SANGA Restaurant
山河日料餐厅
PROJECT INFO
Completion Year: 2022
Built Area (m2 or sqft): 300m2
Project Location: Guiyang, China
Design Team: Wang Jianling,Li Mingjing, Pan Yiming
Photographer: Van
Completion Year: 2022
Built Area (m2 or sqft): 300m2
Project Location: Guiyang, China
Design Team: Wang Jianling,Li Mingjing, Pan Yiming
Photographer: Van
The design of dining spaces is often inhibited by clear functional requirements. The open arrangement of furniture makes the space lack individuality. The traditional compartmentalized design of private rooms makes the space too closed. “Freely spaced planes” is a layout form advocated by German architect Mies van der Rohe. In this project, we hope to bring this idea into the restaurant so that guests who come here can clearly feel the dynamic space. At the same time, each individual booth is stable and private. Once people walk through it, they can feel a strong sense of dynamic. This feeling is related to material, light, and time. This is what we consider the best balance between dynamic and stability.
Since Jinyang as a new district began to develop, the development of Guiyang's old area has slowed down, both in terms of new construction and renovation. This has just given the residents opportunity to develop by themselves. A new kind of development has appeared in the old city. The trend is towards self-repair. Although the seemingly chaotic city is disorderly, disorder represents the vitality from the bottom up. Our project was happened under such a general background.
The project site is located atNo. 28, Diandian Lane. The warehouse was originally the mooncake production workshop of the state-owned company Guilong Hotel. As Guilong Hotel upgraded the Diandian Lane, the warehouse has been idle. The client hoped to transform this place into a high-end Japanese restaurant + bar to fill the gap for Guiyang's market. This is a challenge decision, because this position is neither a traditional izakaya nor a modern bar. Therefore, how to perfectly combine the Japanese-style yakiniku restaurant and the Western-style bar in terms of space and function is the biggest challenge of this project.
Layered design
We have realized that bar spaces have higher requirements for atmosphere than ordinary restaurants; and yakiniku restaurant have stricter restrictions on equipment and furniture. So we decided to adopt an apposition approach, using the bar as the starting point to design the entire space; using yakiniku restaurant as the prototype to design the scale of the furniture and layout; using the advantages of the factory space to produce a shadowy light with a Japanese texture, combining these three layers are integrated to achieve a modern and metaphorical Japanese style.
Floating wall
When a business space is characterized as high-end, it means that it needs to have a strong sense of territory, so privacy between guests is the key to this project. We decided to use walls of different sizes and heights above the ground to separate the restaurant. Some of them fall directly to the ground, some float in the air, and some seem to grow from the wall, just like they were originally growing here. They themselves constitute a set of spatial installation. The wall uses gray basalt panel as the facing material, which gives the partition wall a strong sense of weight. This sense of weight reversely strengthens the power of the floating feeling. It can be said that this is the most important element in the entire space. The seemingly random partition walls actually follow strict logic, including a series of behavioral logics about what is visible and invisible, what is passable and what is not passable. They contribute to a richer level of space and sense of flow. People's travel through it becomes a constantly changing interaction with the space between separation and unimpeded.
Broken bricks
The facade of the original factory building is a dilapidated paint facade. Regarding the renovation of the facade, we do not want to build a brand new facade to form a very unexpected contrast, but hope that it can be in harmony with the surrounding. The surrounding buildings are mainly red brick buildings built in the 1990s. Although this kind of urban scene does not conform to the beauty and cleanliness advocated by the government. But from our perspective, it is the most authentic memory of urban development, and it reveals a unique kind of chaos. Therefore, we decided to use the traditional bricklaying method afterwards to knock down the half of bricks to form a facade style that is both new and has a very strong sense of handcrafting. It is not a deliberately old-fashioned design strategy, but it has a strong sense of integration, which ultimately allows the building to blend well with the surrounding environment.
High window and light
Having high window is a rare advantage of this small building located in the city center, so we naturally hope to maximize its characteristics. During the construction process, we also faced the very absurd request of the property owner who wanted to remove the high windows for some reasons. Fortunately, through the persistence of us and the client, we were finally able to retain it. The high windows are located on the central axis of the entire building, allowing very good natural light to pour in during the day, giving it a sense of ritual. So we hope to continue this sense of ritual into the night, especially as a very important lighting installation in the bar space after dinner. In the open space part, we retained the basic form of the high window and just added hidden LED light strips as the light source for skylight at night. Therefore, whether it is day or night, high windows are very important structures and light sources in the space. Above the bar counter, we wrapped the high window, and combined with the partial ceiling, turned the high window into a luminous patio. As the end of the space, the patio well emphasizes the position of the bar counter and makes the space The sense of ritual has been emphasis here.
Industrial space design
Since the project takes place in a warehouse, we hope to retain the original industrial characteristics of the building. Therefore, we need the building to use only the simplest plaster to treat the walls and ceilings, and try to retain the mechanism and traces of the original building. Of course, this is not simply about exposing everything. In order to show only the frame of the building itself, we need to hide the air conditioning, lighting and other equipment well, so that the entire building can retain the simplicity to the greatest extent without a suspended ceiling effect. In addition, we used washed stone, a common material in the south of China, to process the wall, making the areas that people can touch smoother and easier to care for. The entire space retains the original spatial structure of the factory as much as possible and adds three additional spaces and material levels. One is the ceiling of the open kitchen and bar counter made of wood veneer, and the another is the space partitions made of basalt panels, and last layer is the tables and chairs made of wood.
Furniture and VI design
Because of the special requirements for furniture in the form of yakiniku restaurant, all tables are fixed and ventilation ducts need to be integrated into the tables, so we designed a sculptural table leg to hide the ventilation ducts inside.
The design of VI is also extracted from the design language of the entire space, using curved ceilings and strip partitions as basic elements to form the font. This makes the entire VI design match well with the space.