Design, spaces, interior, architecture. Well, I’m a big trend watcher for these things. Many who know me wonder why I didn’t bother taking up interior design or architecture when I was in school, but I guess I prefer to just be the audience who appreciates. If I’m presented with a fabulous looking interior design and a designer dress, I’ll probably drool over first on the design..
And I did almost drool over this Mexico City Final Departure Lounge designed by Space Architects. Fabulous! I wouldn’t think its a departure lounge at first glance. Sleek lines, warm muted earth colors, the sense that everything is in place and you’ve got everything you’ll need right there. I’m impressed with the private conversation booths, the phone and business nooks. The most arresting feature of this lounge for me is lighting, not your typical Kichler lighting and it looks stunning and very avant garde.
A lot of departure lounges I’ve seen have a very sterile, too modern look, but this one has that warm and inviting appeal. The only concern I have with this is the too crowded layout.
SPACE was selected from among several architecture firms to design the new final departure lounge for a recognized brand of financial services and credit cards. This project is located at terminal 2 of Mexico City airport.
The challenge was not straight-forward, the customer was looking for a design that brought together many things at the same time. The main challenges were to generate a multi-purpose space that would represent a contemporary and cosmopolitan image that summarize the brand to design a new experience, in a globalized world in which the brands and products are in a headlong race to position themselves in the minds of the customers to use built spaces as a natural extension of the brand, a complicated but vital challenge.
A specialized Branding team was used for this project, who together with the architects generated a hybrid methodology as a result of mixing Branding and architecture.
The project design concepts emerged as a consequence of a search for the definition of the brand’s “emotional promise”, that is to say that the project was developed around the idea of designing a group of well worked out emotions that would develop as a consequence of a brand experience. To be convincing, the experience would have to be a sensory experience, an experience that would include all senses and that would seek to arouse the emotions.
This space consumes around 50% of the energy that other similar spaces commonly consume, by means of openings in the ceiling that let in natural light, the design maximizes the usage of daylight in the interiors, additionally generating extremely natural and pleasant sensations.
The materials utilized in the project have a high recycled material content, and the majority of them are easily renewable.
Photography by Willem Schalkwijk
