Located in suburb, customers of ilil coffee store are intrigued by what is on trend even when they are rather hesitant to apply the new trend to their lives. Being surrounded by familiarity can make us feel comfortable, but can be dull; newness can give fresh touch to our lives, but it may provide discomfort. The main theme of this project was to keep the balance between the two and to make the familiar feel unfamiliar and to make the unfamiliar feel familiar.
The priority of this project was to find the essence of things; being able to see what can be created out of the essence regardless of what it was made to be. Designers constantly reexamined their ideas to show customers different perspectives, and this enabled customers to embrace new ideas into their daily lives.
As it being near residential area, bringing in the features of home was key to the design. Familiar factors of home such as the couch of living room, curtains, windows, dinner table, and room with window were brought into the design in a new perspective.
Originally designed to house both Casper College and Natrona County High School, the Collegiate Gothic-inspired complex was constructed between 1924 and 1927 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This project included a complete renovation of the existing 145,000-square-feet historic building and a 137,000-square-feet addition. To ensure continued occupancy during construction, the project was divided into six phases of construction spanning almost five years.
Fine Café is located in a traditional Hutong area near Gong Wang Fu, a prince’s mansion of the Qing Dynasty. In this renovation project, the architects intend to highlight the contrast between history and modern life, and between traditional Beijing architecture and European style.
Like many old residences in Beijing, the building is dug on ground level, descending about one metre. To take advantage of this extra space, a loft is built to divide the café into a lower space dominated by traditional Chinese style and an upper one by European elements.
Article source: ENDO SHOJIRO DESIGN + Tada Masaharu Atelier
We renovated the wooden two-story house in Kyoto to a complex facility (guest house, cafe and owner's residence). Existing buildings were rebuilt and rebuilt many times, so they had a strange shape. So we once organized the structure and added structure reinforcement. And we greatly reduced the first floor part of the building.
By making an alley there, wind, light and sight line have come to the back of the site. The alley is overflowing with greenery, a space where tourists and locals gather. Travelers cross the cafe´ in the alley and get to the entrance of the guest house. There is a small shrine in the courtyard. This is a shrine worshiped in the former building, we rebuilt.
As a French patisserie, the owner came up with a mystical name called A.Mono (Arrival to Mono), ‘mono’ originated from a Japanese aesthetic theory (Mono-ha), which emphasize the relationship between one object to another. Applying this theory onto this building, human can be considered as one of the ‘object’, same to nature, therefore the relationship between human, object and nature, these three elements become the foundation of the design.
“Daily” is a place you can visit on a daily basis in order to drink coffee, to have a chat, to work or just to spend some good time. This coffee place has an arthouse movie atmosphere. From every perspective you have a sense of a movie episode where people casually interact with each other.
Our goal was to create a nice space where good people can enjoy good coffee.
There are two separate zones. The first one is a spacious room with a counter, a sitting area and a lot of lightning.
Article source: Philippe SAMYN and PARTNERS sprl, architects & engineers
Zhoushan Harbour
The local government of Zhou Shan (East China – an archipelago of islands) confided to Wang Shu the mission to rehabilitate the harbour and industrial area of the Lujiazhi Island into a touristic and cultural area, while protecting the quays and keeping maritime activities as memory of the industrial past of the bay. Turning this into a multinational project of innovative contemporary architecture, Wang Shu involved his 14 fellow laureate architect of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture 2007 to 2009. Each of the 16 projects focuses on contemporary sustainable architecture.
Tags: China, Zhoushan Comments Off on 574-1c Lujiazhi Cultural Coffee Shop in Zhoushan, China by Philippe SAMYN and PARTNERS sprl, architects & engineers
After a big flooding in 2002, the theatre was affected by a second flooding in 2012. Even though the small Rokytka river did not cause as much damage as Vltava ten years earlier, the theatre had to be renovated all over again. The restoration of the technologies situated in the basement took more than two years. However, Palmovka has lived through all this and decided to refurbish the entrance spaces of the theatre including a box office, a café and a new façade.
We took on a restoration project for a coffee shop run by two brothers.
The building we were requested to renovate was a rental building which had traditionally been used as a base by a post office etc. for commercial purposes. The building was planned to be dismantled after more than 50 years of serving. In order to make it usable as a shop, reinforcement of pillars including the ones on the tilted second floor was essential. While the pillar reinforcement required the outer wall to be dismantled and repaired, it would put great pressure on the limited budget. Instead, we decided to make use of the big space which was too much for the brothers in the first place and build a new store space without fixing the outer wall. We drew inspiration from an episode that coffee production is agriculture and installed sheets of glass on a wooden frame to build a box-like structure resembling a greenhouse.
Most people ignore that much of the web’s intelligence has been built in Brazil, at Google’s Belo Horizonte Engineering Center, the only one in Latin America. The new office space has over 50,000 sqf across 4 floors of a mixed-use complex in the bohemian Santa Efigênia neighborhood. The challenge was to identify strong conceptual references that would link the global company to the young capital of the traditional Minas Gerais state. The interior design integrates graphics and lighting, exploring the tension between the local culture and the Google’s culture in a subtle and sophisticated approach.