Blue Frog Acoustic Lounge Location: Mumbai, India

Client: Blue Frog Media Pvt. Ltd.

Serie Architects
Status: Completed, November 2007
Cost: Undisclosed
Area: 1,000 sqm
Use: Commercial

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Below: Axonometric drawing

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Project Description
Based on this desire of the project brief to have it all, the question for us is: how do
you collapse a theatre, restaurant, bar and club into a warehouse, whilst maintain-
ing all the performative characteristics of each individual type?
The strategies of hybridisation of the 90s,
more often resulted in the smooth blending
of one tectonic surface with another.
Accompanying this tendency is the belief
that the formal procedure of blending will
result in the cross-breeding of programme.
Blue Frog for us is a project that revisits
the problem of multi-programmed spaces
without resorting to formal redundancy
as a representation of programmatic
complexity. The project brief called for the
conversion of a large north-lit industrial
warehouse within the old mill district in
Mumbai into a complex of sound recording
studios and an acoustic lounge. This
lounge will consist of a restaurant, bar and
a live stage. Beyond this amalgamation of
provisions, Blue Frog seeks to stage an
acoustic experience par excellence.
Based on this desire of the project brief to
have it all, the question for us is: how do
you collapse a theatre, restaurant, bar and
club into a warehouse, whilst maintaining
all the performative characteristics of each
individual type?
The deep structure that has been
employed is of a cellular organisation
composed of circles of varying sizes
approximating a horse-shoe configuration
in plan. The differential extrusions of these
circles, encapsulated at different levels as
tiered cylindrical seating booths, allow the
eye level of diners and standing patrons to
be distributed across staggered levels that
increase in height away from the stage.
These booths seat between 4-10 people
and are arranged around an open centre
that can either double up as a potential
360° stage or accommodate standing
patrons, bringing them closer to the
main stage to create an intimate viewing
experience. These mahogany panelled
cylindrical booths maintain uninterrupted
Below: The amalgamation of stage and dining seating
arrangements generates the open seating booth layout
of the Bluefrog lounge
views to the stage, and also a constant
distance between diners, irrespective of
how crowded the lounge gets.
The undulating height of the seating
booths is gently modulated by a glowing
acrylic resin surface, which unifies the
disparate types and retains the presence
of the architecture even in the midst of the
spectacle of a sound and light show.
It can be argued that the programmatic
multiplicities here arise out of the
disposition of the irreducible typal imprints
harnessed from the above mentioned
precedent types. And it is these deep
structures that give rise to the multiple
programmatic configurations without the
project resorting to any strategies of formal
convolution.
Photos by Fram Petit
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Below & Bottom: Images of the Bluefrog interior

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