Plastic Box by Minimal Studio in Port of Pollensa, Majorca, Spain, transforms a supermarket into a minimalist brutalist retail space defined by a raw concrete envelope and a ceiling of recycled plastic crates. Through salvaged and reused industrial elements, the project reinvents the urban commercial space through a brutalist language, merging sustainability with a bold spatial identity rooted in material clarity and environmental performance.
Plastic Box draws on the legacy of minimalist brutalism to reframe the urban commercial interior, transforming the conventional supermarket into a spatially driven, sensorial retail experience.
The project elevates an everyday typology through a precise balance of austerity and innovation, where materiality and atmosphere redefine the act of shopping.
Conceived as a monolithic raw concrete envelope, the space is articulated through clean geometries and rigorous lines that convey a sense of permanence and structural clarity.
The façades, deliberately devoid of ornament, incorporate dark, recessed portals that intensify the threshold between exterior and interior, staging a controlled transition from opacity to illumination.
At the core of the project lies its most distinctive gesture: a ceiling constructed from a dense grid of over a thousand recycled plastic crates.
This modular system operates simultaneously as an environmental device and a spatial instrument, filtering light to produce dynamic patterns of shadow that evolve throughout the day.
Beyond its visual impact, the system integrates lighting, ventilation, and rainwater collection, embedding performance within a highly expressive architectural element.
The interior continues this language through steel shelving systems, polished concrete surfaces, and monolithic checkout counters, reinforcing a coherent brutalist vocabulary.
The restrained palette and indirect lighting strategy establish a subdued, almost scenographic atmosphere, where products emerge through contrast and shadow.
Through its material reuse and conceptual clarity, Plastic Box challenges conventional retail paradigms, proposing an architecture that reassigns value to industrial remnants.
From ceiling to counter, elements are reclaimed, recontextualized, and reinterpreted, subverting their original functions to construct a new spatial and cultural narrative within the commercial landscape.
Plans
Facts & Credits
Project architecture: Minimal Studio
Lead architect: Juan David Martínez Jofre
Project location: Port of Pollensa, Majorca, Spain
Date of completion: 2024
Area: 193 m²
Client: Voramar Stor
Photography: Leonardo Cóndor