CSSP FOOD PLAZA-UP DILIMAN

Status: Construction

Project year : 2020

Location: UP Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines

Between its construction in 1983 and its burning down in 2015, the College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Association Food Center inside the University campus served as a hangout place for generations of students often as a space for study and different types of social activities. With that in mind, the project proposal recreated the burned down space embracing the concept of an open dining merged with the social aspects of collaborative learning. The project proposal offers an open-air type of dining combined with an undulating overhead park in which the new design deviates from the original building experience as being crowded, hot, and noisy.

The first level of the project caters to the open-air dining spaces and different concessionaires hosting the old businesses that emerged inside the campus. The remnants from the old structure were celebrated by digging up the remaining footprint- exposing the old pillars in commemoration of the past. The recessed dining space with pea gravel bed flooring demarcates the footprint of the burned down structure through its different materiality from the rest of the ground floor.

ARCHITECTURAL EXPLORATION

With the masterplan of the university conforms to what was being used in the other buildings inside the campus, the project proposal was taken into risk to propose a new design that completely diverged from the imposing structures within the school campus. Creating a more explorative forms of architecture that will harmonize to the existing site condition. Instead of following the original dimensions of the old building footprint, the design creates a structure that is more respondent to the climate by turning the old design of the canteen into an open food park-expanding it horizontal and extending it vertical to create a building typology that combines a series of concessionaires, open seating and dining with an elevated public park above.

An elevated walkway above the concessions were conceptualized as an additional hangout space for informal gathering or dining. The flowing stepped roof/park is incorporated with concrete plant boxes which is in-monolithic with the stepped slab to add some pockets of greeneries into the open spaces. Random skylights were also incorporated into the design to bring down the natural light to the spaces covered by the overhead park that also function as seating furniture. Lastly, the roof perimeter is covered with steel louvers with random height and elevation to minimize water sprinkle during the rain.

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