Through this scenographically designed space created by Ramos Alderete, visitors are introduced to a kind of parallel world, imbued with a tactile and tranquil atmosphere. The flexibility of the tiered seating allows for a wide range of uses: from meetings and conferences to spaces for relaxation, reflection, rest, or informal gatherings.
The curved geometry, the treatment of light, and the choice of materials result in an introspective space at the heart of an office in Madrid. The Relaxation Room thus presents itself as a space for calm, introspection, and connection. In contrast to the fast-paced productivity of the corporate environment, the room invites one to pause, to stop, and to reconnect with the essence of collaborative work.
Relax Room by Ramos Alderete. Photograph by Alberto Amores.
Project description by Ramos Alderete
The Relax Room was born from a unique commission within a corporate environment: to transform two meeting rooms, constrained by their structure and form, into a place for pause, contemplation, and connection. The project turns difficulty into potential, exploring spatial distortion and the manipulation of light to create surprising and immersive atmospheres.
In contrast to the productivity-driven logic of the corporate space, the room introduces a quiet heart: a place to stop, contemplate, and reconnect with what is essential. The architecture here proposes a slow pace, attentive to beauty and mystery.
The starting point was a narrow, elongated space, bisected by a pillar and featuring a conventional window. From these elements, a scenography is constructed that transforms the space: the pillar is concealed yet articulates and enables the scale of the space, the window metamorphoses into a lighting device, and the linear geometry curves, opening new visual perspectives.
The curved walls, clad in acoustic materials, generate a serene and tactile environment. The geometric distortion not only conceals the residual elements but also creates an organic and protective atmosphere, disconnected from the outside noise. The airtight door and cladding ensure that crossing the threshold represents a true transformation: spatial, auditory, luminous, and tactile. Entering is like stepping into another world, quieter, more concentrated, more intense.
Despite its small size, the space is modulated on different scales. The main area offers a flat surface, capable of accommodating multiple uses, and a tiered platform that diversifies the ways of occupying it, eliminating the need for furniture. Light also introduces new zones: an individual niche with indirect light, an intimate—almost confessional, secret—conversation space, and the inaccessible yet ever-present skylight. Thus, the project articulates both the collective and the individual, the immediate and the distant.
The space and its variations engage in a dialogue with a lighting system that evokes three complementary worlds:
The oculus: a skylight clad in silver leaf, which softens the existing light and introduces a mysterious, almost unattainable radiance, associated with the idea of infinity.
The niche: a rectangular opening bathed in indirect light, where the individual takes center stage in their singularity.
The reinterpreted window: open towards the office, recalling the relational and shared dimension of work.
This interplay of light constructs a spatial narrative that oscillates between the abstract and the concrete. The RGB lighting system intensifies the possible scenarios, multiplying the atmospheres.
The room seeks to offer the user two spatial experiences that relate to two fundamental attitudes for progress: wonder—towards the infinite, the mysterious—and questioning—about the future, identity, the meaning of shared experience. Here, architecture becomes the mediator between these two states.
In this intersection of intimacy and community, of silence and light, the Relax Room is consolidated as a space of poetic resistance within the contemporary office: a place that invites you to look beyond the immediate and to recover the human dimension of inhabiting.
