New wave: a temporary arrangement for relaxation and work suggests manifold future possibilities.

Jurgen Mayer H. was asked to make a temporary lounge at one of the pivotal points in this year's IUA Congress in Berlin (AR September 2002). Stylepark, an Internet information and service provider, wanted an area where delegates could rest between journeys round sessions and stands, and see what www.stylepark.com has to offer.

The result was an abstracted interior landscape (or, more precisely perhaps, seascape), where people could sit and play with keyboards and screens, lounge about, or even lie down. The undulating topography was intended to encourage different kinds of visit with communication zones, audience areas, rest places and desks, which fused to allow people to have intensive interactive sessions, or just wander in and out.

Linoleum, that wonderful but too little used material, formed the surfaces. Linoleum's organic and pollutant-free constituents, its warmth and softness relative to most plastics, and its flexibility made it the ideal substance to cover the curves of the ergonomically designed furniture. The same material was also used on the horizontal plane, so the whole innerscape had coherence. The curved shapes were generated on computer by the architect, and the resulting profiles sent electronically to the fabricator, who used them to make plywood templates which were then covered by hand in flexible ply and finished with linoleum.

Modular construction has allowed the prefabricated elements to be demounted; they are intended to be erected in other configurations elsewhere.

The jury was impressed by the invention and transformatory power of the scheme, and by its relatively simple execution. The idea has much potential and it will doubtless be used and developed further.

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Jurgen Mayer H. Architekten, Berlin Project team

Jurgen Mayer H. Sebastian Finckh, Andre Santer, Daniel Fichitz.

Photographs

Uwe Walter