CupOne | SODA Architects
Beijing / China / 2016
An Art Installation at the Heart of an Office Building
CUPONE, Gateway Plaza
In 2016, we were invited to design CUPONE, a coffee shop located at the headquarters of BMW China, by the lobby of Gateway Plaza, a commercial development near Beijing’s embassy district. CUPONE Café extends from an angle of the building’s lobby towards an outdoor terrace, with an indoor area connecting both sections. To integrate these features into a homogeneous design, we selected a “Mountains and Rivers” theme for the project.
The Lobby as a Visual Center
When visitors enter through the Plaza’s main access door and take the escalator to the second floor, the view offered by the quiet and rather empty lobby is hardly attractive. On the other hand, the real charm of a café comes from the atmosphere created by the diversity of its clientele. For this reason, we decided to design a lobby with an artistic visual center, one that allows visitors to forget about monotonous work environments, and provides room to sit back and relax while enjoying a cup of coffee.
“Mountains” deliver a cozy feeling of privacy to the open lobby, while the coming and going of visitors becomes “rivers” extending into the distance, just like gentle streams of water flowing through the mountains. Such a visual and psychological enhancement creates a sense of continuity between the open area of the lobby and the outdoor terrace. To this end, after countless attempts, we selected nearly 300 vertical “leaves”: Their champagne plated exterior provides reflection, forming a three-dimensional dynamic filter. Thus, color and patterns on each leaf change continuously with every move, posture and variation on the clothing of both visitors and passers-by. These leaves of different sizes are planted from the floor up to a height of 2.4 meters. Together, they create a range of mountains that provides visitors with a feeling of relative privacy and freedom of space.
Different shades of grey varnish were applied to the inner surface of the leaves. Side by side with multiple sets of purple seats, these symbolic elements reduce the influence of external disturbances, allowing guests to enjoy quality time on their own or with friends.
Sophisticated Indoors
Regarding interiors, we chose a colorful yet mysterious tone of peacock blue as the main color theme, as well as refined solid wood and marble materials to showcase on details. As an extension of the “mountains and rivers”, we hung close to one thousand leaves of white acrylic and reflective stainless steel at the top of the space, using particle hydrodynamics theory to simulate the flow of a stream of water, different material textures, light, and even reflections; just like the gentle flow of water under the sparkling light of the sun. Thus, the stream is born at the entrance to the lobby, then flows through the cascading changes of mountains, into the most dynamic space of the project, right above the service counter, and spreads throughout the café, to eventually dissipate like gentle water flowers under the sun of the outer terrace.
We try to change people’s inertial concept of daily space. Therefore, CUPONE Gateway Plaza provides a place to drink coffee, while being an extremely functional art installation in itself. It is based at the heart of a business area that stresses work efficiency, from where it breathes a warm and vivid feeling into the structure.
Project Year: 2016
Type: Cafe
Client: CUPONE
Architects: SODA Architects
Project Team: JIANG Yuan, SONG Chen, CHEN Fei
Design scopes: Interior,furniture,lighting
Construction company: SOK Consulting Service Limited
Location: No.18, East 3rd Ring North Road,, Beijing, China.
Area: 300m2
Main Materials: Stainless steel,Acrylic,Wood
Photographs: CAO Xuefeng,LIN Yang
An Art Installation at the Heart of an Office Building CUPONE, Gateway Plaza In 2016, we were invited to design CUPONE, a coffee shop located at the headquarters of BMW China, by the lobby of Gateway Plaza, a commercial development near Beijing’s embassy district. CUPONE Café extends from an angle of the building’s lobby towards an outdoor terrace, with an indoor area connecting both sections. To integrate these features into a homogeneous design, we selected a...
- Year 2016
- Work finished in 2016
- Client CUPONE
- Contractor SOK Consulting Service Limited
- Status Completed works
- Type Bars/Cafés / Interior Design
comment