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Architects: Oyler Wu Collaborative
- Year: 2016
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Photographs:Scott Mayoral
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Structural Engineering: Nous Engineering, Matt Melnyk
Text description provided by the architects. 3DS Culinary is a creative laboratory that is situated at the confluence of technology and the culinary arts. Dedicated to experimentation and collaboration between designers, chefs, and artists, the new 3DS Culinary space, located on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, CA, is a direct reflection of the company's innovative ethos. Located in a 1928 Neoclassical Bank building, the architects, Oyler Wu Collaborative stripped the interior volume down to its most basic elements, leaving only the concrete vault, masonry exterior walls, and the exposed steel roof trusses that once hung a coffered ceiling. Inside the open volume, a hyper-modern interior sits in stark contrast to the rawness of the original building.
The program of the space, like the technology itself, charts out new and interesting territory. The space includes a centrally located two-story glass food printing room, complete with roughly a dozen 3D food printers, and a demonstration kitchen that is used for chefs to demonstrate the latest culinary advancements that make use of the technology. The space also includes the offices of 3DS Culinary and a showroom area used as both a learning center and to demonstrate a wide array of 3D printed products - a kind of wonderland of 3D printed design ideas.
Cantilevered off of the glass food printing room, and strategically positioned over the demonstration kitchen, a mezzanine lounge hovers out into the voluminous space. The mezzanine is wrapped in an intricately woven guardrail of white linear steel elements and CNC milled wood panels. With advancements in 3D printing technology acting as the impetus to push fabrication and design of this custom railing system, the massing, materiality, and detailing emphasize complex interlocking geometries. Built up out of hundreds of linear steel elements, along with finished plywood planar surfaces, volumetric forms move in and out of one another - climbing up the stairs, forming upper guardrail, and twisting to form seating surfaces along the perimeter of the mezzanine. Complimenting the filigree qualities of the guardrail, massive blocks of exposed-end laminated birch plywood form the counter of the demonstration kitchen and an inset wall surface along the stairway. Milled inflections within the surface geometries form subtle dialogues between geometries within the space.
