Architecture News Plus (ANP) – Architecture and Design Magazine

VI.AI.PI. Restaurant

This is a project by Giovanni D'Ambrosio and it is located at Bali, Indonesia. There are sixteen images for VI.AI.PI. Restaurant.

: © design Studio Giovanni D'Ambrosio; photographer Emanuele Brai

Project images

Designer's statement

The VI.AI.PI. restaurant is located in the well-known Memorial Square in Bali, where in 2002 the terrorist outrage took place, with victims running into hundreds.

The building where the restaurant club with its three levels and high storey spaces is located; is composed of four levels, the ground floor of which houses a surfing shop.

The indoor space shows itself as open and permeable, thanks to its exposed steel load-bearing structure. The building re-examines the constructive tradition of the tropical buildings, especially the one typical of the Indonesian culture, mainly characterized by big pitches which shelve naturally airy rooms and without curtain walls.

In the VI.AI.PI., the presence of two big dynamic roofs made of black alveolate polycarbonate allows shading, protection from atmospheric agents and the rainwater collection.

The external wrapping is conceived as the result of the fusion between panels made of corrugated iron (also used for the mixed floors), green screens and transparent surfaces made of both glass and polycarbonate. An important “green wall” whose size is 8m x 15m, built ad hoc, screens the sunbeams and shelves the indoor spaces by the heavy rains even allowing natural ventilation and the defining of comfortable and cool rooms.

The concept of the “green screen” as a natural screening system rises from the contest observation: the local populations are used to adorned their gardens with essences and elements took by nature.

Our effort has been to magnify its proportions and to transform the wall in an alive, perspiring and light surface. It is composed of tropical essences which have a predilection for shade and which naturally face themselves inward the building. These different varieties are grafted onto pakis, “natural elements extracted for the aerial roots of forest trees”, which are hung, in their turn, to structural bundle of steel cables and ropes of natural fibres. The parasite species, typical in tropical climates, take root onto pakis and draw nourishment from them, both of them kept wet by a simple irrigation system which gives them vital sap

Thank to this process, the green vertical wall keeps itself always alive and blooming, and becomes a potential habitat for birds and insects, being placed in a quiet contest.

Regarding the finishing of some of the indoor walls, it has been used tiles in coloured concrete made on site.

A no less important element which characterizes the VI.AI.PI restaurant is its realization cost, definitively measured.