American Dream

An almost 300,000-square-metre site in the New York metropolitan area has been transformed into American Dream, one of the world’s largest shopping and entertainment centres designed to offer retail, entertainment and dining experiences that take the traditional American mall concept to a whole new level in terms of sophistication and design. The renowned Montreal-based practice GH+A Design Studios took the client’s input on board to create a high-quality distribution system and make a careful selection of materials, including ceramic tiles from several leading Italian brands such as Atlas Concorde, Lea Ceramiche and Imola Ceramica.
Featuring more than 450 retail destinations and a wide range of family attractions including the Nickelodeon Universe theme park and the DreamWork water park, an indoor ski slope and ice rink, a Ferris wheel and fifteen restaurants, American Dream offers visitors a multisensorial experience that combines architecture with art, graphic design and colour. The plethora of patterns and colours that characterised the original building constructed in the early 2000s have been transformed into a cohesive palette of chic, white tone-on-tone finishes with black framing details, enhanced by dramatic lighting. The sober architecture eschews the classic themes of American malls in favour of a sophisticated combination of materials, details and patterns with a contemporary feel in accordance with a restrained and coherent yet highly appealing language. The project won first prize in the Commercial category of the prestigious Tile Competition 2022, the architecture competition promoted by Ceramics of Italy for the North American market.
Wall tiles play an important role, bringing a decisive yet well-balanced aesthetic appeal to the spaces thanks to a meticulous choice of sizes and geometries, surface textures and installation patterns. “The client set stringent standards in terms of the aesthetics, flatness and tolerances of the various elements,” explains Debbie Kalisky, project manager for GH+A Design Studios. “For this reason we chose Italian companies such as Atlas Concorde, Lea Ceramiche and Imola Ceramica when selecting the flooring materials for American Dream’s Main Street, the central walkway running through the complex, and for some of the vertical structures and architectural details.”
In particular, Atlas Concorde supplied marble and stone-effect porcelain tiles from its Marvel Pro Collection, Marvel Collection and Marvel Stone Collection lines which are used on floors and walls in various colour combinations and layouts in the mall’s corridors and common areas. The elegant essentiality of Lea Ceramiche’s Slimtech Absolute rectified porcelain tile collection chosen in the refined Total Black and Total White tones has transformed some of the mall’s columns into striking architectural elements, while the brilliant minimal white and glossy look of Imola Ceramica’s Re_Colour rectified double-fired tile takes centre stage in all the bathrooms.