Image Credit : Rory Gardiner
Project Overview
The Mr Burger brand started as a single food truck with a brightly coloured identity and is now an established brand of multiple stores and trucks across Melbourne. Beginning as a truck with no fixed location, the brand colours were critical and developed with the intention of being highly recognisable. The physical identity of the brand was transferred from a traditional bricks and motor interface, to the flash of brand colours seen as a truck drove past. This kiosk style store store seeks to play on this point of difference and express the iconic bright orange and cream colours in a new way.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Alex Lake - Architect
Anouska Milstein - Interior Designer
Project Brief
The brief was centred around the opportunity to leverage the exposure of the site. The clients requested that the store act like a billboard for their brand and engage the surrounding public and pedestrians.
Further practical requirements included functional traffic flow for busy times, consideration of day and night usage, maximising the tiny footprint of the kitchen and service area and managing climate, food safety and security while still promoting a sense of openness and transparency.
Finally the architectural outcome needed to stitch into the surrounding shopping centre and also the wider city context.
Project Innovation/Need
The whole project is centred around a translation of the food truck based brand to commercially successful permanent built outcome. With the brand colours being the key recognisable element, the application of these colours to architecture presented a unique scenario. This store seeks to minimise traditional, one dimensional logo based branding, and explore a more meaningful brand experience through the relationship between colour, materiality and light. The project also seeks to address the notion of physical transparency, allowing the public to have a visual relationship with the processes of the business and the back of house areas traditionally hidden in fast food operations. This is particularly evident at night where the perforated facade glows from the inside out, allowing public interaction with the workings of the business and providing a visually engaging glowing lantern as an extension of the existing visual language.
Design Challenge
The tiny footprint of the site with no internal seating presented a number of spatial challenges, forcing every element of the design to work harder as a functional outcome still delivering commercial outcomes for the brand and a positive urban design outcome for the city.
Additionally the busy CBD location added complication in relation to traffic flow, with particular constraints from council enforcing that all external furniture be movable and pedestrian access and sight-lines continually favoured over customer circulation.
Finally, the detailing of the steel facade presented the greatest architectural challenge. The facade is entirely operable, allowing each panel to swing open to clean the glazing behind. Combining this active operable function, structural strength, security and design outcomes into one 60mm layer of facade required extensive detailing, engineering and prototyping.
Sustainability
This Mr Burger store has a particular focus on utilising local design and fabrication with all the furniture and complex steel facade produced in collaboration with local craftsmen.
The exposed facade utilises a double skin system for thermal performance with the perforated steel shading the insulated and doubled glazed facade behind.
The kiosk style store cleverly utilises the surrounding public realm rather than a larger shop footprint. The adjacency to the State Library garden is heavily capitalised on during warmer weather.
Architecture - Commercial - Constructed
This award celebrates the design process and product of planning, designing and constructing form, space and ambience that reflect functional, technical, social, and aesthetic considerations. Consideration given for material selection, technology, light and shadow.
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