The term plasma comes from Classic Greek and means modeling, form, fabric, imagination, fiction. In Physics, the plasma state-or fourth state of matter- describes a unique condition of matter arising at a complex overlay of external forces. Plasma, a charged field of particles, conducts energy.
Plasma Studio, international architecture and design practice, is best known for its use of form and geometry. Shifts, folds and bends create surface continuities that are never arbitrary but part of a consistent spatial and structural organisation. Space becomes expanded, new potentials arise, new experiences abound. A reduced palette of materials and colours with minimal clean detailing is used in order to let dynamic ephemeral events, such as light changes, reflections and people's movements happen and be noticed.
The partners and collaborators of Plasma Studio aim to actively engage in the perpetual transformation of space, in making the built environment better, more sustainable, more beautiful and in tune with people’s lives and dreams. It is intended to contribute through formulating and constructing relevant examples, buildings that might inspire and instill a sense of purpose and belonging. All this being fostered by the academic research of its partners at prestigious international schools of architecture (Architectural Association, Hong Kong University, et al.) and its collaboration with leading consultants such as Buro Happold and Arup.
Recent completed projects range from fully bespoke radical hotel interiors to new-built residential and hospitality projects that have a fresh take of Alpine vernacular through new innovative construction techniques and spatial modulation.
Plasma has won numerous awards and its work is published and exhibited worldwide.
DESIGN APPROACH
Through form and organization of space as essentially political tools (not in a symbolic way but socially, physically), we work towards generating an architecture that authentically reflects and houses contemporary social life patterns and provides generous and indiscriminate opportunities and qualities to an increasingly contradictory, ubiquitous atomized society.
Configuring space and activities elastically we derive at forms that are fine-tuned around specific requirements and express the multiple aspects that informed them. Our emphasis on the deployment of physical space and ephemeral events becomes a 'lingua franca' for our globalized and differentiated world, severing dependencies on (exclusive) historical, linguistic, cultural or intellectual knowledge and readings. Architecture can and should be experienced and interpreted ad hoc as pure physical and phenomenological experience- emancipatory, integrative, active.
RECONFIGURING BOUNDARIES
The current planning laws dissect the cities into lots and separate areas of work, live and leisure and protect the real estate. They promote architecture as mode of exclusion through inflexible definitions of boundaries as peripheral fortresses; separations of inside and outside where the need for climatic filter becomes a device for social disconnection.This use of collage and patchwork as predominant mode of spatial production produces homogeneity and disconnection retaining our environment acting as a collection of individual confined islands. We intend to interweave singular objects and instances with each other and the larger context.
SHIFTING VALUES
What is left of culturally relevant architecture is in danger of becoming polarized by the media and post-modern cultural assessment pattern into styles and brands. Consumed and sometimes produced as such many architectural projects are only able to shift or extend given conventions in either direction yet fail to question these in general. The results are iconographic monuments, unintentional motifs and vehicles of market forces and media culture.We do not just avoid iconography, images or other semantic modes of communication but attempt the opposite: through abstraction, morphological shifts and innovative use of material we intend to produce ambiances that are unfamiliar (new, unusual, exotic). What appears abstract at first becomes a part of a larger story through the active experience and discovery of the space.
UNFOLDING POTENTIALS
Economical, practical as well as ergonomic factors give good reasons for appearance and performance of our built environment. Yet in many cases an inherent potential for a specific, meaningful, high quality solution is brushed away by a commonplace one.Our projects seek to expand such ubiquitous rationalistic ordering systems. Their strengths (in terms of human scale, clarity and versatility for instance) are capitalized and used as modeling instruments in the design process. Yet our designs unfold from those given frameworks, acquiring geometries that are closely informed by multiple environmental, social and intellectual conditions.