Imaginarium in Barcelona, located across the Passeig de Gracia from Casa Mila, is a flagship shop of a well-known Spanish children’s brand. It occupies 3 floors of a narrow building 6 m wide and 28 m long. ‘Since there are 23 different series, we attempted to create a space that has not only many independent rooms, but is also connected as a whole. We got inspired by the space characteristics of the cave, where different scenes are explored continuously as people go deeply into the space’, says the SAKO architects team.

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‘Many of the firm’s goods and packages are in primary color, therefore we filled whole space with rainbow color to set off the commodities and create a cheerful atmosphere. Color on the wall gradually changes in vertical direction. Each of 6 layers of display shelves draw their own smooth curved line throughout the shop, which is like undulations of natural land drawn by contour lines.  In some places, display shelf is flying out just like ‘tongue’ and becomes special shelf for promotional commodity, area sign, table, chair, counter, book shelf and partition and so on. Those ‘tongue’ create distinctive areas in the shop then generate variety of activities around them. Since each layer has different shape, activities are distributed irregularly in three-dimensional way. So once you over look from right above with all layers translucently overlaid, color lines shows the distribution of activities, or ’space stress’.

As represented by a pair of doors at the entrance, goods for parents are displayed right next to those for children, which embody Imaginarium’s philosophy of treating children as adults. For children the experience of exploring in ‘Rainbow Cave’ will exceed that of usual shopping and stimulates their native curiosity.’

For more pictures visit: www.sako.co.jp.