Zedi Hair Salon
Zedi, the reincarnation of a two storey brick warehouse as a hairdressing salon, started with the client’s brief to create a sustainable ‘temple of hair’ … Zedi is the Burmese name for the stepped dome of Buddhist pagodas in South East Asia. In this salon project, the metaphor of the dome’s steps leading to enlightenment is elaborated as an intention to enlighten the community about sustainability …
The salon operates like an undercover agent within a consumer lifestyle. It is located in a fashionable inner-city locale, but its anti-waste philosophy confronts us with our cycle of excessive consumption and waste. On the aggressive to gentle range of environmental activism, however, Zedi is not feral. The salon is sleek and subtly enriched by inventive use of recycled materials. The architects have achieved a kind of convergent evolution between found object art and the current responsibility to the community in regard to the culture of consumption and the need for sustainability.
Carnevale, V (2004), ‘Undercover Agent’, The Architectural Review, Sustain This, Issue 092, pp 109-112.