Design concept
As a sub-brand of Da Dong Group, Taste of Dadong inherits Da Dong’s philosophy while showing a more relaxing aspect in its DNA. Located in Shanghai, the project is a new upgraded restaurant opened by Taste of Dadong, designed by AD ARCHITECTURE. The design is intended to evoke customers’ emotions, ideas and resonance in a social setting, through incorporating psychedelic, cool tones and presenting the brand’s new, trendy genes. The design team tried to express the true meaning of emotional experience in the space, rather than emphasizing physical reality.
Project name: Taste of Dadong · Rhapsody, Shanghai
Design firm: AD ARCHITECTURE
Design firm email: office@arch-ad.com
Chief designer: Xie Peihe
Design team: AD ARCHITECTURE
Client team: Da Dong, Yuan Yufang, Tang Mingji, Si Xi, Shi Xiusong, Taste of Dadong Shanghai Branch
Construction team: Beijing Huakai Construction Decoration Engineering Co., Ltd.
Mechanical / electrical team: Beijing Zhitong Siyuan Mechanical & Electrical Design Consulting Co., Ltd.
Lighting consulting: Beijing Guangshe Lighting Design Co., Ltd.
Fixtures team: Beijing Hezhong Youye Hotel Supplies Co., Ltd.
Kitchen team: Beijing HEC Hotel Supplies Co., Ltd.
Location: Shanghai
Area: 700 square meters
Main materials: paint, brick, membrane, stainless steel
Start time: July 2021
Completion time: November 2021
Photography: yuuuunstudio
Brand exploration
Based on full consideration into the brand’s values and genes, the designers explored the positioning and targeted customer groups of Taste of Dadong, as well as new socializing scenarios. Young, fashionable blue tone is full of vitality; romantic imagination and creativity are like a rhapsody, which stimulates indescribable emotions. Background music combined with drum beats is fitting for the dreamy blue tone of Taste of Dadong. The psychedelic, contrasting colors are in essence presented by lights and shadows, which set the tone for the brand’s image.
Site consideration
The project is sited in Shanghai, a fashionable, avant-garde, artistic metropolis where Eastern and Western cultures converge, a city that is inclusive and charming. The design team accurately captured the character of the city, and predicted emotions in this commercial setting. This is the underlying logic for the project. The design team created a series of dreamy scenes, with a view to evoking honest emotions, and expressing illusionary, disorderly and wandering consciousness.
Spatial thinking
The thinking of the bar area’s spatial form provided important guidance to design creation. It features young power, stylish atmosphere, and gives a delicate and soft feeling. The design considers contingency and accidentality, and meanwhile incorporates anti-tradition modernist spirit. Cool, dreamy hues and fluidity were fully considered throughout the design process. After deep thinking and analysis, spatial expressions were worked out.
Spatial design
The restaurant’s entrance is relatively hidden, and forms a twisting circulation route. The fluid spatial pattern stimulates the guests’ varying emotions and feelings in the space. The space is presented in exaggerated, irregular forms, and abstract modernist aesthetics. The mirrored surfaces generate illusionary visual effects, and strengthen a sense of tension in the space.
The curved screen walls function as partitions, which demarcate several independent socializing and dining areas. Their dramatic, powerful forms along with the cool lights create a dreamy ambience and convey the brand’s avant-garde image as well.
The dining area in the middle shows an extended and upward strength, which promotes the convergence of spatial realms. It stimulates diners to open their mind to socialize, and even evokes their fevered consciousness. The bar counter area awash with subtle light and shadows invites the guests to peep into and interact with it.
The space subtly incorporates classical jazz and punk blue tones, rather than deliberately emphasizing jazz and punk elements visually. It creates a unique cool, stylish ambience through the composition and the rhythm of light colors. The walls and light circles intersect with each other.
The bold psychedelic lighting design in the bar counter area is intended to strengthen spatial emotions. The inner spirit of jazz and punk fills the space with passion, whilst generating a soft yet radical romantic rhythm.
Cool blue lights are hidden among irregular blocks, bringing a breathing and vague ambience to the space. The pink neon light in the bar counter area forms a strong contrast with the blue light, generating an illusionary experiential scenario as well as a free, magical and radical artistic atmosphere.
The artistic private dining area on the periphery adds a sense of ceremony to the dining experience. The semi-enclosed space and the subtly revealed light are intended to produce an independent and mysterious spatial status. Its cool tone and inward-facing spatial form are determined by customers’ demands for semi-private dining experience.
Either separated or converged, open or semi-enclosed, the spatial forms of different functional areas are responsive to the status and number of diners. For diner groups consisting of two friends or a few people, different spatial experience and atmosphere were designed. The disorder spatial status expresses a sense of freedom. The seemingly lack of certain blocks conveys radical and anti-convention expressions, showing a futuristic, contrasting aesthetic.
All spatial expressions in this restaurant are based on the consideration of the number of diners, and the thinking of what emotions needed to be stimulated, such as illusionary, empty and wandering positive emotions, or disorderly, wandering negative emotions. The overall spatial design was centered on the intention of evoking honest emotions of users, trying to highlight the true significance of emotional experience in the space rather that physical aspects.
AD ARCHITECTURE | Profile
Resonating with space is a fantastic experience.
AD ARCHITECTURE (Shenzhen) is committed to carrying out architectural and interior design and researches from unique perspectives, and dedicated to creating distinctive visual art for each project. With international vision, determination to break the boundary and a strategic project management system, the team insists on an explorative attitude to create interaction between human, human and objects during spatial design practices.
AD ARCHITECTURE’s works have been widely recognized across the world, and have won numerous authoritative design awards in recent years, including Andrew Martin Interior Design Award, Restaurant & Bar Design Awards, MUSE Design Awards, Architecture MasterPrize, World Interior News Awards, German Design Award, Red Dot Design Award, Iconic Awards (Best of Best), IIDA Global Excellence Awards, Best of Year Awards, FX International Interior Design Awards, WIN Awards, LEAF Awards, Blueprint Awards, Frame Awards, Asia Pacific Interior Design Awards, etc.
Xie Peihe | Profile
Founder & Chief Designer of AD ARCHITECTURE
Judge of Golden Trezzini Awards 2020 & 2021
Judge of LOOP Design Awards 2020
With great sensitivity and originality, Xie Peihe adheres to create rational simplicity guided by emotional thinking, and to integrate spatial functionality with personality in a natural and subtle manner. He excels at presenting spatial aesthetics through the collision of the simple and the complicated, and strives to let people resonate with space.
In the past few years, Xie Peihe has designed many exceptional commercial, residential and office projects, which have won multiple world-class design awards. His pioneering “minimalistic art” space design language is well-known both in the east and the west, and recognized by the global design industry. He was invited as one of the international judges of 2020 & 2021 Golden Trezzini Awards for Architecture and Design. With “Architecture as Art” as the motto, this authoritative award’s jury includes worldly famous architects Daniel Libeskind, Mario Botta, Toyo Ito, Ricardo Bofill and others. Meanwhile, Mr. Xie was invited by LOOP Design Awards 2020 and became one of the members of the first jury since its establishment. In 2018, he won Perspective’s 40 Under 40 Awards, which recognized him as one of the 40 young design talents who are leading the future of design.
2021 Best of Year Awards
2021 Andrew Martin Interior Design Award
2021 Restaurant & Bar Design Awards
2021 Singapore Interior Design Awards
2021 MUSE Design Awards – Gold
2021 Architecture MasterPrize
2021 WIN Awards
2021 Red Dot Award: Product Design (Red Dot Award Winner)
2021 IF Design Awards
2020-2021 INSIDE World Festival of Interiors
2021 DNA Paris Design Awards
2021 Melbourne Design Awards
2021 A’ Design Award & Competition
2021 Asia Pacific Interior Design Awards
2021 MUSE Design Awards – Platinum
2021 WA Awards
2021 Architizer A+ Firm Awards
2020 International Design Awards
2020 Best of Year Awards
2020 London Design Awards
2020 German Design Awards
2020 International Design Media Award
2020 Jintang Prize – Best Leisure & Entertainment Space of the Year
2020 Jintang Prize – Best Dining Space of the Year
2020 Jintang Prize – Best New Designer of the Year
2020 Jin Teng Award – TOP 100
2019 The ICONIC AWARDS: Innovative Architecture (Best of Best)
2019 Red Dot Award: Product Design (Red Dot Award Winner)
2019 IIDA Global Excellence Design Awards
2019 German Design Award
2019 Frame Awards
2019 WIN Awards
2019 LEAF Awards
2019 Blueprint Awards
2019 Architecture MasterPrize
2019 A’ Design Award & Competition
2019 Taiwan Interior New Talent Award
2018 Perspective’s 40 Under 40 Awards
2018 Best of Year Awards
2018 Architecture MasterPrize
2018 International Design Media Award
2018 FX International Interior Design Awards
2018 International Design Awards
2018 Jin Teng Award
2017 Asia Pacific Interior Design Awards
2017 A’ Design Award & Competition
2017 Idea-Tops Award
