Socle of Holy Water
Draft Competition "5-Star Hotel Baños, Ecuador"
The project emerges from the philosophical concept: RIZOMA, proposed by Giles Deluze and Felix Guattari as a new key to thinking about geometries that generate the shapes of spaces. This concept rejects all structured interpretations and poses an open thinking system. The rhizome concept allows introducing a geometry without hierarchical structure or order; that is, a geometric generation system that grows freely, spreads like mountain vegetation and sprouts like weeds, spreads like volcano lava and moves. Thus, the proposed geometry can be broken or interrupted anywhere, but it always starts again in a connection that can occur at any point. In this sense, the project has neither beginning nor end. The concept adopted from Deluze's thinking defines several characteristics that allowed the spaces to materialize: connection and heterogeneity, that is, any point in the project can be connected to any other; multiplicity, that is, it is made up of a geometry that establishes connections; allocating rupture, that is, if an element is interrupted, or breaks, it does not stop rebuilding itself in changing lines; cartography and decals, that is, the project does not respond to any structural or generative model.
RELATIONSHIP WITH THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT
The project understands the place for the development of the hotel as a point of integral and systemic confluence of the urban fabric of the city of Baños. Therefore, based on the precept that the "site" is not an isolated space, but is part of a minimal expression of the landscape of the geographical space, a building is proposed that guarantees interrelation with its environment and is capable of beneficially influencing within constructed tissue and human tissue. Therefore, on the one hand, the project opens a platform, as a public square in front of its main façade; and, on the other hand, the project also interacts with the city, becoming a formal landmark that, although its tectonic presence is relevant and significant, seeks to highlight and be an integral part of the mountain that accompanies it.
RELATIONSHIP WITH THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT
The relationship of the project with the topography and the natural environment is marked by the materialization of its physical presence on the ground. From the front of the city there is a wall, like a plinth that is positioned at the foot of the mountain marking a line, an anthropic signal that, by generating spaces, finds coincidences with the mountain. The built element, when facing the mountain, does not intend to compete with it, it seeks to "exalt" the mountain and generate a "void" a space of relationship, generating a "valley" between the natural slope and the artificial slope, between the wall. natural stone and artificial concrete wall.
The functionality of the project raises two elements of clear formal and functional difference. An immense wall, like a plinth, that contains the horizontal and vertical circulations of the hotel and the massive service spaces. This functional strategy allows generating a distribution body towards three bodies that approach its tectonic presence without touching it. In these independent bodies, which are connected through walkways, the three types of rooms are developed: single, double and suite. The distribution of the different types of rooms is random; however, it guarantees that the typologies are present in the three clusters built, in order to create three different concentrations that provide different spatial qualities and interrelationships.
The social spaces and common areas are concentrated in the rupture of the wall; where a transparent element is generated that houses the restaurant, the event rooms and the main entrance. In the same way, on the ground floor an immense platform is generated, with different formal and functional qualities that house different social spaces and allows accessibility to the public outside the hotel. Also, at the top of the wall a large social space is generated, exclusively private, to house the pool.
In the basement of the building, on two basement floors, the parking spaces and server spaces for storage, supply, and general hotel facilities are developed.
Competition organized by Colegio de Arquitectos Ecuador CAE.
Honorable Mention, Third Place.
Members: Byron Cadena, Juan Pablo Navas, Dennise Santillán, Gustavo Abdo, Sergio Calderón
Rafael Suarez, Isidro Iturralde, Antonella Cañizares.
March 2018. Baños, Ecuador.