Kiev-Based Volodymyr Mints Channels Nazca Geoglyphs for Lima Restaurant Concept
Feeling creatively stymied after getting his start at some of his country’s top firms, 27-year-old Ukrainian designer Volodymyr Mints decided to open his own eponymous studio last year in Kiev. One of its first projects is Nazca, an ambitious restaurant concept for a site in Lima, Peru. Mints’s goal was to translate that city’s enduring cultural heritage into a raw and moody space.
Imagined in a pavilion inside an abandoned industrial building, the 5,000-square-foot plan is an ode to the massive geoglyphs created in the Peruvian desert by the ancient Nazca civilization. The soil drawings, so large that they’re only viewable by airplane, are said to be an effort of the Nazca people to honor and pray for a good harvest. Mints translated that historical connection to seasonal food with Autodesk 3ds Max software. The resulting atmospheric renderings artificially re-create a geoglyph, which Mints then used as a foundation for the plan’s two intersecting rectangles. “It repeats the shape of the oldest element of landscape design,” he says. He envisions lining the pavilion with textile curtains, to reference the use of natural fabrics by the earliest societies.
