CLIENT
Alvores
LOCATION
Jaén, Spain
CATEGORY
Hotel
VISUALS
The Visual Plan
FURNITURE
Sancal, Santa&Cole & Masiero
Travel can be an emotional event. The design of a hotel lends itself as a great opportunity to enhance that experience.
In these times we live everything advances frantically, but the rest is progressively going backwards to its initial intention. Traveling links us closely to a discovery phase of a place with the feeling of being connected not only to it, but also to ourselves.
Discovering a new place involves soaking up its culture, getting to know its people and the environment in which they live. You could reduce the fact of traveling to a temporary step through the place, but in reality it is possible to experience the life of a local if you are willing to seek its true nature, slowing down the pace and anxiety with which we discover it.
Listening to the local community allows us to learn and pursue a real experience, immersing ourselves in their customs where the hotel should be part of that adventure.
Travel, a very everyday action and integrated in our day to day, we travel for work, we travel for leisure, we travel for our family, we travel to know new places... Here we conceive travel as a process of learning and experience. A philosophy that is explored in the development of this hotel project.
This is how The Journey emerges, a hotel that explores the connection between the permeability of active spaces and the use they house, with the aim of providing flexibility and catering for the needs of users who live there.
A fundamental pillar is the immediacy and direct relationship that the hotel keeps with its environment, this being the shopping center Jaén Plaza, thus affecting the concept of traditional hotel that we know. This generates that instead of focusing solely on offering a place to sleep, The Journey presents spaces that not only serve for himself but for what surrounds him, is why it is characterized by permeability and porosity in its common spaces.
In this respect the building is understood as flexible not so much in its formality as in its spatial organization in which within the same space are generated multiple environments that are efficiently adapted to the needs of customers.
It is in this dissolution of the limits and the relation of the served-server spaces that lies the true value of The Journey. The ground floor, although at first sight hidden behind the large square that introduces and presents itself to the shopping center, does not stop wanting to link to it, being conquered by the green areas that even dominate its interior space as if it were an extension; also the materiality of the limits that according to the degree of privacy and connection they have with the outside are defined to a greater or lesser extent.