Hotel Puerta America is a radical design hotel in Madrid that opened to the public on 14th of July 2005.

A different architect/interior designer of international standing has been commissioned to create each floor, turning the hotel into a vertical juxtaposition of contemporary architecture. The list includes Foster and Partners, Zaha Hadid, Chipperfield, Jean Nouvel, Arata Isozaki, Ron Arad, John Pawson etc.

The hotel has 360 rooms (30 rooms, 1200 sqm per floor) and 644 parking spaces, with a total surface area of 34,000 square metres. The junior suites are located on either side of each floor.

Plasma Studio has been commissioned for the fourth floor.

Design intentions_

More than other building types, hotels are typically characterized by linear bands of repetitive units. The resulting anonymous undifferentiated corridors contrast with the hotels’ ambition to treat each guest as an individual and reduce the dimension of his experience to a function of efficiency.

Equally most other floors here address themselves to the visitor as mis-en-scene that mediate the visitor’s experience with a language shared between consumer and architect, offering a code through which individual taste can be matched to an architectural style.

Through developing a new morphology that is raw, sensory and physiological our project detaches itself from such a predictable reading and offers new modes of spatial experience i.e. a creative, bodily and haptic discovery and engagement.

Corridor

Rather than supplanting or disguising the Cartesian system, 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.

The corridor section is modulated in width and height to alternate rhythmically between the smallest and largest possible size. In addition the floor moves upwards and downwards as a series of ramps, subtly inducing the rhythm of the normative conditions behind the surface as a physiological experience. In addition to this radical, raw and sensory formation a tessellated mesh of LED light seams was introduced to produce a color gradient.

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

In order to further intensify this color coding, stainless steel was chosen for all the corridor surfaces, including the floor. The floor rhythmically flows up and down as a series of subtle ramps, inducing a bodily experience beyond the visual. Just like the walls and ceilings it becomes dissected by LED light seams.

Rooms

Entering the room might come as a surprise if not relief to the guest as he leaves the intensity of the stainless steel clad tunnel behind and finds a very refined, calm, generous and luxurious realm for himself.

Although the rooms are continuing the floor’s concept in their color, materials and geometry, they are developed as a ‘bracket’ to conciliate the intense artificiality of the corridor inside with Madrid outside, which appears virtual in a different way because it is untouchable behind the glass window.

The room’s entrance area is shaped as a funnel towards the view through the plate glass window. This includes a ramped floor from light grey rubber that finishes against carpet in the same color, introducing the user to the comfort of his bedroom. Like the edge of the visual cone from the entrance turning into a strip light and a fold in the ceiling, many more visual relationships reverberate through the geometry of the ceiling folds.

A long meandering sheet of stainless steel becomes the main organizing element of the room: moving all along the back wall, it starts as desk, turns headrest then seat. It ‘crashes’ into the glass division wall and mutates into a bathtub and finally the shower.

Another sheet is shaped into the sink. The folded glass wall that divides the bedroom from the bathroom has thus become another product of deformative forces: the two pieces of furniture seem to have crashed perpendicular into a single pane, transforming it into a prism that breaks light and views in ever changing oscillating configurations.

Competition Design Team: Nate Kolbe Dip.Arch, Keong Wee Lim

Design Developing Team: Anneli Giencke Dip.Arch, Miquel Marine I Nunez, Isaak Loong, Amy Stringer, Nadine Mirza

Construction Team: Christian Taeubert Dipl.-Ing.(FH), Anneli Giencke Dip.Arch