At the outset, the search for form in Zoī Vendome has been about what it is not, as much as what it is, namely to avoid the look or feel of a typical medical facility. What are medical facilities? An uninviting check-in desk followed by long, bright, sterile corridors bordered by doors leading to examination rooms, a tired and uncomfortable waiting lounge at the end of the hallway. Predictability and nervous anticipation at all times, let alone an experience which hardly aids in healing and restoring patients. This project quickly became one of sharply contrasting conventions to create a medical facility for the 21st Century. In stark formal contrast to the rigidity and sterility of current medical facilities, we were in search of form that placed human experience at the very center: the Baroque. It engaged the viewer in a dramatic and immersive experience, elevating and exalting the human body. Scale, intricacy of details, flowing and elastic space, and dynamic use of light and shadow work in symphony.

The question then became how to infuse Baroque sensations into the functionality of contemporary medical facilities, normally characterized by soulless materials and standardized, unimaginative spaces. Could one imagine a ‘Neon-Baroque’, a fresh take on Baroque form, applied to a medical setting, bringing the medical facility into contemporary culture? It is with this premise that Zoī Vendome began. From the lobby, to the hallways and examination suites, members are comforted yet in awe, always feeling at the center of the experience. The onsens serve to revitalize and heal, emphasizing the viewer as protagonist through theatricality of layered spaces. Light and shadow, in a type of chiaroscuro drama, add a certain calming sensation yet evoke a sense of mystery, wonder and surprise.

Throughout the project, light is progressively reduced in intensity, starting at the lobby, with homogeneous light that bathes the space in an aura of a colonnaded ruin flanked by vertical monoliths. The hallways thereafter begin to reduce in brightness, a series of curved rooms, where paths are carved into the form, using color to highlight these transitions, like peeling back the skin of a fruit to reveal the flesh. Beyond these transition spaces, one is transported to the examination suites, where the atmosphere is calmer and intimate, as if in a protected womb with no sharp corners and the bed at the center, the patient becoming a sculpture in a small rotonda. All equipment is concealed within the walls and centripetally serves the member at different intervals, from examination, to changing, to showering. Lastly, the onsens, where light has been reduced in full, creating a cave-like sensation amplified by the monolithically carved walls and pools out of pure volcanic stone. They invite visitors to be hidden within this series of bathing postures, shrouded by dramatic but dim lighting and black stone.

The project manages to follow a formal evolutionary path in the historicist nature of its simplified Baroque gestures which give a sense of drama and serenity, and also be revolutionary in its strong contemporary approach in its manipulation of lighting and materials to create an episodic unfolding of spaces, pushing it past just a medical facility, but a space of cultural reflection. It is in this we have tried to conceive of Zoī Vendome to be a world within itself with the visitor always at the center; a beacon for a new generation of healthcare facilities.