442 Design breathes life into The Ozone

Edinburgh’s Our Dynamic Earth attraction relaunches its Ozone corporate event venue this week, with interiors and a brand identity created by local group 442 Design.

The revamp is designed to minimise noise pollution, explains Our Dynamic Earth marketing director Catriona Bruce.

‘We needed a design solution that would allow us to have music in an acoustically sound area,’ she says. Maintaining the integrity of the Michael Hopkins-designed building and creating a multi-functional area were also considerations, she adds.

‘The biggest challenge was making sure that The Ozone (pictured) worked as an acoustically sound room in its own right,’ says 442 Design director David Dunn. The space occupies one end of the canvas-roofed, glass building’s ground floor, which also houses the entrance and ticketing areas and a café.

‘We put in a solid, undulating ceiling that fits under the building’s canopy and a retractable glass curtain,’ he says. ‘The client didn’t want doors in the partition, so we had to create another way of allowing flow between closed and open areas.’

The group devised a double-curved entrance tunnel, with two chicanes, so people standing just beyond the glass partition can see live bands playing in the Ozone, but ‘can’t hear a thing’, says Dunn.

442 Design has also created the identity for the space. The ‘ripple’ logo echoes Our Dynamic Earth’s corporate identity and also represents layers of soundproofing.

442 Design beat two rivals to the work, which carried a £500 000 budget, after an unpaid, creative pitch in June 2003. Consultancy creative directors Kevin Rettie and Pete Fox led the interiors and branding work, respectively.