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New-look retail development carves itself into the landscape
Porto Pi is, among the large range of centres belonging to the the Testa Sacyr Vallhermoso group, an atypical building nested between two rock escarpments at the end of the bay of Palma de Mallorca, with views oriented to the Marina and Spanish King’s residence. The original building dates from the 1980's and needed an interior renovation as its exterior image of a grounded ship remains valid and communicative, although the industrial tone of the three storeys needed updating. Along with this fundamental change was the treatment of the exterior retail streets and the extension of two two-storey buildings on the terrace of the centre.
Les Terrasses is a 20,000 m2 cultural, leisure and retail extension of Porto Pi, the principal shopping mall of the city of Palma de Mallorca. Taking full advantage of the perfect location on the roof of the Porto Pi building located on the city’s main seafront, and freely borrowing nautical references such as white painted steel contrasted with wood slats and serigraphed glass, the chasm cut between the two perfect prisms creates a promenade in which to freely walk and shop.
The project seeks to get down to the essence of retail vocabularies, recreate perspectives, simplify the itineraries of visitors who do not readily welcome new habits, thus generating a new environment in accordance with the shop-owners definitely represents an exercise in balance. Upon first visiting the centre, the architects’ first reaction was to generate a global project, developed not from its details but on the interaction between volumes and light: to convert the centre into a single store with its own ergonomy, aesthetic, to interactively and dynamically mark it’s fluxes and connections.
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