Romania-based studio SquareONE recently has completed the Shade Club in Bucharest.

+ Project description courtesy SquareONE

Shade was a interesting experiment. The location is the basement of a residential building in the center of Bucharest. Since the 90's there were many clubs there some of them very successful. Some quiet scandalous. The last years before it was closed, the location was synonymous with some of the Romanian interlope world. So it had a bad name. After a period of almost 5 years the location was rented by two guys who hired us to do an eclectic glamorous club.

Since the space is very small, segmented, and with a dark past, and the new owners want at least a elegant, stylish objective, I thought of a mysterious concept with a touch of humor.

A ghostly house animated by the EGO of a small dog. The spectrum is omnipresent.

The furniture is illustrated on the walls 2D imagines. But the shapes are extruded in the space and form continuous volumes trough the club (see the Classic Bar and the Classic Dj booth)

Because the structure was so dense, and the club divided in 3 different spaces, we decided to create different designs and graphic pattern that links the spaces.

Shade Club, image courtesy SquareONE

The lights

It's a black and white design. I usually use light to color my designs. This is the case here: a RGB spectral tube system that runs on the perimeter. It is mainly indirect light. The same system is used in the first bar too.

The spaces

Funny, when we began the prep there were 7-8 layers of different materials applied on the walls, you could witness the entire history of the location in the past 15 years. That got me thinking about the past.

The first space is the biggest and has the highest density of structural pillars. So the first row we covered in mirrors and covered applied 3quarters of a lamp on two edges of each pillar. So we got a sort of tromp de oeil in the first space, so the pillars disappeared and a forest of lamps emerged (the lamps are made of fiber glass skin shaped on massive wood molds finished and polyurethane painted
The other row incorporates the classic extruded bar and Dj, so in a way they disappear too, being part of the bar design.

The volumetric pattern on the walls is CNC cut dense polyurethane foam white painted. Behinde it we used a mirror for a repetitive visual effect and to relate with the mirror pillars in the space.

Shade Club, image courtesy SquareONE

The second space is a circular one that runs around the third. To be more precise, the third space is a central lounge box of concrete.

Given the shape of the second circular space, we went for an organic design with a baroque decoration; the structural pillars (only one row in this space) were covered in a Corian skin. It is a soft, organic shape vertically extruded. The Corian skin was engraved with the graphic design CNC milled into the surface of the material. Then a special mold was made and the Corian milled plates were thermoformed.

Shade Club, image courtesy SquareONE

The semicircular bar in the this space was done exactly the same. The walls have a routed MDF structure a Axpet cladding and a graphic design cut and applied on the surface. Axpet is a very thin extremely flexible and hi glossy material (that has a good fire behavior). I tried a lot of material but Axpet was the only to do the job. Otherwise we should thermoform the plates for the walls too. This would skyrocket the costs.

The third space is a small lounge, quite isolated from the rest. The design is basically one lounge sofa, with a helicoidally shape and a ellipsoidal light membrane on the ceiling made of a elastic membrane that diffuses the light. I used white cords hangings to better illustrate the shape and to link the two elements.

The graphic design on the wall is handmade.

Shade Club, image courtesy SquareONE

The Classic Bar

It is a section through a classic table extruded through the space. There are virtual sections that cut the volume and leave white luminous surfaces with 2D images of different objects (lamps, tables generally house furniture) the ideea was to illustrate a photo of the interior of a house that cuts a volume and leaves a impression.

Since there were so many mirrors it was no need to induce the presence of a former person in the space (regarding the haunting) but working on the design of the bar I felt like putting a character into this scene, or more the suggestion of a big EGO (therorethically it is a good way to underline the social impact of such a public space. The vast mayority of the regular clients have oversized EGO's ). The Chiwawa light spectrum is a irony to that.

To give a good contrast to the design we used Corian Noir in combination with Glaciar Ice Corian that is translucent. So I used spectral tubes as light source to light up the white surfaces.

+ Project credits / data

Project: SquareONE
Location: Bucharest, Romania
Design: SquareONE
Team: Arh. Adrian Cancer Zeana, Arh Sabin Dumitru, Arh Neli German

+ All images courtesy SquareONE