Contractive projections and operator spaces

Parallel to the study of finite-dimensional Banach spaces, there is a growing interest in the corresponding local theory of operator spaces. We define a family of Hilbertian operator spaces , , generalizing the row and column Hilbert spaces and , and we show that an atomic subspace that is the range of a contractive projection on is isometrically completely contractive to an -sum of the and Cartan factors of types 1 to 4. In particular, for finite-dimensional , this answers a question posed by Oikhberg and Rosenthal. Explicit in the proof is a classification up to complete isometry of atomic w-closed -triples without an infinite-dimensional rank 1 w-closed ideal.