Meeting Someone Restaurant

Architecture & Experiential Design

Professional (2017)

Overview

Office : WAY Studio

Team : Tao Zheng, Fernie Lai, Wang Tao, ZengHao

Location : Beijing, China

Status : Built

Tools : Rhino, Grasshopper, Maxwell, Vray for Rhino, AutoCAD

Phases : Conceptual Design, Design Development, Construction Design

Project Background

Meeting Someone is a high-end restaurant in Beijing. The client requested the restaurant to have a dream-like atmosphere. We designed the exterior facade and interior around an existing structure. The restaurant’s exterior facade is designed to have a ripple effect using red bricks. The center of the ripple is the entrance to the building. The brick facade was pieced together manually following a template I designed that would allow the construction team to build the wall efficiently.

Drawings & Diagrams

Exterior Undulating Brick Facade

Photos

Below are images and a screenshot of a 3D model of Meeting Someone’s ripple-like exterior facade. The brick pattern was designed and modeled parametrically using Grasshopper in Rhino.

Brick Assembly Instruction Templates

Below is an enlarged template in plan view (followed by a few more rows of brick templates) that I created to help the builders stack bricks to create the rippled brick facade.

Construction Photos

Below are construction photos of the exterior facade. In the left photo, you can see all the paper templates stacked on top of each other. Once the bricks are aligned to each template and the mortar sets, the paper templates were ripped away from the wall, revealing the final rippled brick facade.

Second Floor Interior

A large waving structure encompasses the main dining space. Below are some photos of the structure under construction followed by renderings, construction photos and final photos of the completed restaurant. I broke down the 3D model of the waving ceiling structure and unrolled the complex surfaces into templates that the builders could use to assemble the structures. The structures were then built up with a pliable wood and then sealed with plaster. Afterwards, they were covered with a red fabric. Once the structures were completed, the room is lit from the ground by recessed lights to create a soft glow.