EverGreen casualfood bar (Korai project) | Marco Rucci

The concept starts from a desire: to let the ‘customer experience’ become a 'total

experience'. A space able to expand the customer senses by pushing them to

move, to feel forms, shapes and materials.

The EG space, as a 'space performance' doesn't offer clear space solution, but just

'undefined spaces': multiplicity of semiologies, suggestions and metaphors, height

impact materials stimulating communication at different levels. The customer

needs to move, to explore, to search solutions, to activate the mind and senses.

Evergreen space is not an answer; it s a question, it gives you possibilities,

different roads: the role of the customer is active, they have to give their own

solution.

On the ground floor, varnished ash wood slats are used with several random tones

of green as floor and wall covering, to let the space vibrate between the different

possibilities of green. On the same floor, orange and white resin finishes are

moving in a fluid growth process where the white folds up to become a part of the

bench while the orange folds to become a wall before to turn in the direction of the

staircase and the open kitchen. The concept of organic changing, metamorphosis

and continuity, relates also the red corian bench: it moves through the space,

showing its mass and disappearing into the floor in the direction of the staircase.

Up this 'in progress' space, two big 'E' and 'G' shaped volumes float in the space

as two balconies; they are made of green PVC stretched film. All the materials like

also super mirror finish stainless steel, transparent coloured / fluorescent / radiant

Plexiglas, glass and glass mosaics, dionysos marble, are used to expand the

'waiting experience' by inducing in the customers the desire to explore, to learn

from the 'multiplicity' and 'difference'.

Placed on the ground floor of a great commercial building protected by the

municipality of Athens, it overcomes the competition on the level of the spatial

continuity, modelling the new flooring to the adjacent slopes of the pedestrian

square and the commercial gallery, and opening completely the borders toward the

public spaces. The ground floor, with the big folded working and exhibition bench

for gastronomy and coffee(designed with Menelaos Koulouris), is a 'significant

cavity': it is an extension of the public space that now flows from outside to inside;

it runs along the glass and red corian bench and goes up in the double height

modelling itself around the big 'E' and 'G' shaped balconies. The staircase

(between the 'red bench' and the coffee roasting and open kitchen area) is

characterized by a strong action of light and colour, intensifying the experience of

verticality. The upper level is dedicated to the tables and also to the toilettes and

storage/dressing room.

Mr.Koulouris thinks about the process of designing of the EG as ‘stochastic process’:

“…there are process for wich knowing the past and present, the future cannot be determined; others for which the future is determined by the present, without keeping in mind the past.

Multiplicity of materials, chromatic dissonances, forms looking for order, make free the ‘aleatory variable’: amazing ability of space to form it in the mind and time, through the experience of the space itself.”