Photos courtesy Eventscape
By Peter Saunders
Apropos is the latest in a series of new restaurants to open in Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Designed by Icrave, a studio in New York, N.Y., built by Toronto-based architectural fabrication firm Eventscape and operated by restaurateur OTG Management, which specializes solely in airport eateries, it is actually a pair of restaurants that mirror each other like oversized signs, forming a ‘gate’ for airline passengers as they enter Pearson’s Terminal 1 on a moving walkway through a major concourse.
Custom façades on both sides serve to accentuate the restaurants’ illuminated signs and decorative ‘fins’ set above a bar and a glass overhead wine rack. The concept is to allow passengers to stop and recharge with light culinary fare and cocktails before moving on to their final gate.
Façades of fins
Eventscape built the series of wavy, fin-like structures to form the façades. There are 37 decorative fins on each side, for a total of 74. Each has a unique, rotationally symmetrical curved profile and a distinct Pantone colour to create a gradient effect across the façade. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) were incorporated into the end fins for the restaurant’s logo signs, which were fabricated by DCL Communications in New York, using tube-like diffusers to achieve a neon-style appearance.
With some 1,000 parts used to build the fins, detailed numbering and management were required throughout the process. Each fin is 7 m (23 ft) tall, with a 4-m (13-ft) vertical cantilever terminating 0.3 m (1 ft) from the ceiling of the airport’s atrium roof.
“As the airport atrium upper walls are made of 4.3-m (14-ft) high glass panels, our structure needed to have the 4-m (13-ft) vertical cantilever in the upper section, with only 1.8 m (6 ft) of lower wall space available for our structural connections,” explains Elaine Allen-Milne, Eventscape’s marketing and communications manager. “Our solution was to design and engineer a rigid, triangulated truss system embedded within the ceiling plenum, which facilitated the mounting of all suspended elements, including the wine rack.”
Toronto-based Eventscape built a series of fin-like structures for the façades, each with a unique curved profile.
The overhead wine racks are stainless steel structures with tempered acid-etched glass front faces and shelving. They were sleeved over ‘stub-down’ extensions from the finished drywall ceiling, making installation relatively quick and easy, requiring only one day on each side. Co-ordination with mechanical and electrical tradespeople was necessary, too, to incorporate heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), electrical, fire prevention and audio systems into the ceiling.
The bar was built with a wooden frame, solid-surface countertop and stainless steel drink trough. Once the installation was complete, the exterior of the bar was tiled to match the floor.
