MOOI ARCHIVE is located in Jiangsu Intelligent Manufacturing New City Park, whose site was formerly known as Nanjing Second Machine Tool Factory. As a historical old enterprise, it has now become a new industrial park. The design team preserved the old factory structure and created an original concept bar in which the boundaries are dissolved.
Due to the good street location, the design team used “disappear” and “blend in” as the design logic and “MOOI” (The meaning “beautiful” in Dutch) was used as a symbolic expression to further deepen the brand concept. The outdoor landscape is extended indoors and subtly integrated into the community life in the street, reproducing the imagination of “dining in the park” and bringing consumers a rare experience of close contact with nature.
At the beginning of the project, the design team wanted to respect the original appearance of the building while reducing the homogenized spatial design. How to find a new way to reconstruct the spatial framework, and how to reduce the heaviness of the building with a friendly and light experience, became the focus of the team’s thinking and vision.
TRIOSTUDIO took “disappearance” as a clue through repeated structural rethinking, and built a steel frame inside the whole building with a special structural form to create an 8-meter-long bottomless support mechanism, suspending the back kitchen area on the second floor, cleverly dividing the dining space and functional space, and realizing the “dissolution” of the column into the space.
The height of about 11 meters in the old factory building brings the possibility of creating open space. The frame of the old building becomes the façade of the restaurant, and the nesting of the old and new spaces allows the boundaries to melt away, creating the possibility of spatial extension.
TRIOSTUDIO planted a 5-meter plum tree in the dining area, deeply blurring the boundary between indoor and outdoor feelings, and adapting the greenery of the landscape to the industrial style of the space under the giant scale of the overhang. The space no longer emphasizes its own existence and “disappears” into the nature. The rich indoor and outdoor greenery eliminates the boundary between inside and outside of the concrete building, allowing customers to be in close contact with nature.
MOOI ARCHIVE stands on the corner of a city campus, creating a new atmosphere in an old place. It is a place where people reconstruct their sense of connection to space, neighborhood and nature, and where they can feel a unique experience like a community. In a daily life that tends to be humdrum, it inspires people to explore some new life aspirations.