Bao
Bao is a small restaurant project located in the context of a typical North American strip mall. The brief was to create an interior fit out with strong architectural qualities to promote the restaurant’s branding and a layout which facilitated deliveries, take-outs, and fast dining experiences to reflect the types of dishes that the restaurant prepared.
From the beginning of the project, there was a desire from within the studio to respond to the banal and monotonous nature of the strip mall context. The goal was to create something which broke from the repetitive nature of box-stores lined up along a parking lot – both in a visual sense as one looks into the different stores from outside, and in an experiential sense as one enters the interiors of these different spaces.
The design of the project began by drawing two tangent lines connecting the edges of the store front to an “open kitchen” from within the restaurant. The two tangent lines, in effect, line up a direct visual experience of the open kitchen to the street-front to project the “theatre” of cooking onto the strip-mall façade. The open kitchen is then finished completely in stainless steel to create a visual terminus to draw on-lookers from the outside into the space.
Moreover, to frame the visual projection, the tangent lines are formalized into bulkheads in the restaurant’s interior to not only channel the visual experience but also to create differentiation between the seating areas and circulation. The relative low height of the bulkheads creates a sense of intimacy for the seating areas and unifies the project in one strong sectional gesture. The soffits of the bulkheads are hollowed out and filled with “banners” to add warmth, texture, and diffused light into the seating areas. The “banners” as a motif takes hints from the Chinese cuisine the restaurant prepares and draw inspiration from hanging lanterns and papers which are commonly found during Chinese festivities.
The Bao project is an exploration retail design in the most widespread context in North America: the suburban context. The project accepts the banality of the North American strip mall and argues that interesting spaces can be created in these environments – and that architecture should not be reserved only to the urban or the rural.
Images by Jeremie Warshafsky
StudioAC Team:
Yuchu Su
Andrew Hill
Jennifer Kudlats