Looking at Bacardi as a brand, it has the most literal process of mass-production compared with other brands; mass production as a repetition of the same product million times each day, which is simply a liquid inside a glass bottle. On the other hand, Bacardi was always trying to have a mass projection reflecting their fancy image to the community and their audience, using also a repetition but here with variable images.
Throughout the architectural history of Bacardi, their buildings always projected fancy images, delivered refined messages from their exterior, ranging from artistic façades, sculptural forms and ornamented patterns, in addition to projecting the image of famous architects. However, none of these buildings were projecting Bacardi’s real corporate identity or even the nature of their banal internal functions, which are offices and fabrication. The Design ambition was to flip this relationship between exterior and interior on one hand, exterior and audience on the other hand, this will be achieved by projecting neutral and banal message from the exterior, while the interior will condense all the projections of Bacardi’s identity, history, family and success.
Furthermore, there would be a redefinition of neutrality, which has its own zone in the middle of scaling up and down of repetitive elements within a variable grid order. Based on the notion of mass-production and repetition, the project functions can be flattened on one level instead of having multiple stacked levels. This expanded-horizontally building will be floating on Bermuda Island, this thinness will contribute to the notion of banal and austere perception from the exterior.
The program’s functions were re-classified in a different way according to their repetitive identity, and the scale of neutrality. These new categories will graduate within the project according to their scale from exterior to interior while having different projections. On the contrary, the user’s experience will start and end with two diverse extremes of these scales.
