Much has been made of AIR Circular Campus and Cooking Club (Air CCCC), the buzzy new restaurant by renowned chefs Matt Orlando of Amass restaurant (a now-defunct world leader in food sustainability) and Will Goldfarb of Room4Dessert fame, as well as Potato Head co-founder Ronald Akili.
Sitting on a sprawling 40,000 square worth of greenery atop Dempsey Hill, Air CCCC is an amalgam of many things; a farm-to-table restaurant, research lab, cooking school and a garden where produce for the restaurant’s Southeast Asian-meets-European fusion cuisine are grown.
The main building that houses the first three components is the former CSC Dempsey Clubhouse – a space built in the 1970s for local civil servants. Having worked with OMA since 2013, Akili naturally turned once more to the famed architecture firm (a longtime collaborator with the likes of Prada) to transform the space.
Air CCCC’s second floor contains a more intimate dining area, space for R&D on ingredients, as well as a fermentation room at the back.
From the get-go, Air CCCC was conceptualised as a culinary lab of sorts that bridges food, design and sustainability. Both chefs are passionate about the topic (but not preachy about it) – think noodles made from detritus like fish bones, or a banana caramel dessert made with banana skins.
OMA was therefore tasked with coming up with a design that would grapple with this premise: is it possible for fine dining to satiate pleasures on the tongue and provoke deeper contemplation about food and its impact on the environment?
A winding path bisects the greenery and leads you to the main building of this culinary nirvana.
To that end, the expansive nature surrounding the building and the former CSC Dempsey Clubhouse served as the main pillars bookending OMA’s design. A key design element is the 100-meter walkway – a sinuous wooden footpath that connects Air CCC and one of Dempsey Hill’s main parking lots.
On one side of this path lies the restaurant’s lawn, where events like weekend farmers’ markets are staged, and the other, the aforementioned garden, where various plants like chilli, starfruit, wormwood, borage, moringa are grown.
Air CCCC’s main building is distinguished by its openness – here, a semi-outdoor ground space on the ground floor melds seamlessly into the lawn and exterior.
OMA has gone for for an open concept in many ways. For instance, the ground floor of the old clubhouse was formerly enclosed – it’s since been transformed into a semi-outdoor dining space that connects seamlessly to the lawn via wooden patios (there are extendable glass doors to shield diners, should there be inclement weather).
Ribbon windows on the second floor help to add to the feeling of openness.
Likewise, Air CCCC’s second floor is distinguished by ribbon windows – glass replaces the original facade to create an airy indoor area that overlooks the lawn. At the back of this floor, there’s also a cooking school and a special room where by-products are upcycled through fermentation, meant to encourage conversations on ingredients and how the restaurant applies the nose-to-tail approach in its dishes.
A massive steel cylinder was installed at the back to support the building’s new incarnation as a restaurant and its needs.
The clearest sign of the merging of the old and the new is the cylindrical steel frame at the rear of the structure – it’s been installed to support the staircases that serve the new needs of the building. P.S. the open staircases also offer a nice vantage point of the tennis court that’s hidden from view and a relic from the building’s past.
Even Air CCCC’s Andreu Carulla-designed furniture is crafted from various materials such as Styrofoam (try touching the chairs’ tactile handles) and recycled materials from previous art installations.
The ethos of sustainability is one that runs thoughtfully throughout the restaurant, including its furniture. Famed Catalan design Andreu Carulla used recycled timber, plastic bottles from a previous art installation, and Styrofoam typically found in disposable food containers and made them into these stylish chairs for instance.
Says OMA Associate Shinji Takagi: “This small project is a consequence of the intimate collaboration among a visionary entrepreneur, innovative chefs, a progressive industrial designer, and ambitious architects. I hope such ‘smallness’ will be conceived as an impactful and meaningful endeavor.”