Part of a larger concept for healthy fast food, the Clover mission is to revolutionize the way food is produced, distributed, and ultimately consumed. Through a system of local hubs, restaurants, pods, and food trucks, community networks are emphasized. Scaled up, this will have an enormous positive impact on the environment since the polluting capacity of modern food systems is on par to buildings and automobiles. This first prototype restaurant is in the Holyoke Center, the Harvard owned building designed by Josep Lluís Sert. Our approach was to combine the minimum-footprint-aesthetic of the Clover brand with the abstract spatial concepts of Sert’s space: Like a minimalist art installation, fluorescent ‘cloud canopies’ are suspended below the original waffle ceiling. A cut into the existing mezzanine brings natural light from a previously hidden skylight while a wire trellis allows climbing ivy to reach this light source. The idea of transparency is both literal and figural: The boundary between ‘kitchen’ and ‘customer’ is dissolved to reveal the workings of the food-making while the use of glass allows visual communication between spaces while reflecting and multiplying light.
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