A research project about the architecture of dim sum restaurants eventually evolved into a space that uplifts small businesses in New York’s Chinatown. T. K. Justin Ng, founder of emerging firm Spaced Agency, was researching the ways dim sum restaurants evolved to create spaces of belonging when he came across the nonprofit Welcome to Chinatown. The architect and artist created a series of NFTs, depicting dim sum ladies pushing different carts of food, to help the organization raise funds to conduct a survey about the neighborhood’s small businesses. The survey manifested in the Small Business Innovation Hub, a community space that’s robust in its programming yet flexible and light in its design.
The survey identified a number of challenges facing small businesses in the community, like increased competition from larger companies, language barriers, and access to resources. The hub seeks to help relieve some of these issues, offering coworking space, advisory services, and mentorship meetings in addition to community events. Spaced Agency converted a former plumbing fixture store into a flexible space that can accommodate these wide-ranging programmatic functions.
Linear and deep, the hub opens with a double-height space that houses the main gathering hall and a wall for a rotating art gallery. The space shifts into coworking and meeting rooms spaces through the use of cherry wood cabinets and a silver curtain, mounted onto a radial track that curves through the space. The floor-to-ceiling cabinets hold carts, not unlike dim sum carts, that can rotate around the room as necessary or stay concealed within the wall. Behind it, the single-height space features a small kitchenette to accommodate any catering needs, different types of meeting rooms, and a lounge.
“We mixed the cart idea with the curtain, which is helpful in terms of being cost effective, but also allows us to be fluid in terms of what is a boundary in the project. So the curtain and the cabinet anchors the specificity of the site,” Ng told AN Interior. This allows the main gathering hall to be set up for different types of gathering, from movie nights to lectures, allowing a central “stage” to be positioned in different areas rather than fixed to one.
The color and material palette is equally cost efficient and site specific. The blue that engulfs the space is both the color of Welcome to Chinatown’s logo and a welcoming base for the hub. It helps contrast the many community-made items and trinkets from the nonprofit. Red stools, easy to stack and transport throughout the space, pop against the blue and are sourced from vendors in the neighborhood.
The research-project-to-NFT-to-commissioned-project pipeline may seem rather out of the blue for an architect, but art has a home in Ng’s practice, especially for Chinese American projects like this one. “Chinese American architecture, like Chinatown’s histories, is not well documented, other than San Francisco a little bit,” explained the founder. “There are cathedrals of community life within Chinatowns that aren’t well documented. So painting them was important because it’s a visual record of how these places work. We emphasize the appearance of Chinese American architecture, like pagodas, but we don’t actually talk about how they’re laid out and structured.”
With the Small Business Innovation Hub, Spaced Agency visually documents these types of overlooked spaces and then physically evolves this design history. Like the hub, the practice seeks to grow—both its own business and the community alongside it.