Sala en espera

How does a space affect our perception of time? Is it possible to design a waiting room into a positively transformative space? What avenues does Design Culture offer the preservation of interiors?

The Waiting Room

In 1975, the architect Carlos Ferrater designed the waiting room in the Bonanova Dental Clinic in Barcelona. Although it has been heavily modified throughout the years, the waiting room's general form remains almost entirely intact.
It is a space imbued with the duality of space and time: the room generates, or rather, releases time and exists in a loose temporality.

The formal complexity of Ferrater's project attempts to create a space that will enrich the experience of waiting, a space in which to experience the passage of time. The room is not merely functional; instead, it creates a real change in the user's experience. My project is an approximation of this reality.

A Training Ground in Wasting Time

This approach to space is based on my own experience and my proposal is to live the waiting experience. This process is informed by my personal circumstances. I arrived in Barcelona in 2017 after four years in Amsterdam, where I worked on a number of interiors projects. It was important to come to a stop, and to look around for new tools to capture the transformative nature of architecture. And so I arrived at the waiting room, a space that invites me to stop, to leave aside immediacy and to create my own time.

With this project I wanted to recover the space and redefine the process of waiting. By imposing a strict training program on myself to combat my fear of wasting time, a rejection of the uselessness and anxiety brought about by indefiniteness, I learned to live the waiting experience.

These exercises conclude with spatial graphic translations that are not a collection of interpretations so much as an attempt to open new paths. The waiting room folds out into more than fifty new constructions that are scattered and thus breathe life into the original. This collection of exercises makes up the magazine Sala en espera, an update of the Bonanova Dental Clinic's space.