Taste of Dadong · Rhapsody, Shanghai

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.
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.
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.
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.

Taste of Dadong · Rhapsody, Shanghai by AD ARCHITECTURE in China won the WA Award Cycle 40. Please find below the WA Award poster for this project.