Clémentine Lumia

In the midst of the industrial, cultural, area of the city centre of Maastricht: a Flower Shop. The river, greenery and surrounding buildings envelops three new structures that offer flowers and emotions with an intention is to provide visitors through acts of sharing an embodied experience.

Three buildings showing openness through introverted to extroverted characters while proclaiming their function; the workshop, the shop and the greenhouse.

The industrial appearance offers functionality with the curiosity of the different banal materials attempts a unique botanical atmosphere. Play of light, on the undulated concrete, glass, and colour through plastic. The morphology and materiality have the goal to resonate with the image of the flower's growth.

The growing pipes, the sink, the blooming windows, flooring bricks, botanical garden mist and the flowing mesh tarp, create a feel for industrial composition and delicacy, letting the flower exhibit itself. A growing building which moves with the seasons, weather changes the atmosphere offering the quality of unexpected life.

In search of identity through community, culture and visual perception, inspired by artists, architects and writers, such as Lewerentz, Blossfeldt or Baudelaire, the concept focus on the connection between person and nature. Yet proving a tension between comfort and discomfort. Promoting physical pleasure and sensuality of surrounding space, generating positive or negative emotions.

Looking at romantic paintings, in a personal definition, romanticism understands separation. A duality between life and death, growth and decay. Accepting what things are and exhibiting them as beautiful objects.

My design accepts this tension. A reflection through observation and participation. Exhibition of pre-death and post- death preservation. The application of emotions through flowers and the lack of, as industrial materials. Thus shown in the objective and the need for a reconnection to not only nature but to the communal act of sharing and uniting.