A hotbed of dorm creativity

Call it dorm room disgust, call it restlessness for the high rises to replace their aging furniture or just call it insanity. But whatever you call it, no one can deny that creative genius is thriving here at Penn. If you had an old iron, an elevator cord spool, some plastic bottlenecks, a decomposing couch and some scotch tape, what would you do? To some Penn students the answer is obvious -- decorate the apartment. College sophomore Scott Sokoloff first heard about the abandoned cord spools that were extracted from Hamilton College House's infamous elevators from a senior. The wheels in his head were already turning as he headed out to the dumpsters. And by the time he was rolling one of the huge circular monstrosities past bewildered Spectaguards in the Hamilton lobby, his mind had already transformed it into a buffet table. Within a month, it had been cleaned off, covered in a tablecloth and had become an integral part of the numerous weekend meals that he and his roommates hosted in their apartment. Looking back on life pre-spool compared to life now, Sokoloff proclaims, "I believe that no room is complete without a gigantic wheel." Right down the hall from Sokoloff resides another budding interior designer. Engineering junior Peretz Cik is the mastermind behind what he proudly refers to as "the ghetto pulley." Using old plastic bottles and string, he created a pulley system in his Hamilton dorm room whereby he can close the door while sitting on his bed across the room. "I used bottlenecks because they're smooth, and the string pulls over them with little resistance," Cik reports. When asked if he used his engineering knowledge to develop the system, Cik answers in the affirmative. "In order to shut the door, the string had to have a force at a certain angle and have the string pointing toward a certain corner of the door." Next, Cik displayed the projector that he had built to turn his room into a movie theater with nothing more than a cardboard box, a $5 page-magnifier from Staples and a dorm room wall. The only problem that Cik ran into was that the lens inverted the image and projected it upside down. Cik, undaunted, proceeded to hook up the TV to his computer so that he could invert the TV image before it went through the projector. "Who wouldn't do this?" is Cik's final conclusion. The high rises are not the only hotbeds of redecorating innovation. College freshmen Matt Aquino, Byron Drumheller, Robbie Biggs and Ken-ichi Hino bonded early in the year in their Quadrangle hallway of Butcher -- soon after, their two rooms were famous for their late-night parties. "Well-known? Just ask our RAs," Aquino says with a smile. However, the boys realized early on that their cramped rooms with bulky beds were not ideal for the kind of atmosphere they wanted to create for their parties. That is why one night, it suddenly struck them that they could move out of one of their rooms and make it into an official lounge for such occasions. "That was it -- at 3:30 in the morning we started moving furniture, and we did it all night," Aquino says. Slowly, they found things to add to their new pad. Aquino's father, who is in the liquor business, gave them old memorabilia that they used to decorate the walls, and one day when Drumheller and Aquino were on 41st Street, they found an old couch that they dragged all the way back to the Quad in the cold. Next came the scotch tape that they used to write messages on the wall to be further accentuated by black lights. Unfortunately, they were soon put on probation for their parties, and their party room became a place for them to just chill. But not all of Penn's on-campus creations are large-scale productions. Take the case of College sophomore Nora Badal's old iron. She had nothing in her wardrobe to iron, but she did have a hankering for grilled cheese last year in the Quad. As a result, her iron quit its day job and moved from smoothing out creases in her shirts to ironing out toast. "I wonder what you can make with a curling iron?" she ponders. MacGuyver would be proud.

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