Departure Lounge by SPACE Architects

SPACE Architects 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.

At the beginning of this century neuromarketing started to be used in England as part of the development of a new science using magnetic resonance to define what motivates consumers in their decision making. Such studies have had many revealing results but one in particular has generated a new way of understanding architecture. The way that the brain codifies the majority of the information that it receives is by translating it into emotions, like this it gives a value to things, good brands are connected emotionally with their users through experiences and the great majority of the experiences take place in built spaces. In order for architecture to be transcendent it will have to be defined as starting with the search for emotions that will enable it to connect with its users.

In the case of the final departure lounge the fundamentally functional aspects were worked on at the same time as working on the emotional definition of the space, the great majority of the persons that use these spaces take advantage of them to work before getting on a plane. The emotional solutions would have to be very functional as well being able to give a solution to all the users’ different needs and work habits. That is how this space is made up with some private meeting rooms, informal meeting areas with virtual divisions, Wi-Fi and support areas. Together with these working spaces, the final departure lounge also has recreation and entertainment areas, such as the lounges for a game of dominos or cards, a small massage room, and a beauty-hairdresser’s salon.

In general this space is without any doubt a taster of what many other office building spaces will be like in the not so distant future, spaces that will represent properly the expectations of their brands and that will be sufficiently flexible to practically support any way of working and meeting. The project was developed with a methodology generated by SPACE in which all projects seek to be designed in a sustainable manner. 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.

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