NCS Portfolio

Bacardi Corporate Headquarters. Spring 2014. Ron Witte (professor). Rhino, V-Ray, Illustrator, Photoshop.

All corporations are icebergs: every commercial enterprise must interact with the public, yet every company has secrets.

Bacardi Limited has a long architectural history of using its buildings to engage the public, while remaining aloof from that public. Bacardi is both open and closed.

This new corporate headquarters for Bacardi takes on this division of things which “show” and things which “make” and proposes a deeper interaction between them. It will engage Bacardi’s public in the deepened image of the company by turning the outside of the building in on itself. But it will not put the guts of the building on display; rather, it will create a space that is neither interior nor exterior: an in/out space.

This in/out space gives the public the illusion of entering Bacardi, while allowing the corporate surface to remain impenetrable.

Different Show Point strategies create different interactions between In and Out:

The Box maintains an aloof attitude to its site in Hamilton, Bermuda. Half over land, half over water, it hovers in space without aligning itself with site features.

Visitors are invited to leave Bermuda and enter the world of Bacardi:

Revision

S.S. Bacardi has landed, now let the party begin! Standing on massive piers in Hamilton harbor like a piece of maritime infrastructure, the Big White Box gleams in the Atlantic sun as revelers throng the long jetty connecting it to the shore. Underneath the sun shines down through the opening, and elevators whisk partygoers up to the roof deck of the ship, where the full variety of the company’s liquid offerings are being celebrated.

This project is well-conceived (given its provocation, at least), but it does not go far enough. It is too staid. Why does the Box hover partly over land, partly over sea? It belongs to the ocean, to international waters. Why is the top of the box not used? Why isn’t there a minigolf course on top? Where’s the waterslide?

Why was the concept model, with its showy protrusions, abandoned? These balconies are the perfect place to show off what makes Bacardi successful: its product. This project is two things: an impenetrable corporate headquarters, and a bar.

To take this thesis seriously, it is necessary to entirely ignore the project’s context. This building does not belong in Hamilton at all. That is why it is on the water.