Gabriela: Filipina Kantina

Experiential Graphics- Small Scale (features or elements)

Project Narrative

Gabriela's motto: "Revolutionary Food for Revolutionary People" reinforces the design to be daring, educational, interactive and vibrant, evolving the traditional order-counter food stall into a memorable space that people will come back to again and again. Our project directly addresses the challenge of identity in the built environment. Named for anti-imperialist Filipina revolutionary Gabriela Silang, the design not only represents Filipino-American culture in a vibrant and unique way, it also creates a salient and colorful space in a busy food hall where everything around you is clamoring for attention.

Architecture, graphic design, branding, and interior design all bring their own unique ways of translating a project’s needs into reality. Through the synthesis of each of these disciplines, the best results are found.

Spatially, there were some interesting challenges to overcome. By nature, a food hall stall needs to function at a similar capacity to a full restaurant while occupying only a fraction of the space. We sought to maximize the depth of the shallow footprint through multiple means. Carefully layering many colors, textures, lighting, and materials invites passersby from across the food hall into a surprisingly immersive experience. The back-of-house space, usually behind closed doors, is open to the customer’s view to see the full cooking experience, cooks share a counter space with customers eating, further establishing a conversation between the people making the food and the people eating the food.

As with so many immigrant communities, food is a rallying point. Food is a community builder, and the design intentionally fosters that. Food represents time spent coming together, just as it can be a way to reflect a community’s ideals and history outward. The design for Gabriela speaks to this aspect of culture - traditional patterns and colorways come together with familiar retro accents and warm tones; just like the food, it bears many influences and material realities to become something uniquely itself.