VIP Room ARCOmadrid 2016
Among the multitude of beautiful objects that interior design has provided to the history of Architecture, the folding screen is highlighted as formal and spatial inspiration for our proposal. The VIP room is structured around a series of folding screens that become the leitmotif of the space. They are organized inside the room offering a homely and welcoming character to the space.
Our folding screens do not tell tell anymore the stories of heroic journeys and scenes in leafy gardens, but the lifes of contemporary families and their cities. The folding screens are fabricated from domestic objects in an nontraditional way. Many ladders, full of paint drops, form bars and supporting structures. Recycled windows separate rooms and provide privacy.
The VIP room allows us to invite the visitors to a journey: a tribute to worldwide known streets where people still negotiate, talk, rest, and enjoy long lunches. Our project starts with a reception area, offering visitors small terraces that allow visitors to imagine being in Dublin, London, Paris or Athens. In the middle of the room, in the lounge bar, we are trasported to the Middle East to zocos and medinas. And finally we end the trip in a restaurant that seems to transport us to Bali, a floral, colorful and cosmopolitan context.
To compose this great collage, we have taken inspiration from many pieces of art, but we wanted to mention Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass particularly. The visual enigma that work of art offers, made possible to imagine a space in which furniture from El Corte Ingles show their ability to recreate almost any kind of environment. Share the rediscovery of the used objects beauty and extend the belief that our imagination can give new life to what is going to be thrown. This is our small contribution to address the ecological crisis of our planet.
Crale to cradle philosophy
Statistics say that most objects are discarded when they just been used for 30% of its potential life. They also says that while during the 30s an average European family of 4 people, owned between 20 or 30 objects, nowadays families posses 2000 or 3000 objects. These data encourage us to reconsider the emotional link that we have with what surrounds us, with our, increasingly abundant, belongings.
Designers can no longer aspire just to create beautiful and functional objects: we need to avoid premature obsolescence, think of new use for dayly objects and try that our designs will become the second life of leftovers. In this context, we work under the philosophy called ‘from cradle to cradle’ consisting of a design culture based on imitation of nature that propose design and fabricate each object thinking about the origin, present use and future of all the materials involved, in order not to generate waste and trying that the energy balance become zero or even positive.
El Corte Ingles Philosophy: A Company that is part of our life and culture
In addition to these environmental aspirations, work for El Corte Ingles Company has been an invitation to think about design democratically: we try to target everyone, from families with different condition, to people with different professions, or to tastes that are based on varied experiences.
Visitor comments have been very significant: everyone remains the best trip she or he has done. Some recognized Bangladesh and some others Marrakech in the centra area. The space meant to activate positive memories to the visitors. They have also remembered that their first impressions about China or the Middle East came from the hand El Corte Ingles.
It worths not to forget that the ultimate goal of all of our designs is to create a nice warm and welcoming space. A place where visitors feel as guests of a host who strives to please them. In a space as Ifema, this is a whole challenge. pillows, fabrics, carpets, natural vegetation and lamps, has been selected for this purpose.
Text from Izaskun Chinchilla
