Affect Studio: Hashi Mori

Just off of Rosanthaler Platz, in Berlin's Mitte district, where casual bookstores and cafés promise womblike comfort in the shock of winter, one window reveals the abstract and sculptural interior of a Japanese izakaya restaurant. Designed by the newly established architecture firm Affect Studio (based in Los Angeles and Berlin) and unveiled this January, Hashi Mori, which translates as "Chopstick Forest," is located on the ground floor of a modern steel and glass multi-use building — one of thousands that have filled in Berlin's blanks in recent years, between time-stamped pre-war apartments and cement GDR high-rises.

Hashi Mori's design gives character to this otherwise faceless edifice: from the other side of the street, one notices the restaurant's bar and exterior façade, which are filled with half a ton of Japanese rice and backlit to cast a diffused glow both inside and outside its doors. Particularly startling when reflected off of icy pavement in cold months, this glow reaches into the street like an intangible extension of the restaurant's modest 175 square meters, and acts as an invitation inside.

As one approaches the restaurant, the back wall appears through the window as a lush forest. Upon entering, one sees these woods gradually disintegrate into a wallpaper of abstract lines, hand drawn on the computer then processed by a customized script. The vertical lines of the wallpaper complement the vertical lines of the restaurant's centerpiece: its 56 square meter ceiling installation made of 13,454 hand drilled, stained, and threaded chopsticks, 57,400 knots, and over 20 kilometers of nylon. Installed by a crew of 14 people over three weeks, this "undulating" chopstick canopy is at once a very literal insignia for the restaurant, and a sensitive culmination of its metaphors.

Like the restaurant's wallpaper and backlit "rice" structures, the canopy is a sum of its parts that looks nothing likes its many individual components. It is a visually cohesive texture, and a mysterious mass that plays on the brain's desire (then inability) to "recognize." Together with custom designed tables and an expandable seating system, the restaurant's ability to shape-shift and defy parameters makes an otherwise small space feel borderless and malleable. To quote Sofia Borges, co-founder of Affect Studio with Bjørn Hoffmann, the design addresses the clients' requests for "a cozy space that establishes a visual identity for the restaurant while also maximizing table count."

In the broader context of Berlin, Hashi Mori's design is a cohesion of unlikely materials, just like the city that surrounds it. The design is as simple and "traditional" as wood, rice, and handcraft; at the same time, it is deceptively complex in its use of 3D modeling and computer programming. In this way, the idea of "tradition" is subverted, somehow — "easy" materials are made difficult to define, flipped, hung "upside down," reinterpreted. Yet the atmosphere —comfortable, intimate, and elegant — still speaks to the nature of an izakaya, an easy drinking hole that serves food. On a street that's constantly changing, in a city that's constantly changing, how appropriate that Hashi Mori's design allows for its blanks to be filled by countless different understandings. Katya Tylevich