During the last couple of months the CEU Cardenal Herrera University launched a contest for students from our Architecture School: ‘Designing the new office of hospitality’. Many students participated in it and saw this as an opportunity to gain experience that goes beyond design. This was because the office was going to be modelled the same way as the winning proposal.
In the end, the proposal that won the contest was made by the group formed by Marouane Alaoui, Maria Kanarchuk and Holly Yarjau. First, second, and third year of architecture, respectively.
We also interviewed them:
Marouane told us about the idea of the project: ‘Basically our idea was to create space that will be helpful for the new students, and at the same time it’s a space that is going to be used by the workers during the rest of the year’
Holly also explained her idea of creating a smart way to access this new office ‘We wanted to create a visual fool-proof way to find the hospitality office in its new spot. The first step is getting there right’. As a matter of fact, Maria added ‘We aimed to make the student experience finding and using the hospitality office very intuitive. (…) we tried to make students (ourselves included) lives a bit easier’.
Lastly, Holly thinks that it’s definitely a good opportunity for students to participate in school contests like these: ‘It’s good to work in groups with people from other backgrounds and different years in the university.’
The students explained to us this ‘fool-proof’ idea deeper; which were colourful lines painted on the floor from every entrance door leading to a desired location, in this case to the hospitality office. Very creative and innovative idea in order to show the starting point and the ending point of a path.
An important point of this proposal was the idea of productivity. Once you are inside the office, the space divides in two; in one side, they proposed some kind of ‘do it yourself (DIY)’ and in the other side they placed the desk with workers. The idea of DIY are some spots in the office where you can take certain forms and leave the office (in case you don´t need to talk to any worker). Therefore, you can optimise your time and wouldn’t need to wait for a worker to be free. The second part, is mainly for people that have to be attended by any workers from hospitality office, so they would have to wait.
Maria also told us that their main challenge was to ‘create space that would adapt to the points of low and high business of the office. It was quite a problem considering the limited space.’ In other words, Marouane added ‘the fact that we had to manage a small place with lot of tools that should be useful was a big challenge’.
All in all, Maria, Marouane and Holly were very enthusiastic about participating in the contest and, especially, to have won it.