Project details

COMMUNITY CANTEEN

Located in the center of a courtyard in an upcoming residential neighbourhood of Hainan island, the new community canteen is aimed to be a center point where residents from the surrounding residential buildings can gather not only for the enjoyment of the dining experience but also for informal, daily social activities as well as special events held within the same space.

Given the fact that the project site is surrounded by large-scale residential buildings with public amenities such as a café, a convenient store, an amphitheatre and others inserted under the buildings, people naturally walk across the courtyard space to reach to all these facilities from many directions, engendering informal circulation trajectories on the site plate. These invisible trajectories, in fact, represent ‘flows’, in which the architectural concept of the project is originated from.

The concept of “Pebbles in The Flow” derives from landscape setting found generally in nature including Hainan’s scenery. Metaphorically, if water flows were flows of circulation created by moving people, then a group of piling pebbles were masses, forms and spaces of the canteen that let the flows run through the assemblage of the “pebbles”.

The rounded shapes and whirling lines on the ground and on the ceiling of the building appear as if they were the result of the water flows that leave their marks, resembling an organic form of a pebble shaped by the processes of sculpting by water flow for many years.

By overlapping the differently elevated roofs with the highest one in the middle, the interior space is bathed with indirect natural sunlight through the glass windows at the gaps between them. At the sane time they together create an effect of a church-like space with the extra height and swirling linear lights on the ceiling scape.

With all these design elements composing synchronously, the community canteen is no longer just a dining place. It becomes a wide-open social hub where people’s experiences are enhanced.

A favorite cozy gathering place that they can be proud of.