Office, Showroom & Warehouse
Bayader, Amman
2019 ongoing
Our project in Bayader West Amman occupies a narrow strip of land, which spans the city block from North East to South West.
The programme, which consists of showrooms, a retail branch, the company head quarters and speculative office space, is accommodated in four autonomous structures. A basement links the buildings below ground. The rest of the site is a densely planted native forest providing breathing space in a largely industrial area; warehouses, car mechanics, and builders merchants occupy expediently built structures which meet tar- mac streets directly. Pedestrian and vehicular traffic intermingle.
The proposed buildings do not refer to the context compositionally but relate through an attitude to construction. Two concrete framed structures on a classically proportioned three-meter grid provide column free floor spaces with generous ceiling heights. The retail branch has a clear height of 7 meters which is optimal for stacking manufactured boards, whereas the showroom is high so that it feels gallery like.
Their facades are tonally similar; composed of whitish concrete, limestone and timber with aluminium detailing. They are differentiated by texture and relief rather than co- lour so that their appearance changes significantly throughout the day.
The interiors of the showrooms and offices are also muted. They aspire to both the cool rigour of speculative office space and to the raw, engineered quality of factories and warehouses. The interior character of the project is energised by this tension between its use and the building typologies to which it refers.
