Yak and Yeti

• location:
  Somerville, MA
• Date:
  Completed 2010
• client:
  Yak & Yeti
• collaborators:
  General Contractor: Sheng Jian Du
  Structural Engineer: Evan Hankin, PE
  Photographer: Kevin Buzzell
• project_team:
  Principal-In-Charge: Elizabeth Whittaker
  Project Architect: Anne-Sophie Divenyi
  Project Manager: Joana Torres, Andrew Richardson
  Design Team: Joana Torres, Andrew Richardson
• description:
  The design for Yak and Yeti, a Nepali and Indian Restaurant in the Boston area, translated the client’s desire for traditional Buddhist imagery into a contemporary architectural language on a modest budget. The space is unified by the use of a single economical material identity; the benches, floors, hostess stand and wait station are wrapped in a 67% post-consumer recycled engineered wood, creating an abstracted landscape that is evoked by three-dimensional forms that peel out organically from the two-dimensional floor surface.
  
  The main dining room feature interprets the mountains of Nepal as an abstracted landscape of woven cotton straps. Varying thicknesses of straps make a form of gradated density across a framework constructed of inexpensive plumbing pipe. The implied jagged mountainscape informs the local scale of the strap pattern as well as the form of the overall installation. The woven surfaces are broken strategically by nine lighting elements - silver-dipped light bulbs recalling the nine eyes or nine lives of Buddha. These fixtures create a glow behind the white cotton straps.
  
  In the secondary dining room, a giant wall graphic of Mount Everest re-scales the classic framed landscape photograph, with the supergraphic, high-resolution photograph creating a totalizing environment above the built-in benches ringing the room.