MEDEA HOTEL

Maria Antonietta Santangelo

The Medea Hotel by AMDL CIRCLE is embedded in a straight-lined grid of the city of Batumi, Georgia. Planned on the former site of a reinforced cement Soviet building, just over 10 floors high, it is named for Medea, a cunning, controversial figure of Greek myth. The rhomboidal site plan, on a wide lot but with tight borders, breaks up the urban form, positioned diagonally, covering 2,500 square meters of the 3,300 square meters available. This project is the most recent example of the architect Michele De Lucchi’s fully realized and far-reaching work, as architecture that keeps its classical underpinnings while becoming a symbol, a large-scale object. Each side is the same as the other an uses the same expressive language.
The design of the 21-story “mythological” tower, about 77 meters high, delineates a broken line that directs its snaking composition, and then it is organized by the metal and glass grid of right angles that marks the elevations. Here, the long, straight form of the windows heightens the sense of verticality created by the tapered architectural form. The building is divided into groups of staggered floors that go gradually in different directions and serve different functions: in addition to the hotel, apartments, conference room, and casino hall. The Medea is in Batumi’s historic center, and its entrance is covered by a large overhang on the side facing the Black Sea. The architecture’s stereometric development immediately draws the focus, rising like an urban memory on the background of the eclectic architecture of the Adjara region.