The architecture of one corporate canteen in Bangkok supports some concepts of quality "downtime" by giving its users a change of environment, connection with nature and by provoking movement.
Designed by
Exposure Architects, this canteen sits in the center of Satin Textile
manufacturing plant’s ‘campus’, elevated with slim concrete and steel legs 8m above a shallow artificial pool made from the factory's cooling system drainage water.
The canteen is accessed by a long pedestrian ramp that climbs up, tangents the building, and then leads back to the ground finishing a semicircle. Three long dining hall arms radiate from the central elongated body of the cafeteria. They are clad in glass offering the diners a calming view of the surrounding nature and taking them briefly away from the work environment.
// Eating has always been a social event, a need transformed into a ritual for all social classes”, writes Exposure of their inspiration behind the design. “Today’s life has endangered this act, has brought it back to mere functional activity. In designing a factory cafeteria, it has been therefore of paramount importance to give some nobility to the moment of eating, while keeping always in mind the notions of efficiency, timing and economy. //
// Based on the strength of its guiding concept (the web of a spider or the tentacles of an octopus, if we are to be led by the compound name that the project has been given), Octospider is also an intelligent revisiting of the architectural promenade concept and a study on centrality in the relationship between volume and space. It originates in the obvious pleasure of organizing a neo-constructivist pathway along which one encounters a curved generator with four interpenetrating, resolute, sharp lines. It is finalized in the contrast between the opposite principles of the weightiness of matter and the lightness of an upward thrust that is made possible by 12-centimetre diameter poles up to 8 metres long, nearly at the limit of their tensile strength. //