Playing Architecture - Royal Lottomatica Offices

The Royal-Lottomatica offices has been a starting point as well as a goal for our research. Toy and light are the basis of this research and certainly technology drawing is one of the major innovation in the design of the latest ten years. In fact the mechanical and technological plants are the very center of our contemporary design and this need to be managed aesthetically. A colored pipe, the “snake”, can be used without electricity, full of colors during the day and dark during the night. But if you decide to use it as a light source you will enjoy its colors even when it's night. In this way buildings will achieve a new role, thanks to their night presence and they won't need any external lighting: they will produce their light and colors, and will “dialogue” with people and with the city. The reception is defined by “the snake”, the bright pipe – a prototype – that shows the path toward the offices and characterizes the spaces. These spaces are surrounded by wiggly lines converging toward the central oval, lighted up with fluorescent light. Volumes are extremely collected and create an ethereal, vanished environment, far from the daily housing dimension. This space is marked by some symbolical figures, typical of the toys world: numbers, and their placement in a random order, and colors, in a childlike combination. The management offices do not betray this concept: the color, untidy in a neoplastic matrix with Dutch and Russian lines (from Mondrian to El Lisitskij), draw furniture built to be toys, even before of being volumes destined to contain things. The relation between object-toy became then strictly dualistic: it's not a simple container, it should be a toy that contains others object-toys (a kind of “matrioska”). In this context other objects-toys like the pinball machine or the swing, or the egg-armchair: these are toys for relaxing, but also working toys. In the same way the meeting room, where pastel blu sky colored chairs stands in an orange background, where the cupboard on the wall became like an horizontal chinese pick-up sticks toy.