Gallery

Description

Zaha Hadid Architects, have designed the new Roca London Gallery located in the well-known Chelsea Harbour district near King’s Road. Roca is a leading global bathroom brand which, through its renowned Innovation Lab, is dedicated to developing cutting edge, technologically advanced products that continue to set the benchmark for the industry as well as to underline its position as market leader. Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) were chosen by Roca in 2009 to create a versatile reference space capturing the essence of the brand and its values. This project is the latest in the series of Roca Galleries globally, which include the Roca Barcelona Gallery, the Roca Madrid Gallery and the Roca Lisbon Gallery.

Taking its inspirational cue from the idea of a space created by water in its various different states, ZHA’s bespoke design defines a flowing and porous space with a dynamic language characteristic of the practice’s many projects globally, yet specific to the functional needs of Roca as a brand. Zaha Hadid Architects have created a precisely ordered, intimate and enjoyable sensory design environment, which stimulates the visitor through its active and engaged relationship with Roca’s exceptional bathroom products. The Roca London Gallery is a single space of 1100m2 including connected, semi-open zones for product displays and a meeting room space seamlessly incorporating a range of state-of-the-art interactive technologies and audio visual resources. Designed as a versatile multi-purpose environment, the Gallery will host a wide range of social and cultural events of interest to Roca, including exhibitions produced in-house and externally, meetings, presentations, debates and receptions.

The design brings about a connective language between the architecture and the bathroom products, with the movement of water ‘carving out’ the interior and moving through the Gallery as individual drops. A flowing, all-white space made of faceted GRG (gypsum) panels serves as a central axis of the Gallery. Around this a number of smaller connected semi-enclosed spaces can be viewed through openings in walls. As a result, the visitor never feels enclosed in one space, but can always see beyond it into the space through overlapping and cutaway forms that enable a pleasing permeability to the Gallery. Water defines the landscape of the interior space, creating a sense of mobile liquidity reinforced by a series of elongated, illuminated water drops. These cascade around the ceiling as a set of lighting fixtures, down the walls as shelves for books, media and small products, and onto the floor as tables and seating. Their fluid lines of convergence both lend each area of the space an individual identity and connect them by the way they define a feeling of movement.

All the panels, which are made of GRC, or fibre reinforced concrete and extend up to 2.20 metres in height, have been pre-fabricated in moulds and constructed on-site. The façade is made of 2x4 metre panels of 800kg each. The panels creating the interior walls are 6cm thick and made of two waffled concrete layers sandwiching a honeycomb mesh that can stress in different directions and is very robust as a composite material. The furniture is made from GRP, or reinforced plastic, including the cove-shaped reception desk. The lighting scheme created by Isometrix is also innovative in a complementary way, with special features including washing the walls in light and a mix of direct and dispersed mood lights.

Biography

Zaha Hadid, awarded with the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004 is the founding partner of Zaha Hadid Architects, and is internationally known for her built, theoretical and academic work. Each of her dynamic and innovative projects builds on over thirty years of revolutionary experimentation and research in the interrelated fields of urbanism, architecture and design.

Working with senior office partner Patrik Schumacher, Hadid’s placement of interest on the rigorous interface between architecture, landscape, and geology in a practice that integrates natural topography and human-made systems, leaded her to experimentation with cutting-edge technologies, in a process that often resulted in unexpected and dynamic architectural forms.