Sited adjacent to a museum, a music hall, and a boutique hotel, the Ordos restaurant promises to become a crucial element in the fabric of Kaokaoshina, an emerging cultural district and tourist destination in southwestern Inner Mongolia. The restaurant's striking appearance - of a glass box floating effortlessly above a shaped landscape - owes its diaphanous presence to an innovative materials palette of high-tech glass that includes colored inner layers, dichromatic and translucent films, and ceramic fritting. Inside, this glass mélange tantalizes patrons with constant, subtle shifts of light - an appropriate visual complement to the restaurant's menu, which encompasses three cuisines.
The 3,000 sm restaurant maintains its vital connection to the environment on several levels. Extensive solar analysis early in the design process established an optimal orientation for the transparent building, and a large green roof harbors an array of indigenous plants. In stark contrast to the restaurant's modern architecture, the structural skeleton of a traditional Anhui house, purchased and restored for the project, stands at the heart of a central courtyard, provoking a lively visual dialogue and narrative for this exciting culinary destination.
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