anD + Motoelastico team
What? Explaining the concept The lobby of a multistorey office building is a place that people cross every day to go somewhere else. It is often a stage of a journey or a place for an encounter, but rarely a final destination. For these reasons it is a space with a very pragmatic identity: a uniform background witnessing the daily stream of business. The O’biz Tower Lobby challenges all these ideas to create a space full of identity using a highly visible and recognizable pattern. It is a 70’s show set design or a striped renaissance Cathedral, a shot of color on a grey concrete canvas.
Why? Describing the choices.
To enhance the graphic features of the project, we used a striped tridimensional pattern that goes well beyond the limits imposed by the interior space. The pattern starts on the pavement of the public plaza around the building, and it leads the users towards the main reception area. The stripes work as a filter: they collect the visitors from outside and redirect them towards their final destination within the building. The lobby becomes a landmark, a geometric progression, where a simple design feature is used to organize all the elements of the space: floor, walls, ceilings, furniture and lighting uniformly. How? How was the design realized.
The lobby is more than 11 meters high, so we decided to lighten up the construction of the higher areas, without compromising the pattern composition. The project was realized alternating two different kind of stone, green oriental marble and gray granite, for the floor and the lower parts of pillars; while for the ceilings we used laser cut punched metal panels in two colors and different patterns. All the lighting apparatus is with led technology. It all comes down to a 60x60 cm construction grid, which makes all the project completely modular and eventually adaptable to different locations.
The lobby of an office building is a place where people transit and pass through; it is a ‘not-place’, almost by definition, such as the airport waiting area, almost devoid of their own identity. It is an ‘object’ almost alien, home to almost strangers or people who have closely job relationships.
It is from this absence of relationships that we started the analysis in order to create a space that would have an own identity, more intimate, but that it would been also functional at the same time.
The first thought was to give continuity to the signs that led from the outside to inside, through a set of paths drawn on the floor same as to indicate direction, access and waiting areas and inside the meeting area.
The idea from which we started seemed immediately relevant as the trend of the signs, who were outside in the direction of the entrance to the lobby, were also what we wanted to became the beginning of the project and so they has been then up to the safe completion of the conceptual immediate result. The flooring outside had to lead us into the great hall through a strong and direct sign, in an empty space and where people usually only pass through it. The idea was just to be a design that could mend the gap and the strong connection between the two ‘not-places’.
Our space, had to remember the history that we feel belong to our culture through the Renaissance and Siena, with its cathedral, and this would be our input charming and also the starting point, just because of its complexity and simplicity, with horizontal lines at first, and it has to be also representative with its main materials: marble and stone. The lines will join floor, wall, and ceiling with geometric drawing. How to connect flooring, wall and ceiling would have been the real project meaning. The result has been achieved simply by combining two concepts only apparently different but that they had a single matrix, which gave birth to the result, allowing us to go further, and now all of this seems like the only option and resolution of this enigma.
The concept was therefore to re-establish a relationship built through paths, emotions and touch sensations and materials, lights and colors, contrasts and differences by quality and stone finishing, to emphasize differences, between stone and marble, between light and dark, between smooth and rough, shiny and matt, between gray and green. It should have been a place where simple geometries, materials, were not only signs on the floor wall and ceiling, but they must have meaning inside them, stronger than a mere decoration. These spaces should suggest a meaning not only transitory, they must have a direction, a route that would lead almost forced people to the outputs, to the elevators, and other directions almost with empathy.
Our task was to redesign the space at first, enriching it with an intrinsic value, as the required materials were, by their very nature rich, but it was culturally stronger. The modular 600x600 mm. was the starting point of the project, with stone tiles, metal and lighting apparatus together in a large symmetrical design.
All this has been possible by using modular laser cut punched metal; a material that it is lighter and economically viable for the ceiling also on the higher areas where there are great pillars, looking for signs by stubborn continuity.
With the same metal sheets, we have added seats to one of the waiting areas, same used for information desk. They are informal seating, positioned on the stone lines floor with the intention to do not separate the seat by the ground, and giving continuity to the design to seat to an ergonomically compatible highness.
We believe to be able proudly to create a simple space that comes, however, from one thought to the most complex, and with a limited budget and scope of action.
When it was almost completed interiors, were asked us to give a more accomplished design, from which we started supplementing with external flooring that goes all around the building; we wanted it to be the exact continuum of the interior, so we looked to continue it the design which it was only ideally, but now it could become concretely, with same design, size and color alternation used for interiors and this was the way to give it full meaning to the drawings on our the stripes to the floor.
