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All photos: DAICI ANO/.
Aoba-tei
Atelier Hitoshi Abe, 2004
By inserting a wall of thin steel plates within the The inner wall is a monocoque structure that
interior of a French restaurant in Sendai, Japan, does not have any structural frames supporting
Hitoshi Abe created for this project a soft boundary it from behind. Therefore, the light passing through
surface that spatially mediates between the first the graphic holes is not disrupted. Since there was
and second floors of the existing building. This soft no way to pierce graphic holes at the welded joint
boundary also links the inner space of the restaurant lines of the steel plates, the holes were marked again
with the space defined by the famous roadside after assembly and welding and hand-drilled on-site.
zelkova trees that symbolize the city of Sendai. Lights The difficulty of plex shapes from
have been installed behind the inner wall, thereby thin steel plates within an existing building led to
pointillistically reconstructing the light and shade the use of shipbuilding technology for the actual
of the zelkova trees in the interior space. manufacturing. Craftsmen who were highly
The -millimeter-thick metal plates that experienced with the unique characteristics of steel
constitute the inner wall were perforated by a plates were able to deform the steel freely by heating
numerically controlled turret with hundreds of and chilling key points and thereby producing
thousands of variously sized holes. The plex curved surfaces. The singular descriptive
follows a digitized image of a zelkova tree that was methods they used to translate a three-dimensional
posed and reassembled in Photoshop. Final volume into two-dimensional surfaces were
adjustments to the graphic were done by hand by predicated on the manual craft techniques these
Atelier staff members. This process was done before experts used to make the curves.
the steel plates were folded into shape.
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