Quality Hotel Friends

The house with thousand eyes creates an illusion; like waves from a point in middle of the northern facade. The image appears from a distance. It makes the stiff block soft, almost wet, with the windows as rings on the water. The impression is formed by windows in three different sizes: 1.4, 1.7 and 2 meters in diameter. The variations furnish the standardized rooms with a kind of individuality, especially in corners. The 400-room hotel is built next to Friends Arena, a 65 000 seats sports and event venue, and the upcoming Mall of Scandinavia, a shopping mall designed by Wingårdhs. It is operated by Nordic Choice Hotels and designated for their business range sector, with special attention to conferences. The hotel is based on the strictly repeated module's opportunities for large-scale pattern effect over a continuous surface. The monotonous divided and abstract white terrazzo is used as a medium and the circular windows as dots to create a large-scale, binary image, made up of the most basic building blocks - the circular grid point, and the orthogonal grid. The hotel room, which is the smallest unit in the housing program, indicates the scale for the raster and thus the image. Elements joints are made white, and sanded, in order to subordinate to the pattern. With the help of grid points in three sizes, an image of an "impossible" wave motion is projected over the facade. The scale begins at a point on the north facade, and propagates circumferentially over the surface.

The soft wave contrasts to the rigidity of the block. Its scale and density communicates the image from far away. Viewed from a distance, the picture appears clearer and strengthens the function of the building as a landmark. The image continue down over the public floors, and up over the top, public plane and out onto the roof which is assumed to be more exposed than in other contexts . The plaza level and below is carried out as a continuous glazed slit to create visual contact with the square and get an abundant natural light from the north.

The building follows the environmental standards of Wingårdhs. Size of site: 7.060 m² Size of building: 21.935 m²