The Barber Truck

Project Details

Project Description

FROM THE DESIGNERS:

The Barber Truck is a project at the nexus of architecture, urbanism, and beauty & grooming, distinguished by a nimble responsiveness to pandemic times. Designed as a collaboration between Spiegel Aihara Workshop (SAW) and MOA (with interiors by Night Palm), the project reimagines the barber shop as hyper-local: a roving grooming station deeply rooted in creating a comfortable, familiar, communal sense of place, even if not anchored in a particular location.

While there has been a proliferation of mobile retail in recent years, typically through the growing acceptance of food trucks, The Barber Truck offers something different. Instead of an interior that accommodates only back-of-house activities, The Barber Truck invites customers in. The resulting experience is immersive, while the site itself is mobile and its design flexible and modular. This is a strategy about living on the land lightly, about reaching broader audiences, and allowing for the choreography of a greater variety of goods and services within any given neighborhood.

At its core, The Barber Truck is designed to operate inside out, with multiple workstations on both the interior and exterior of the vehicle to accommodate a wide variety of situations and locations, from music festivals to haircuts for the homeless. This strategy also provided something of a lifeline during the early days of the COVID lockdown, just after The Barber Truck launched in March 2020, allowing it to quickly adapt to pandemic restrictions and safely provide outdoor haircuts.

Constructed from modular SIP panels, the truck’s main volume also features an aluminum-framed pop-out that expands its width by two feet when parked. Inside, the pop-out accommodates three barber stations, allowing ample space behind the chairs for the barber to move around clients and to and from the tile-clad wash area as needed. Each station includes built-in mirrors and millwork whose drawers hide and reveal each station’s many necessary products and tools. The interior also features a small sitting area, bar, product display case, and bathroom. Wainscotting and millwork are painted in the same deep cerulean blue as the truck’s exterior, while floors are blond hardwood and pile. Throughout, compartments and cupboards fold in and up, hiding products and securing the truck for a seamless, safe experience when moving from location to location.

The exterior of the pop-out features fold-out compartments containing a mirror, plug, and haircutting equipment to create full service outdoor barber stations. A structural steel lattice support on the interior is visible, recalling the gridded steel windows of the industrial era. Additionally, one wall of the façade is designed to incorporate multiple sets of demountable panelized ‘art-walls’ allowing for the truck to produce a large scale canvas for rotating exhibits of local artists' work.

SAW x MOA have become fascinated with the notion of reimagining the city, demanding more flexibility, more variety, more diversity, and less resource consumption from our urban and even suburban centers. It's a strategy well suited to the inevitable future of electric vehicle infrastructure (a speculative proposal commissioned by and presented for the city of Los Angeles) and reinforces both the importance of the qualities of space, and opportunities of the cycles of time.

Project Credits:
Deployed: March 2020
Location: Varies
Client: The Barber Truck
Architects: Dan Spiegel of SAW // Spiegel Aihara Workshop & Dustin Stephens of MOA Mobile Office Architects
Interior Designer: Tiffany Howell of Nightpalm
Fabricator: Popshopolis in Denver, CO
Size: 210sf base configuration, 230sf deployed
Base Vehicle: 24ft Morgan Olson Step Van
Photography: Bruce Damonte