HWKR Food Centre

HWKR Food Centre brings a futuristic, 200 seat take on Asian hawker dining to the public realm of Melbourne's EQ Tower in the CBD. Commissioned by ICD Property and Brandworks, the centre was conceived as a technology focused venue, with four tenant kiosks rotating every three months to keep the offer changing and give the space a distinctly Melbourne twist on hawker cuisine.

Craig Tan Architects set out to create a socially thriving, village-like atmosphere that draws people into communal interaction, borrowing the energy and intimacy of street markets. Four volumes, or pavilions, are inserted into the space to form a permeable food centre that opens onto the retail arcade and works at an almost outdoor, urban scale. Each pavilion is then eroded and hollowed out, with the food tenancies set within so that they become part of the fabric of the structures themselves.

The gaps between the pavilions read as pseudo urban squares. A sculptural bar and a terrace of bleacher seating activate these in-between zones, while the ceilings are left exposed to the existing soffit, celebrating the texture of the overhead exhaust ducts. Graphic colour fields drawn from the branding palette spill out across these spaces as luminous, cloud-like canopies.

Completed in 2018.

Architect: Craig Tan Architects. Photography: Mark Allan, VIA.