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Contract World Awards 2007
HOTEL CHIC&BASIC BORN
(Germany)
PROJECT: CHIC&BASIC HOTEL
The four-city townhouse stands at the place where the Calle de la Princesa meets the Parc de la Ciutadela in Barcelona. Originally used as a residence and then as a school, it has now been converted into a hotel by ADD+Xavier Claramunt. The structure of the building with its rows of classrooms off the corridors was retained for the hotel. It is now overlaid, however, by the new hotel-room partition walls which have been inserted into the old construction at an angle. Old architectural elements such as mouldings and stucco festoons now extend beyond the room limits and thus intimate the old, more spacious layout. The ground plan organization of the rooms is also unusual: the window fronts have been reserved for the bathrooms. They are prefabricated ready-to-use cells that cleverly extend beyond the boundary of the room and generate a spatial shape which considerably differs from the usual rectangular “boxes”.The jury’s verdict:: Behind the classical facade, the architects have selected a ground plan which matches the structure of the city district. Like houses in a street, the hotel rooms are arranged along the corridors. The hotel guest strides along the latter and, just before reaching the door to the hotel room, encounters a zone which is marked out by a curtain immersed in coloured light. As a result, orientation in the hotel is facilitated in a way that stimulates the visual cortex and the mundane hotel corridor is made into a place to be enjoyed. The surfaces of the rooms are all in white and the old stucco ceilings are hidden by smooth plaster board. In an almost poetic manner, the old elements of the building such as stucco ceiling fragments and moulded sections that are barely concealed from view are projected onto the walls where the guests can see them by means of mirror strips attached to the walls. Discovery of the building’s history is thus made into a game. All in all, the “Chic&Basic Born” is an outstanding example of how to handle historic elements of a building in an ultra-modern and delicately designed hotel architecture in a self-confident but sensitive manner.