Aston Martin & Lotus Norwood
Aston Martin & Lotus Norwood is an ongoing project I’ve been doing since August of 2021 for Michael Argiros. This project started because the people at Cadillac did not like sharing his showroom floor with his Aston Martin & Lotus dealership.
There was no clear solution, but I decided to take a nearby property Michael was interested in and decided to come up with a proposal for a new dealership. Since I would be presenting to Michael, Aston Martin employees, and real estate employees I catered the presentation to renders rather than line drawings. This is a very important and impactful decision as I made this design and presentation in 2 weeks, so there wasn’t ample time for a plethora of drawings.
I took inspiration from Crown Hall by Mies van der Rohe, specifically the flanges that run along the roof of the building in order to keep the interior open. The center piece of the dealership is intended to act as a massive flange in order to free up the showroom floor. The exterior façade took inspiration from the Aston Martin logo and grille. I also wanted to keep the overall design as simple and iconic as possible. The shape of the building is a rectangle, allowing for implementation on many lots, and the elegant curvature is implemented along the long side of the rectangle, addressing the highway with the Aston Martin logo and the most elegant façade.
Note : This image is courtesy of the Aston Martin Design guidelines
Michael was impressed with my design and connected me with the designers at Aston Martin so I could bring the building up to its branding guidelines
Note : This image is courtesy of SOLLI Engineering
As the project progressed the sample site that I used was changed to being beside the current Norwood Cadillac dealership. A large challenge with this was that there is a national gas line that runs underneath the site (represented by dotted line), meaning there were strict guidelines on the size the dealership could be.
Soon after the site changed I was informed of two other major issues. First, the car brand Lotus must also be included within this building. This created more design challenges as I needed to find ways to balance the representation between the two brands. Secondly, I was informed that this project would need to be put on hold as Aston Martin is currently changing their core branding ideologies. Aston Martin is doing this so they can create a more uniform appearance amongst their brand, and penetrate the market in a new way. I created these two additional concepts in order to ensure a multitude of ideas to potentially move forward with later.