Roca needed an iconic building that truly represents their position as the world’s leading bathroom brand. The desire to create a technologically advanced experience personifying their innovative philosophy, allowed the agency to encourage a level of visual sophistication and abstraction that was liberating. Tiempo BBDO’s challenging brief combined so many different types of content, physical formats and technologies, that we began development stepping back and looking universally at how the showroom (building + contents) mirrored the brand model: Roca (product) + water (audiovisuals) = Experience.
Their idea to use water as a central motif allowed us at Boolab to conceive of a global language that evokes a sense of contact with nature at a sensory level for the visitor, connecting the individual pieces in feeling rather than with a single specific look. I was inspired by the manufacturing processes, surface and sculptural qualities of the product and established a conceptual criteria (for movements, rhythms, forms, evolutions, materials, lighting and choreography) that would apply in part or whole to the development of the separate pieces.
The site-specific nature of the project continually inspired us to think about formats and creativity in an architectural context. The set design for Rituals and 10:1(6k) cinematic perimeter video format for eg, were specifically devised to maximize the overall unity and continuity of space. This fundamentally conditioned how we used composition and played with scale as it relates to the visitor. Seeing the full size piece for the first time was pretty insane!
The darkness of the interior space suggested working in a very theatrical way, both in terms of elegantly describing volumetric form in the films, as well as allowing us to create choreographed changes in global ambient light given off by the screens that happen over longer periods of time. I loved thinking about how this ‘modulation’ could help the space feel alive and create a perception of architectural volume that breaths. Fluxus in particular was designed to take full advantage of the reflective ceiling to accentuate the effect.
Main credits:
Director: Paul Freeth
Agency: Tiempo BBDO
Production company: Boolab
Client: Roca
