Tin Tin Restaurant & Bar in Chandigarh by Renesa Architecture Design Studio.

Tin Tin Restaurant & Bar by Renesa Architecture is a flurry of sweeping arches, contoured ceilings and morphing vistas as the interior volume feels at once disarmingly exotic and naggingly familiar.

Now we’ll be the first to say we have some concerns with this project — the curved back stools seem to be a direct copy of Tom Dixon’s Cassia collection amongst a few other things we can’t quite put our finger on. While we take no pleasure in this, acknowledging copying is important as it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stay on top of it all. With that said, do we still think this project has something to say? Hell yes! and we wanted to show it to the Yellowtrace audience within a constructive context — now let’s move on.

The project is found within the city of Chandigarh, a little known architectural pilgrimage in India. Here, during the 1950s, Le Corbusier was given full reign to exact his own design rationale, much like a visual manifesto. The city is teeming with modernist civic buildings and surprising design oddities.

With this context, Renesa looked to another modernist great, Carlo Scarpa, with their maze of terrazzo a clear homage to his Olivetti flooring in Venice. The floor to wall tiling is elaborate and at times disorientating, as the team themselves describes it, it’s “a geometric mosaic matrix residing within the spaces, a permanent resident that earmarks the walls, portals, and various surface finishes to instil a sense of visual dynamism.”

Grotto-like, Tin Tin’s shell is derived from the stippled appearance of cast on-site slivers of Indian stone and terrazzo that were painstakingly hand-laid over six months by a brigade of stonemasons and casters. The deep shades of jade, umber brown, veined white, and greige bespeckle the spaces to create pockets of hues across the bare montage. Now that’s artisanship.

With European and Indian cultural references colliding throughout this grotto-like design, Tin Tin offers something unique that could perhaps have only happened in a city of contradictions such as Chandigarh.

Related: Olivetti Showroom in Venice by Carlo Scarpa.

[Images courtesy of Renesa Architecture Design Studio. Photography by Niveditaa Gupta .]