The Rocks under Light Screen

Lucky Cookies Bakery: The dissolved border of display window

The Lucky Cookies is a bakery specializes in traditional Chinese pastries. Located on the first floor of the famous Beijing Longfu Building, the site is a north-facing street shop with an area of only 37㎡. While the floor height reaches 5.7m, the main depth of the site is just less than 3m. The site’s nearly 1:2 bottom-to-height ratio and its full-height glass curtain wall façade compress the store into a "display window": the entire interior space is visible at a single glance.

Since the site’s only entrance opens towards the interior corridor of the Longfu Building, and the pastry display and cashier has to be arranged next to this entrance, the main space facing the street therefore could only be occupied by the baking kitchen, which occupies 3/4 area of the entire store as required by the design brief. Thus, the most important street-facing storefront has to display a kitchen scene rather than pastries, and the already shallow depth of the store will appear to be even more cramped when filled with kitchen equipment, making it challenging to spatially attract pedestrians to enter the bakery.

In response to the above limitations, we decided to use both the interior corridor seating area and exterior seating area offered by the landlord to find a solution. By visually connecting the two seating spaces with the store interior, the sense of spatial scale is expanded and the site’s actual climate border is weakened. We also took advantage of the "display window" character of the site to design a presentable baking kitchen, turning a usually back-of-house space into the very shopfront to "live broadcast" the pastry-making process to the street.

We raised the interior finished floor to be a 150mm tall travertine platform, which extends to cover the interior corridor seating area. As the original curtain wall façade cannot be modified, we simply added to the exterior seating area a travertine platform whose finished level is at the same height of the interior platform, concealing the bottom frame of the curtain wall underneath, and wrapped the rest of the curtain wall frame with stainless-steel mirror to minimize the presence of the "display window" boundary, making the interior floor appear to extend directly to the outdoors.

To further enhance the merging effect of the interior and exterior, we designed a series of isomorphic furniture – the “rocks” - to facilitate all functions needed in the bakery - equipment sheds, prep tables, cashier counter, display case, bench, lightbox sign, bamboo pond, etc. Scattered around the bakery like “rocks” growing from the platform, they blur the boundary of the site with their identical material and similar form, creating rich layers within the limited depth, and allowing the interior space to overflow to the exterior. Thus, the large kitchen equipment that fills the site depth all the way to the facade no longer appear crowded.

We made full use of the zigzag wall that occupies the largest visual area of the "display window" and designed a 15-meter-long "light screen" to fully catch pedestrians’ attention. Specially invented for this project, the 243 prefabricated modular lightboxes on the “screen” are detachable, embedded in the stainless-steel grid by magnetic connections for future easy replacement and maintenance. The front of each lightbox is an inwardly inclined surface to leave space for a little bracket displaying the "paper-cut pastries" at the bottom of each grid. The paper-cuts are made according to the silhouettes of actual pastries sold by the bakery. While the “rocks” horizontally break the site’s boundary, the "light screen" vertically utilizes the site’s height advantage and north-facing character, counteracts the reflection on the facade glass, and highlights the spatial layers of the “rocks” as a background further connecting the interior space to the outside.