The imperfect beauty of a restaurant in Shanghai

Designed as an indoor garden, Zhe Tian specializing in desserts chooses the monumentality and malleability of concrete as a metaphor for the small joys of everyday life.

Located on the ground floor of a 1970s building in the French Concession in Shanghai, a dessert restaurant designed by Quarta & Armando reinterprets the experience of tasting sweets - in Chinese culture a break suspended from everyday life and its problems - through an architecture inspired by the concept of imperfect beauty.

Read also: Charcohol restaurant in Shanghai is inspired by wood and fire

Like a garden, the room open to the outside through large windows takes shape through the spatial composition of custom concrete tables where the monolithic purity of the surfaces is broken by cracks and irregular cantilevered finishes.

In the corners, the old parquet floorboards that previously covered the space are regenerated and used to embellish the facade and portions of the interior, thus rebalancing the massive presence of the cement, left instead in all its raw presence on the ceiling.

Location:
Shanghai
Program:
Restaurant
Architects:
Quarta & Armando
Area:
90 smq
Design team:
Gianmaria Quarta, Michele Armando, Gu Tao, Tianyi Mao
Year:
2020

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