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The Wednesday Journal of Cultural Insights.
The creative team Bureau have designed a dream-scape spa for Origin in Geneva’s Saint-François neighbourhood.
Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta and Galliane Zamarbide the masterminds behind Bureau also go by the name of Spatial Practitioners.
The space has been designed to improve our overall wellbeing with an impressive list of benefits;
Floating is a natural relaxation method with a simple principle: you lie in a sensory isolation chamber in body-temperature water containing Epsom salt. No pressure, no noise, and no light disturbs you. A deep relaxation sets in. You float…
How do Origins and Bureau reflect this weightless feeling throughout the design language of the space? By taking us on a sensory floating voyage, mentally and bodily experiencing a certain state of suspension, in a rather safe space, where the outside is imaginary, evoked, lived uniquely through imagery.
“From a very interiorized experience one is thrown outside, travelling in and out”
Bureau
The team reworked a poetic take on the brief, they thought about how to create a world from which one can rest and imagine, evocative, abstract yet somewhat graspable.
“When one closes the eyes, the light that has been absorbed and lived transforms into colours, flashes of that connect with undefined sensations. Connecting realities, perceived in the space but also, most of them, outside it.”
Bureau
The spaces in ORIGIN are about the progression towards that state, through colours, materials and all things living that accompany the experience of floating in our most natural state on a highly salted water pod.
The work of Shirana Shahbazi for the team of creatives was what they call their direct inspiration. The realness of Shirana’s photography, but also the multiple possiblities of the spaces that she proposes.
Travels, journeys through sensations, lived realities, precise moments but also unprecise relations, liquid ones, without the need to explain, certainly with the impossibility to explain all of it, no need.
Bureau
What has been proposed is a series of colours that wrap and unfold everything they encounter, opening the book of a space that proposes an insular pause, outside of everything but in a strong interiority.
The progression attempts to fluidly sequence the steps of the user, taking them inside, from a sort of unreal, bi-dimensional image – the show window, or Jeff Wall’s light boxes – to the extreme intimacy of the water pod.
Curtains, rails, vertical lines, horizontal surfaces, shelves, seating, tile grid as a guiding measure. All elements contribute to a strong subjectivity of perceptive frames that are altered by other patches of colours, space- holders.
Within that rather abstract journey we would ¡nt hesitate to sign up for a floating experience, how about you?
Photography: Dylan Perrenoud
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