ArchShowcase Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination. Hanging Hotel by DecodeineJune 16th, 2012 by Sumit Singhal
Article source: Decodeine The following project commissioned by Holden Manz & FOCUS gallery Cape Town, situated in South France Massif de L’ Esterel, uses architecture to dictate and choreograph our perceptions of immediate contexts and environments. The hanging platforms offer a rest for rock climbers, a pause enabling them to enjoy the views and environment for a longer period before setting off on their journey once more. The surfaces are partly embedded partly protruding from the existing rock face structure. A grid of borehole foundations injected into the rock face expand into the existing granite, clamping the main body of the structure into the façade.
The hanging hotel creates a serious of polarised glass spaces which protect the climber from glare reflecting light in an uniform direction creating an illusion that the sun is in a lower position than it is and therefore negating glare, Uvb light rays are reduced by using holographic filtered compound glass, this reduces the number and types of wavelengths entering the spaces which in turn reduces the harmful uVb rays, the holographic filters split the white light with a prism affect, the filters are removable and this effect can be taken advantage of. This hi tech prism louver system almost completely reflects direct incident light, but admits diffuse zenith light. The dismountable concave reflection louvers wrap themselves round the pods acting as partly a shading system, they also heighten the experience and the view, a filter that allows to choreograph the view as it is in all its reality but whereby mirages and misleading illusions, at these altitudes, are controlled and edited by these pods creating clear and real images of the immediate environment, alternatively, the pods choreograph a heightened yet dislocated relationship with the real perception of existing views, an alternate reality by using the prismatic optical elements which divide colour with changing viewing points. The main shell of the hotel is a carbon fibre reinforced polymer shell which very much like the tarpauline tent is flexible yet strong, the main load is carried by the walkway, columns, horizontal foundations which pin the reinforced glass pods and carbon shell to the granite cliff face like a portal edge.
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