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Architects: Didier Fiúza Faustino
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Felipe Ribon
“The XYZ Lounge is an intersection, a space where paths meet. It is the central point for exchanges between the visitors to the conference center of Zebrastraat in Ghent. It questions the contemporary notions of conviviality and physicality. During a time where social, sexual, and gender identities are upturned and questioned, how may one provide a space which is both neutral and sensual, a space free from social markers, without tailoring to a singular identity?” summarizes Didier Faustino.
The architectural intervention on the XYZ Lounge, a 360m² surface area, aims at redefining the use and the volumes of the public spaces: entrance hall, central nave and bar, lateral rooms, and mezzanine platforms leading to the conference halls and meeting rooms. A made-to-measure metallic frame imposes a new outline for the space, supporting the walls and ceilings that have been brought in: stucco moldings, marble panels, textile ceilings, lighting surfaces, and wood claddings.
The lounge spans out into three spaces from the entrance: an open space on the left-hand side, for cocktails and evening parties with a DJ including a projection screen, an adjoining bar below the central nave, and a smaller open space on the right-hand side with access to the terrace. The furniture, designed specifically for the space, is composed of fixed elements made of marble (counter, islands, and suspension lights), high tables and chairs (varnished steel tubes, marble surfaces, leather seats), and a series of rotomoulded seats in polypropylene.
“The XYZ Lounge has been conceived as an interstice-space offering a new form of physicality and identity, a space of convergence and interaction where temporality is suspended. It is a space conducive to physical trajectories and a certain form of eroticism, at the center of which the bar spreads out, the spot of connections and disconnection, the anchoring point where people come and go.
The marble, the stucco, and the fabric, all clean materials, stage the encounters made within this in-between space, creating an envelope where the different tonalities call out to our carnal sensuality. The XYZ Lounge, conscious of its duality, projects us into a romanticism of science fiction, crossing over into an unknown yet familiar elsewhere.” Didier Faustino
