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Echoes Bar

Part 2 Project 2004
Ilias Galanis
London South Bank University | UK
The first experience I had visiting the hotel was the sound of piano music coming from the Palm Court, filling every space and giving each a different quality. This was the driving force behind the project, as I decided to design a piano bar that would generate a flow of sounds to both the hotel and the city. Through recorded data I began analysing sound waves and geometries; this gave me a a formal and environmental methodology applicable to the entire hotel. Through this investigation I realised the potential existing for a structure that developed a dialogue between itself, the hotel, and the city, based on the volume of users in each and the language of sound.

A steel structure supports flexible PVC cushions that expand and contract by reducing or increasing their internal volume.



Ilias is a naturally curious student with unlimited hunger for ordinary information and extraordinary visual spectacle. Using the hotel management's real life brief as a basis, his project for the Langham took this upmarket tourist hotel with its comfortably static dark corners and transformed it into a heaving, seething beast. The intervention in the vacant rear courtyard burst from the upper floor windows and famous Palm Court with a shocking vigour, its EFTE cushions flapping in response to sensors tracking the changing acoustic environment of the hotel. All this invention was drawn and modelled with passion and skill; from the innocuous tinklings of the lounge pianist came a great dragon's tail of a building.

2004
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