Interior design Mac Stopa / Massive design
Photos Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Text Antonella Boisi

Opened last in April, with the monarchs of Belgium on hand, the arena’s interiors are by Przemyslaw ‘Mac’ Stopa, the creative Polish architect, designer and graphic artist at the helm of the studio Massive Design.

The facility has already been a Best of Year Honoree 2013 in the Public Space category of New York’s Interior Design magazine, and won the Interiors Award in the sports category of the magazine Contract, at the 35th Interiors Award Breakfast 2014 in New York. What makes the Ghelamco Arena – built by the real estate developer Ghelamco NV, active in the office, residential and retail sectors, guided by Paul Gheysens and also the sponsor of the local soccer team K.A.A. Gand – so special? It is precisely the expressive force and high quality of the interiors, which mix materials, production technologies, forms and functions in an experimental and innovative way, adding nobility to a sports complex in concrete and glass, a new construction with a skeleton of metal pillars, and a seating capacity of 20,000. Considering the talent of Mac Stopa to shape space with a theatrical, unconventional approach, starting from a rigorous rationalist background (he took a degree at the Cracow University of Technology), a winning goal was only to be expected. The same kind of winning approach as when he took part in the events organized by INTERNI for Design Week in Milan, in 2013 and 2012, namely “Interni Hybrid Architecture & Design” and “Interni Legacy.” In Ghent, he was asked to develop a series of design solutions that would be easy to implement, to improve the acoustics and intervene in precise areas: the main entrance and box office; the lounge and restaurant on the first floor; the main circulation corridor of the second ring, with different refreshment points below; the locker rooms and the spa-wellness center for the athletes. All the way to the lighting, furnishings and graphic design of each zone. And done in record time: less than two and a half months. As usual, the inspirations behind his vocabulary were organic geometry, color, 3D effects, lighting integrated with architecture, with the most up-to-date energy efficiency solutions. Mac Stopa has covered all the pillars of the entrance lobby with white panels with a sculptural form, using a special plaster-acrylic material called Gypart, produced by Gyproc, shaped in a fluid, sinuous pattern up to the suspended ceiling. These glossy white surfaces are joined above by over 10,000 matte modules made with Solo, a soft material in glass wool, treated to absorb sound, produced by Ecophon (Saint-Gobain group). “I started with the standard rectangular form of 120 x 240 cm for this prefabricated part,” the architect explains, “and then I cut it according to a pentagonal layout, to limit waste, but also to suggest the classic segments that are stitched together to form the 3D graphic of a soccer ball.” That same element of reference returns, like a leitmotiv, in the iconography of the entire work: from the counter of the bar on the second level to the cartoon walls along the circulation routes. Together with the lines of LEDs (Philips) that change colors, penetrating the suspended ceiling, lighting up the institutional blue ‘sky’ of the Ghent team.