2015_in progress_San Francisco, CA_900ft2

SixFoot20 specializes in fusing street foods from different cultures. Currentlyoperating from a utility tricycle equipped with a hot plate and ice box, the laundromat at 439 Duboce Avenue in San Francisco will be SixFoot20’s first bricks-and-mortar location.

We wish to bring the street into the restaurant and architecturally express the hybridized nature of the menu through materials and layers. As much as is allowable by San Francisco’s historic overlay restrictions, we will open the facade. Sometime in the past 25 years, the laundromat’s classic recessed vitrine storefront was replaced with fixed plexiglass panels. We will maintain the same proportions but replace the vitrine with vertical bifold windows. Benches in front of the windows will double as steps, patrons do not have to enter through the door, they can climb through the window onto a continuous linear “stoop” that wraps in front of the service counter. The stoop will replace conventional seating.

SixFoot20’s menu not only hybridizes cultures - east and west, north and south - it challenges notions of slow and fast food. Menus are created daily based on the availability of ingredients. Items are cooked to order, and served in paper. Spatially the restaurant will blend expectations of fast and slow, it will feel provisional, but also encourage a desire to linger. 

With no budget for expensive materials, we will be repurposing the remains of the laundromat. Broken washers and dryers will be parted out for paneling formwork, and we are currently figuring out how to convert a clothes dryer into a coffee roaster.