Rice students build an upside-down room for Willy Week

From a certain angle, it looks like your average dorm room: twin bed, desk scattered with notes and textbooks, a trashcan full of junk food wrappers, clothing bunched in a pile on the floor. This isn’t a real dorm room, however. And your eyes aren’t deceiving you: Everything in here is upside down.

This “build” inside the Martel College commons is a carefully constructed replica of graphic novel character Peter Parker’s bedroom. Step inside, strike a pose on the floor, have a friend snap your photo, rotate it 180 degrees and voila!: You’re suspended from the ceiling like Spider-Man. It’s all part of Martel’s theme for Willy Week, “The Amazing Cider-Man!”

Martel College students Jonathan Bunt, Gigi Rill and Amanda Suarez spent three months constructing Peter Parker’s upside-down bedroom. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow)

During Willy Week, each residential college engages in activities centered around a theme leading up to Beer Bike, Rice’s annual intramural bicycle race and water-chugging competition. Other colleges build floats for the parade that precedes the competition, but Martel traditionally constructs interactive sets known as builds. Previous years’ builds have included Dr. Rick Sanchez’s garage from ‘Rick and Morty’ and a ‘Game of Thrones’ set with towers, flying buttresses, a dragon head sculpted out of 600 beer cans and a life-sized beer bottle Iron Throne.

A trio of Martel College students began the build back in January and unveiled their upside-down bedroom March 19. All in, the $500 project took 350 hours, during which they stapled down real carpet and baseboards, painted the walls, hung blinds and found innovative ways to keep all of Parker’s stuff from falling “up” along the way.

“The bed is actually just PVC,” said senior Gigi Rill, a mechanical engineering major who’s been in charge of Martel’s Beer Bike build for the last three years. “Everything needed to be light.” Sustainability was also a core focus for the students, who used leftover paint, scrap wood, carpet remnants and their own college-created detritus — Post-It notes from a chemistry study session, an empty jar of Nutella — to stage the room and enhance the illusion.

“We definitely focused on the details because that’s what’s going to sell something like this,” Rill said. “For example, the headphones or the upside-down hat — anything that looks like it’s hanging is going to look really cool when you flip it upside down.”

Rill was joined on the build by freshman Amanda Suarez, a materials science and nanoengineering major who created theater sets in high school, and Jonathan Bunt, an electrical engineering major who last year constructed a motorized couch that he drove around campus until the wheels fell off. Bunt said the team members were so confident in their efforts at recreating Parker’s bedroom that they didn’t even take a single photo until it was finished.

The students used leftover materials, dorm room detritus and PVC pipes to complete the illusion. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow)

“The first time we took a picture was two days ago,” Bunt said. “It came out way better than we thought it would.”

The upside-down bedroom will reside in Martel Commons through this weekend’s Beer Bike festivities, with the goal of getting as many people to pose on its “ceiling” as possible. “We want everyone to have this as their Facebook profile image,” laughed Rill.

“The way I describe Rice to people is, ‘Rice is a school of happy nerds,’” she said. “It’s people who are very nerdy and passionate about a wide variety of things; but then they’re also pretty happy and willing to come out and help us build an upside-down room purely for the sake of getting really good pictures.”