In the time when Dalí was working on the project for his museum, one day, while looking at a reproduction of the painting of Mae West's face, an idea occurred to me. As its name suggests, this painting transforms the face of the famous Hollywood star into a room: the hair becomes a curtain; the eyes, views of Paris; the nose, a fireplace; the lips, a sofa... I thought that it might be interesting to build a real space that, when viewed from a particular point, would reproduce the Dalinian painting, which in turn represents a virtual space. I explained this to the Maestro at the first opportunity. Dalí loved the idea and, without further ado, he ordered me:

-This will be colossal, Tusquets. Start designing it immediately.

Soon, I realised the fundamental problem I was facing: in the painting, the point of view is very high, between the two eyes, so you see a lot of pavement. To reproduce this geometry in the little depth available, as I didn’t want to reduce the size of the objects – I wanted the mouth to be the size of a real sofa, so visitors could sit on it – I had to incline the floor at an exaggerate angle, raising the farthest part. This would enhance the sense of depth, like in the stage of the Teatro Olimpico by Palladio in Vicenza. But, since we wanted visitors to be able to circulate comfortably in the room, I wasn’t at all convinced by the idea of tilting the platform. Then I thought I could achieve the same effect by raising the point of view, placing the viewer on a viewpoint and forcing them to look downwards. This meant tilting back what is known in conic perspective as the picture plane, in other words, I would not tilt the floor but the back wall. When entering the room from the side, everything would appear distorted and mysterious, and it would only be clearly visible when reaching the key viewpoint. With Aldámiz’s help, we built the wooden platform, the checkered floor of the foreground, and the slanted panel at the back.

Dalí collaborated enthusiastically on the realisation of the project.

The lips particularly captured our attention and led to the creation of the Dalilips, that is explained in the design section.

With the photographer Oriol Maspons, we enlarged the views of Paris that represented the eyes. As we took them from a small reproduction, we had to enlarge them a great deal, and they ended up with a very coarse texture. When we showed them to Dalí, somewhat dejected, Salvador, demonstrating his ability to turn necessity into virtue and make the most of accidents, was absolutely thrilled and exclaimed:

-Don’t worry, they’re fantastic, they look like pointillist paintings, I’m going to finish them by hand as if they were a Seurat.

When Dalí saw the voluminous nose-fireplace, he said:

-You have to put fake logs burning in the holes.

-But in the original painting, they’re not there, Maestro...

-It doesn’t matter, don’t be so literal, I must have forgotten them… now we’ll do it better.