The high design quality of this 5-star hotel isn’t exactly evident from the outside. Its very location, on the edge of Madrid, on the twelve-lane Avenida América, seems questionable for a hotel in this price category. The high-rise itself looks like an overgrown circus tent – Jean Nouvel covered the facade with a PVC film in rainbow colours, printed with oversized lettering (ill. 1). Nevertheless, the Hotel Puerta América certainly does stand out from the grey urban sprawl of its surroundings.
While the outer skin does all it can to get noticed, the entrance seems remarkably withdrawn. Visitors enter through two slits, like a lock gate. It’s in the lobby that the real design ambitions of the client are unveiled. Here John Pawson has used sandstone and wooden slats to create a bright, airy atmosphere (ill. 3) leading through to a number of bars and restaurants. Four glazed lifts on the outside of the facade lead upwards to the 342 rooms and suites, giving a panoramic view of the city along the way.
It’s in the twelve floors of bedrooms that the design variety is expressed most clearly. The hallway and corridors on each floor are so different from each other that you’d think you were in different buildings. On one floor the bathrooms bulge out into the corridors (ill. 4), on another all light is swallowed up in pitch-black surfaces. The fourth floor resembles a mirror cabinet: here Plasma Studio divided up all horizontal and vertical surfaces into triangles, folded them to create a spatial structure and then clad them with stainless steel.
On the ninth floor the Scottish architect Kathryn Findlay goes one step further with her interactive concept in an artificial retro-ambiente. The light points in the white fibreglass wall not only activate as someone passes by, they even take on the colour of that person’s clothing. This is achieved via concealed mini-cameras which pass on the colour information to the LEDs.
The halls and corridors set the scene for the rooms. Zaha Hadid has turned the first floor into a futuristic 3D landscape. The floors, walls and ceilings all seem to flow into each other – the bed, desk and armchair grow out of this landscape. Even the bathroom looks like a mould for a sculpture without corners or edges. In contrast to the all-black or all-white rooms, the bathrooms do feature colour (ill. 5). This flowing space concept was created using a thermoformable synthetic material. It is supported on a frame of MDF. The individual segments were prefabricated, glued together on site and the joints sanded. Ron Arad also used this imitation stone to create expansive fittings that incorporate a bed, a desk, a cupboard, washbasin and WC.
In contrast to the organic shapes used by his colleagues, David Chipperfield opted for clear, geometric forms. A black floor of small terracotta tiles, white walls and simple, black furniture create a restrained atmosphere that radiates calm. Only the blue baldachin over the bed adds accent. Similarly relaxing are Arata Isozaki’s black rooms, where fabric-covered wooden grilles and a cube-shaped wooden bathtub echo traditional Japanese architecture.
Altogether the result is a layering of diverse, architectural environments, each one complete within itself, to cater for a range of tastes and preferences. And, although some of the participating architects were not able to maintain the high design standards, the Hotel Puerta América is without doubt well worth trying out for a night. In the five-star category in particular, this hotel is refreshingly different. In fact it’s not just one hotel, but twelve, all under one roof. (For a free tour, take a look on the Internet.) Just how well the concepts hold up in the day-to-day practicalities of hotel operation remains to be seen. Ron Arad in any case has a piece of advice: “If you want to feel at home, you should stay at home.
