2017 Gallery
Winner: Best Installation Design
Foolscap Studio for Noma Australia
23 Barangaroo Rd
Barangaroo, New South Wales
Widely regarded as the world’s best restaurant, Noma decamped to Australia for a ten-week residency in early 2016. Not your average pop-up, the project required a full-scale restaurant fit out and a treatment to reflect Noma’s uniquely defining ethos, which is firmly grounded in time and place.
Jury Citation
Noma Australia managed to tread that fine line between representative materiality and realization that never descends into “featurism” or mawkishness. With a shelf life of only ten weeks, Noma Australia, through its collaborating creators, managed to embody the best the nation has to offer in terms of “ingredients,” both at the table and in the physical environment. The decision to create rammed earth counters is inspired.
This is a material that is not suited to long-term hospitality use, but ideal for the short-term embodiment of the “earth beneath our feet” concept that reflects this great brown land – materially rich and satisfying, and highly evocative. “Fusion” is a word that’s been used practically to the extinction of all meaning in restaurant design, but Noma Australia truly managed to fuse the best of Noma and the best of Australia in a texturally satisfying tableau, executed with incredible finesse.
