Customer: AENA, Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport
Architect partner: Circalle
Year: 2022
Location: Madrid, Spain
Terminal 4 Satellite at Madrid-Barajas was transformed from a low-capacity comfort area into a dedicated rest zone. By combining lounge seating, backed seating, planters, and Leaf Lamp Trees into a single spatial composition, the space was designed for passengers facing a long wait before departure.
The existing comfort area in Terminal 4 Satellite offered limited seating capacity and made poor use of the available floor space. For an airport handling over 60 million passengers annually, the gap between what the area offered and what departing passengers needed was a specific and solvable spatial problem. The brief was to create a zone that would invite passengers to stop and settle, while fitting coherently within the terminal's existing architecture rather than sitting apart from it.
The installation is organised around two seating registers within one connected area. Nova C Lounge forms the core of the zone. Its sweeping ergonomic form is designed for the kind of extended rest a long-haul passenger needs before boarding. Integrated armrests curve upward to form small tabletops at regular intervals, so the seating functions as a place to put things down without leaving the chair.
Nova C Back extends the zone's capacity along its perimeter, offering an upright alternative for passengers who want to sit without fully reclining, or who are waiting alongside companions using the lounge seats. The two types of seating work as a coherent whole with two distinct offers.
Planters define the boundary of the zone without enclosing it. Their curved forms follow the same spatial logic as the seating, giving the area a soft threshold against the terminal's wider circulation. Leaf Lamp Trees rise above the composition, their branching forms and birch bark trunks introducing a vertical presence that the terminal's architecture does not carry on its own. The wool felt leaves diffuse the lamp's light softly, reducing the ambient noise that reaches the zone from the concourse.
The zone carries a different weight than the space around it. Natural materials and soft light gather in one composition. The terminal does not change. The experience of being in it does.
The installation created a spatially distinct rest zone within Terminal 4 Satellite. The reclining lounge seating, integrated charging, and soft acoustic properties of the Leaf Lamp Trees address the specific conditions of long-haul departure in a single composition. There is no requirement for the kind of structural intervention that would have closed the area during installation.