Air Rights Part 2 Project 1999 Jimmy Ruiz London South Bank University | UK Air Rights: hotel in Euston RoadFrom a roof in Fitzrovia I saw London as a web of aerials and communications markers strung out along the artery of the Euston Road. This road contains many of the great urban architypes, including stations, parks, and - significantly -hotels. As a type, the hotel has become both a sympton and symbol of the new hyper mixed metropolitan architecture. But here, the hotel is a vehicle for giving new transparency to the London street and skyline. The operation of the building is always visible, constantly communicating. Internally, glass block walls contain a system of smart dumbwaiters supplying guests at all levels. And a giant glasshouse covers the rear courtyard, which terminates in the fuselage of the bar. Externally, the cast glass swimming pool is used as the principal element of the main facade expressing ideas of time and space as means of expanding the physical boundaries of the ultra-deep site. - unique - distinctive - refreshing - romantic - emotional - sympathetic - city - cracks - depth - threshold - float - edge - transition - bone - aerial - blueThe hotel is seen as a positive architectural intervention which hopes to reflect the best qualities of city life. Air Rights: the new city landscape was to moderate between the ideas of the work hard/play hard city, with emotions of fast and slow facades. Jimmy's introduction of the containing of water as the front layer of the building used ideas of time lapse and transition, expressed as a site survey. This survey started with modelling the variable edge conditions that diffuse the vertical and horizontal boundaries of the site. Jimmy's approach to the project addressed the issues of metropolitan architecture, and the essential urbanism of the Euston/Marylebone Road. His ideas of verticality challenged density, and speculated on, the emotion of form. This architecture of hope uses layers of light and the projection of daylight from the inside of the architecture outwards to the street. At night, this process is reversed - which in a way addresses Jimmy's view of the hotel as a magical and positive space, in contrast to some of the inward looking buildings of the late twentieth century which stand in disregard of their surroundings. Jimmy's constant research tested the transparency of architectural form through modelling the projection of light and colour using an intricate A0 perspex model. This penetration of light and the reflection of water allows the rest of the city to become part of the hotel.