Ceiling for Calm in a Space That Never Stops
At Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, a bespoke ARCHISONIC® Felt ceiling follows Beyond Space’s layered narrative of Dutch landscape, Mondrian and movement, bringing acoustic comfort to Lounge 2.
The final seating area carries this idea into the ceiling. Lines that begin in the spatial composition continue overhead, where baffles made from ARCHISONIC® Felt turn the architectural rhythm into an acoustic layer for a public interior that is never still.
Schiphol sits in the Haarlemmermeer, a landscape shaped by drainage, order and human intervention. Beyond Space uses this condition as more than background. The first seating areas translate polder precision and Mondrian’s late Boogie-Woogie works into orthogonal lines, warm wood tones and connected seating islands.
The third area shifts the reference. Instead of Mondrian’s final paintings, it looks to his earlier studies of blossoming trees, where branches begin to loosen and dissolve into abstraction. The space becomes softer and more fluid. Planes unfold across the floor, while lines extend into the ceiling and help bind the seating areas together.
In an airport lounge, sound is part of the architecture. Announcements, footsteps, conversations and luggage do not stop, and they should not disappear completely. The task is more precise: to keep the space comfortable enough for people to wait, speak, read or pause without adding another layer of visual noise.
The ceiling offered the right place to do this. Above the seating zones, the ARCHISONIC® Felt baffles introduce absorption where sound gathers, while leaving views, circulation and the openness of the terminal intact. They do not turn the lounge into a closed room. They make the open space easier to inhabit.
The ceiling may read as a continuous gesture, but it had to be resolved as a precise installation. Spacing, height, alignment, material use, acoustic intent and manufacturing logic all needed to work together.
Our in-house Computational Design team translated the architectural rhythm into a bespoke acoustic system. This allowed the design to remain expressive while becoming accurate enough for production and installation. The value of the digital workflow is not that it makes the ceiling look complex. It makes the idea buildable without losing its spatial character.
ARCHISONIC® Felt turns recycled PET into a lightweight acoustic surface with a soft material presence and a palette of 45 curated colours. Backed by Re:Impact, the material is designed with a route beyond its first use.
At Schiphol, the ceiling becomes part of the traveller’s pause: shaped by movement, engineered for calm and made for a place that never stands still.
Location: Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Netherlands
Design: Beyond Space
Photography: Max Hart Nibbrig