T•CAFE

Architect：LAAB Architects

Location：Hong Kong; | ;

Project Year：2017

Category：Restaurants

T ‧ CAFE is a self-service café in T ‧ PARK, a sludge treatment facility, and an environmental education center in Tuen Mun.  The facility embodies the “waste-to-energy” vision and seeks to educate the public through its spatial design.

We learned about the availability of fender wood from the demolished Wan Chai Pier at the beginning of the design process. Wan Chai Pier was once the main transportation connecting Kowloon and Hong Kong Island and the fender wood had been immersed in water for more than 40 years. We believe that they are useful materials that can be transformed into beautiful public furniture.

Collaborating with Master Wong from Chi Kee Sawmill Timber Factory, we cut the long, hard fender into smaller logs. Different parts of the wood were then examined to determine the furniture design: the most intact ones were sculpted as dining tables and long benches; moderately eroded ones were used for coffee tables and short benches; those that were seriously decayed were used for stools and “Ocean Cubes,” where the ocean-blue resin was added to preserve the eroded logs. By transforming the fender wood into public furniture, T‧CAFE also preserves an important piece of memory in Hong Kong’s collective history.

Whether an object is obsolete or useful depends on one’s perspective. We believe that design has the power to both transform materials and shift perspectives.

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