which , at street level , mitigates against the impact of the 15m podium , whilst a 5m wide glazed slot ( with ripple ) cuts open the blank façade at its centre .
Holiday Inn is synonymous with trains , planes and automobiles . While The Zone ’ s pop industrial theming calls for billboards and steel pylons , the futuristic Gautrain location seemed to want something less sentimental , less static . The brand is ( when at its best ) slick , brash , American and all about branding . With the neighbouring five-star Hyatt Hotel known for its small room windows , the competitive four-star Holiday Inn just had to go one-up with horizontal ribbonwindows on its otherwise plastered façade .
According to international brand standards , Holiday Inn rooms are to be generally identical and rectangular , but the team exploited a 5 % allowance for ‘ executive rooms ’, which are permitted to be non-standard , and were shaped to make the primary corner of Oxford Road and Tyrwhitt Mall - offering dramatic southerly views towards the towers of Berea .
The horizontal vernacular of strip ribbon windows , shadow-lines , plaster-bands and expressed slabs was deliberately overwrought into cantilevering ripples at the primary corner of Oxford Road and Tyrwhitt Mall - as if Bill Pabst had somehow picked up a speed wobble .
The Zone @ Rosebank 327