quicnic

click here to download the (still unfinished) quicnic project documentation (.pdf, ca. 17mb)

fast-food + picnic = quicnic
a fast urban idyll

The Quicnic project is based upon the concept of a futuristic and synthetic reinterpretation of a "picnic" for an urban culture, combined with features of fast food serving. A future fast food restaurant has to be able to serve a growing number of different cultural groups and individuals with different expectations. Society will continue to generate and re-generate its rules and codes of social life, resulting in even more individual claims wanting to be satisfied. Due to its semi-public and transient nature a fast-food restaurant will not attract customers only on the basis of the nature or quality of its food, its scope lies in its "faster" and more intense qualities - its social functions. A picnic is a social event, with a community celebrating its unity in an informal and relaxed atmosphere. The picnic itself obviously is much more of a get-together than just eating together. However, there are some unique characteristics with picnic food - treats often combined and packed very cleverly - paying tribute to the fact that planning, organisation and the locality do not allow for complex meals. Picnickers want to enjoy the sensual stimulation of nature for recreation and relaxation.
Informal and enjoyable, easy to handle - with these characteristics, the picnic situation offers an ideal environment for a pulsating metropolitan fast food restaurant. Additionally, because of its various connotations, the picnic metaphor provides the essential means of identification for sophisticated urbanites. Translated to a restaurant concept, this means that a scenery is provided featuring all qualities of a relaxing picnic that yet saves the guests valuable time with a ready-made picnic "out-of-the-box" . The scenery is based on an open playground inside the building structure, which replaces conventional fast-food experiences with a multifaceted shared experience and gives different expectations enough possibilities to envisage their own picnic situation. Both the smart cosmopolitan wanting himself exposed in the center, as well as the Steppenwolf, taxed by an excess of metropolitan stimulation, that finds his hideout in the deeper "shrubbery", can easily assimilate to the restaurant's logic.

The overall concept of quicnic as well as the design of the different areas follow the paradigm of a "fast urban idyll".
While it maintains its close connection to fast-food in terms of typical highly optimized operations and a complete automation of processes (fast-in, fast-out), it provides a totally new view of the guests experience and perception of the restaurant's function: An open structure that leaves the guests a maximum of autonomy and invites them to freely explore the possibilities at quicnic. Clients don't only come to eat - they have their own quicnic. Quicnic provides a synthetic natural surrounding and a new, stage-managed version of a pleasing real picnic adventure. The paradoxical urban idyll is revealed by the resulting redefinition of original picnic characteristics within a new artificial context, such as correllation and association of groups, subgroups and individuals, autonomy and informality in the semi-public restaurant space.