Stone façade cladding

woodverticalsustainable

Hotel Nodo: “naturally urban”. A hotel with façades covered in Laminam bioactive surfaces was the first building to actively combat South America’s (*) pollution in Chile’s capital. Its architect, Ricardo Stein, designed the hotel to create a building that could not only iconographically reproduce a forest inside a city (just like a landscape), but could function like a forest and purify the air – like an artificial living organism. Laminam was the first to make this possible. The company supplied the cladding surfaces for the Hotel Nodo in Santiago, Chile making it South America’s (*) first bioactive building. The Italian company’s products treated with bioactive technology were selected by Chilean architect Ricardo Stein, who is specialised in eco-sustainable buildings, for his project. He wanted an architectural element that could aesthetically evoke nature in an artificial area while actively fighting pollution. Stein explained, “Chile is presented to other countries as a land of landscapes. The Hotel Nodo attempts to iconographically represent landscapes as an element of differentiation, and satisfy the search for unique new experiences for people who temporarily live in a hotel. At the same time, the hotel was built with the intention of artificially reproducing nature and not only for aesthetic reasons. The goal was to create a structure associated with the idea of being a living organism.” To reach his goal, Stein did not choose a design solution that involved natural materials (stone and wood) or the creation of architectural spaces where trees could grow, like Stefano Boeri’s famous “Bosco Verticale” in Milan. Stein opted for a conceptual solution instead.