Project Description

The new airport, shaped from the Ravenela, aptly nicknamed” l’arbre du voyageur”, welcomes departees and incomers as guests to our land, Mauritius, land of contrasts and colours. In as such, the landscape accompanying the architecture should reflect the diversity of experiences that we can encounter while visiting different places; from coastal areas with palms, to green plains, fields of undulating sugar canes to high lands with endangered endemic plants with their unique flora and fauna. The design concept is based on the works of an illustrious “fils du sol”, Malcom De Chazal, in his paintings as well as his writings which offer a true Mauritian view on our island landscape. Mass of contrasting colours are well outlined. Shapes are instinctively apprehended. The juxtaposition of opposing colours reveals their proponents and also creates a new entity in its unexpected dynamism.

At the main entrance, like a “promontoire”, we grasp the whole of the landscape of concentric primary colours that are, in fact, visual colour references to spatial location. As a reference to a “Chazalian” painting, the main entrance garden is a joyous composition of plants of different colours. Within its grove, a family of giant dodo- travelers animate the composition. As a public art piece, it can become a meeting point.Inside the terminal, the two internal patios give us the opportunity to re-create two ‘Tableaux” of local scenery with distinctive visual experience: one reveals our blue gecko in its surrounding and the second one, the giant tortoise. It is a playful scene to introduce the locals as well as the internationals to the efforts being made to the safeguard of our fauna.