Plasma Studio

Hotel Puerta America is a radical new design hotel in Madrid. A different architect/interior designer of international standing was commissioned to create each floor of the hotel, giving free rein to their creativity in the development of the rooms and floor as a whole.

The list of invited designers includes Foster and Partners, Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, Jean Nouvel, Arata Isozaki, Ron Arad, John Pawson etc. The hotel has 13 floors with 30 rooms, 1200 sqm per floor. Plasma Studio was commissioned for the fourth floor.

Hotels are usually characterized by linear bands of repetitive units with anonymous, undifferentiated corridors that contradict the hotels’ ambition to treat each guest as an individual. For the design of level 4 of Hotel Puerta America, we used this repetitive rhythm of partition walls, service ducts and entrance doors as a sectional framework from which a differentiation of the corridor skin was devised. In other words, the perpendicular partition walls were pulled along their axis, while the entrance doors produced resistance. In addition to this radical geometry, we introduced a colour gradient with an LED light seam that gradually changes.

In this way each section of the corridor has its own unique character. Its colour is continued into the adjacent rooms so that guests develop an intuitive sense of their place within the floor

THE VORTEX-This conscious intensification of experience within the circulation areas culminates in the knot: the area where both corridor wings fold into each other to create a vortex, forcing the ceiling to dip down and form a cocoon: a bracket in space and time from where projections of Madrid’s daily routine can be seen flickering whilst waiting for the lift.

THE ROOMS-The rooms have been designed as a zone that links the artificial intensity of the trembling stainless steel tunnel with the exterior behind the plate glass window. Reverberations of the corridor in colour, material and geometry are employed not to destabilize, but to organize, to define the usual functions and to accommodate comfort and wellbeing. The room’s entrance area is shaped as a funnel towards the view through the window. Many visual relationships are projected onto the subtle geometry of the ceiling folds.