Andalusia Hotel
The interiors of a new five-star hotel in Benghazi, from the double-height lobby and the café to the guest floors. The scheme is conceived around the architectural memory of Andalusia — not as motif, but as a question: what does a hospitality interior owe to its cultural reference?
The answer is shade, procession, and water. Arched openings choreograph the sequence from arrival inward; water sits at the centre of the lobby, where the eye comes to rest; the public spaces turn inward, as Andalusian buildings do. The intent is contemporary and the discipline is borrowed — the layered shade, the way those buildings hold air.
DIUM / Andalusia HotelSHADE, PROCESSION, AND WATER.
Shade
The reference is not an ornament but a climate. Andalusian buildings are made of layered shade — openings set deep, light arriving indirectly, the brightest surface always one space away — and the hotel is planned the same way, so that the eye is rested before the guest has sat down.
Procession
Arrival is a sequence, not a door. The arched openings are set one behind another from the entrance inward, each framing the next, so that the guest crosses the lobby as a series of thresholds rather than a hall — and the double height is discovered gradually, not all at once.
Water
At the centre of the lobby, water gives the public spaces a still point to turn around — and carries the memory the scheme is built on more precisely than any motif could.
Working together