"Food House" project is formerly known as a restaurant opening for public business, which has a typical vintage architectural style of the 70’s and 80’s. The project enjoys a relatively favorable geographic location and an extensive view with the windows facing the boundless ocean. The owner of the project mainly expects to repair and refine the building’s appearance, combining with new functional requirements and responding to the surroundings, so that the indoor and outdoor can be a unified temperament to enable building to integrate better into the environment.
Firstly, the design is started from inside and outside moving lines to make people believe that the design is for a better use of the product itself; therefore, combing moving lines inside and outside the building is a primary problem. Grand steps originally facing the main entrance will be cleared and set in the west side of the building. Ascending the stairs, stone lions distributed bilaterally symmetrically add a lot of fun and a sense of ritual for the entry. In the build-out of moving lines of outdoor balcony, the designers try to avoid the site of existing ornamental plant landscape, owing to which the form of the building profile is added a natural sense of site belonging. The appearance of the reconstructed building based on oatmeal color scheme, as well as the trapezoidal extension of the building unites the building with the surrounding landscape harmoniously.
Positioned as a private club for gatherings of owners, relatives and friends, Food House is not used for the public commercial purpose. For this reason, it is not necessary to intentionally make the interior decoration cater to all tastes, which also provides designers with a relatively free space to conduct procedural creativity and emotional release. Of course, based on the solid practice skill of the designers, it seems that everything is under control.
Straws are extremely common and simple plants, which seems kind of weak instead of strong, but when they gather together and constantly duplicate the distribution of arrays, as a whole they will show an unbalanced strength. This state is like daily work, which seems to be repetitive and tedious, but over a long period of accumulation, some specific experience and wisdom are produced. Couldn’t the design work be the same? Compared to the final concrete form of the project, the designers set store by the design process and the logic among the forms generated in the process and that tends to be the pleasure of design. The designers try to displace the basic spirit of straws into the narration of whole space, and thus the straws appear in the entrance lobby, on the wall body of every space node and on the ceilings’ irregular wood texture. The designers expect to spread in a three-dimensional way based on the design of node as well as the designers’ improvisation to extend the boundary of space creation to some extent and add some unpredictability and exploratory of artistic creation.
When the space is coatedwith the gray background formed by straws, other dynamic spaces nodes play a role in presenting atmosphere by some decorations with fine texture. For example, the set of sculptures on the windowsill called exercising monks, with the help of a stream of light from the sidewindows, originally ambiguous heads show particularly good and rich expressions. Putting the rational factors of creation aside, designers prefer to believe that this is a coincidence, namely at this point, this place, and then the scene.
The designers think that concept must come before design. The concept is a complete harmonious state formed by several seemingly fragmentary ideas that are organized by human’s consciousness and logic and then establish certain inherent correlation and work together. In traditional Chinese culture, craft has been highly praised. Craft does not mean outdated and conservative techniques. In fact, it advocates a kind of spirit, which is the process of exploring the values in common and easy objects to produce a new structural relationship in the end. The designers attempt to get to this state by the communion of the objects of great diversity and space in Food House: objects like glass craftwork chandeliers in sharp contrast with wool in color, dead branches collected in the street, and shells after eating can be recreated into a three-dimensional relief wall. Besides the wall, all objects in the space, including the white plates, transparent goblets on the table and small gourds picked up on the market, etc. present a breathable sense of integration. Obviously, what matters is the concept of space deeply rooted in the designers’ minds and deepening continuously not the single object itself.
Finally, we’d like to emphasize a design viewpoint of the designers through Food House project: the final result presented by each design is just a concentrated and periodic reflection of the designers’ true states and the concept is growing along with the time elapsing. Only keeping an open mind, conducting constant self-speculation, keeping a pure heart in the process of practice designers are likely to have the opportunity to complete works with warmth and vitality.
