2,100sf restaurant in Oklahoma City.

Status: Construction

Oklahoma City is at a midpoint between Los Angeles and New York by rail and has a very interesting history of being a warehousing location for Hollywood films.  The city has a district called film row, which coincidentally is where our Oklahoma satellite office is located, where trains would unload film reels for distribution throughout the mid-west. This of course was long before digital media when films were projected on film.

As a result of this Oklahoma City would have films in theaters before any other city in the Mid-West.  The Tower theater in mid-town was THE venue to see new releases.  It has just been redeveloped and has come online as a commercial space for rent.  We’re building a deli in the old Tower Theater lobby.  The client also has a few photos of old Oklahoma Delis that were a source of inspiration to him in becoming a restaurateur.  We wondered how we could use this history of imagery to create a building material.

A workflow developed across a few different software and a packing algorithm allowed us to scrape the web for every image of a deli sign ever uploaded to Flickr.  We then resized the images to inputs we determined about how big they should be and in what fashion they should accumulate. This interlocking system can be arranged by size, location, or color.  The objective was to sort through all the possibilities to find the best fit for each container.