01/09/2020 - Hotel Nodo “naturally urban”. A hotel with façades covered in Laminam bioactive surfaces was the first building to actively combat South America’s pollution in Chile’s capital. Its architect, Ricardo Stein, designed the hotel to create a building that could not only iconographically reproduce a forest inside a city (just like a landscape), but could function like a forest and purify the air – like an artificial living organism.
Stein explained, “Chile is presented to other countries as a land of landscapes. The Hotel Nodo attempts to iconographically represent landscapes as an element of differentiation, and satisfy the search for unique new experiences for people who temporarily live in a hotel. At the same time, the hotel was built with the intention of artificially reproducing nature and not only for aesthetic reasons. The goal was to create a structure associated with the idea of being a living organism.”
“Nature is read aesthetically and iconographically,” explained Stein, “with a stone base on which a wooden vertical body grows with a regular-irregular order, as if it were a forest.” However, following the project’s ideal premise, he used concrete for the base and a pillar, beams, and reinforced concrete slab system for the vertical structure. This allowed “maximum flexibility of use, which is essential in multifunctional buildings”.
These façades are covered in Laminam’s bioactive ceramic slabs. Stein explained his choice in this way: “We were looking for surfaces that made us think of wood, particularly forest tree trunks to represent the natural element. We needed something that could help fight pollution by acting as an authentic green space. This meant purifying the air like real trees. We realised that the surfaces produced by Laminam could meet image and function purposes.”
The building’s iconic façades are covered with 2,300 sqm of Laminam slabs with a thickness of 3 mm treated with bioactive technology that act like a living plant organism in sunlight and purifies as much air in a year as 1.5 hectares of forest. These surfaces self-clean with rainwater, drastically limiting cleaning and maintenance operations, which saves considerable amounts of money and maintains the building’s features and appearance over time.
Laminam on ARCHIPRODUCTS
