Emotionalist rescue: The Blue hotel by Spheron

What is an emotionalist building? This is a question that has been playing around in director of Spheron Architects Tszwai So’s mind for some time. It became part of discussions he had with an international group of friends over Zoom calls during Covid lockdowns. People joined from Canada, Hong Kong, South Korea, the UK and beyond, becoming a kind of creative collective. What emotionalist architecture might be, however, remained a theory. That was until February 2023 when a member of the group commissioned Spheron to design a new hotel for the company they run jointly. Just Inn is a small boutique art-led hotel chain based in Taiwan and already had three locations. But the practice was given only eight months to design and build it – or the hotel chain would go bankrupt.

It was these circumstances that, by fortune or force, created the opportunity for Spheron Architects to explore and experiment with what an emotionalist building is. The site had been purchased: a 10-storey corner building with basement in the centre of Taipei, down the road from the Taiwan National Museum and nearby to the city’s main train station. It was built in 1970 originally with an art deco/modernist look, which had been altered to become, as So explains, ‘more Taiwanese’. Ten years ago it was bought by a hotel brand and half of its full-height windows were covered up, using brown and orange metal cladding panels. ‘It was awful inside,’ says So. ‘The bathrooms were pushed in front of the windows.’

Essentially, there was no time for many of the usual architectural processes. No time for drawings, for iterations or planning permission. There was no budget for much either. Just Inn started with an ambition to carry out all the work for £250,000.

The design has depended on impulse, ingenuity and, with no time to lose, the personal has been woven into the making and realisation. The first thing So did when he arrived in Taipei was initiate a psychogeographic tour of the city with the client team. They followed any route they fancied – sketching, photographing, collecting and chatting along the way to get a feel for what worked and what didn’t.

The project started with the strip out. The brown and orange metal cladding was removed but, otherwise, as much of the existing was retained as possible, including furniture, carpets and doors. Decisions about what should stay and be reused were made along the way – again discovering and reacting to what the team found.

Once the cladding was removed they would have needed planning permission to put it back. Spheron considered restoring the Taiwanese mosaic underneath, but not enough remained to make this feasible. ‘The only option was to render the building with a thin layer of cement,’ says So.

This is where The Blue comes in. The dilemma was what colour cement to choose – retain the grey or change it? The process for deciding was to pick any colour based on emotion or gut feeling. For So this was blue and, when he took it to the client, it was their choice too. For So, the feeling came out of blue’s long history in art as the most expensive colour, that it is the world’s most popular colour and that it is cross-cultural but that, at the same time, it is rarely used in architecture. For the client, one member of the team had suffered an unexpected close family bereavement that led them to ‘feeling blue’ too. The decision also felt instinctive. The country’s national bird is the Taiwan blue magpie. It is unique to the island and the bright blue render is designed to emulate the colour of the bird’s feathers. Achieving the colour came out of a patient process of trial and error with the contractor by mixing in Taiwanese iron oxide to get the perfect vivid shade. ‘When the scaffold came down,’ explains So, ‘Taipei paused for a moment.’

The same colour blue has been used to paint the stairwell, architecturally linking inside and out. Internally the walls are finished with lime-based plaster for the texture and for its more environmentally friendly qualities in minimising embodied carbon. The ground floor has been opened up and made level access to encourage the public to drift in and out effortlessly between the columns which form a plinth to the hotel bedrooms above. The floor itself is also an emotionalist feature. Instead of throwing away waste glass from the strip-out, it has been reused as part of an underfoot art installation, reminiscent of fallen leaves, star constellations or teardrops using quotes and words that Spheron solicited from AI and contacts all over the world, including from Mecanoo’s Francine Houben. Passers-by slow down to read the words.

Much else has radically changed but also stayed the same. The chandelier in the ground floor reception area is made from scrap metal sheeting. The reception desk is the steel stair that was previously positioned in the same spot, turned on its side. All the furniture has been sanded down and reused; likewise the doors. The ensuite bathrooms have been retained and deconstructed in their original position. This allows more light into the bedrooms in addition to the extra light resulting from removing the external cladding.

The final bill was less than £1 million, which equates to around £500 per m². A few elements are outstanding. Just Inn would like a restaurant on the first floor, which for now is an exhibition area. The bedroom corridors just have white walls and grey floors with artwork to follow and populate the space. The basement will also become a cinema room. There are 56 bedrooms but there will be 59 eventually.

Despite a stressful year, remarkably, the hotel was completed and opened on time. ‘It is a very experimental building,’ says So. ‘We found out what an emotionalist building is. Conversations were about going through bereavement, midlife crisis and relationship issues. We used these stories to inform the design – the approach was less rigid and intellectual in that sense, and not too academic and commercial.’

Looking at the project from the street, its bright blue render, béton brut plinth and openness certainly provoke a visceral reaction.

In numbers

2000m2 GIA