New York-founded, Beijing-based studio MARS Studio turned an active highway underpass in Tongzhou into a restaurant by splitting the space in half with a wall of mirrored glass. Commissioned by Intime Group for a site inside the still-under-construction Tongzhou High Line Park, the project keeps one half of the underbridge space open as a public walkway while enclosing the other as a glass-fronted dining room. The result reads less like a conventional restaurant fit-out and more like a case for what a forgotten piece of urban infrastructure can become without ever fully closing off the space it occupies.
A construction site with a quiet spot underneath it gave the project its starting point. Invited to develop an independent design proposal within the still-forming Tongzhou High Line Park, MARS Studio found no predetermined site or program — only a park under constant transformation, with machinery and temporary fencing shifting daily. Beneath one of its bridges, the studio found the opposite condition: a shadowed, slowed-down space, separated from the rhythm of the construction and traffic above it.
A contradiction built into the city shaped how MARS Studio approached the site: “Underbridge spaces often exist as contradictions within cities.” Rather than enclosing the whole span, the design keeps this underbridge restaurant design split in two: one half becomes the glass-enclosed restaurant and bar, the other remains an open corridor for passersby and cyclists moving through the park — two different uses coexisting under the same bridge, similar in spirit to how Linehouse revitalized Macau’s Kam Pek Market from a neglected 1920s building into a food hall without erasing its public role on the street.
A single mirrored wall does the work of dividing the bridge into solid and void. On one side sits the restaurant, enclosed in glass; on the other, an arched public passage for pedestrians and cyclists. This mirrored glass restaurant interior turns what would otherwise be a hard boundary into something that separates and dissolves at the same time, letting the underbridge space become somewhere to be observed and paused in rather than simply passed through.
Silhouettes and arches layer onto the glass as people move beneath the bridge. Reflections of the structure’s curves, shifting light, and activity inside the restaurant multiply across the mirrored surface, visually extending the underbridge space’s limited dimensions. It’s this reflective glass dining space effect — overlapping layers of light and time — that gives the project its name, a place MARS Studio describes as “a spatial fragment filled with imagination and memory.”
New arches inserted into the old structure reinforce the bridge’s existing language while giving the walking path a clearer rhythm. This adaptive reuse infrastructure architecture approach doesn’t fight the bridge’s original form so much as extend its logic, using new construction to sharpen rather than replace what was already there.
Blue by day, shifting color by night defines how the space reads across a full 24 hours. During daylight hours the interior holds a soft sky-blue atmosphere; after dark, blue, pink and gradient lighting blend across the arched surfaces. This restaurant lighting design China approach treats light as a material in its own right, doing for the mood of the space what Craft & Concept’s custom LED wall does at Huit Sushi in Montreux — shifting an entire dining atmosphere without a single wall moving.
108 square metres (1,163 sq ft) carved out of a bridge span make up the finished interior. Design ran from December 2025 to February 2026, with construction completed between March and May 2026. MARS Studio‘s team was led by director designer Ma Ning and main designer Fu Yajie, with lighting design by Chen Mengting; this 108-square-metre restaurant Beijing project sits within Tongzhou, Beijing, photographed by Luo Canhui.
What lingers isn’t the sky-blue glow of the dining room but the corridor running alongside it — still open, still public, still carrying pedestrians and cyclists past a restaurant that never asked the bridge to stop being a bridge.
LUMINOUS TUNNEL – DOS RESTAURANT by MARS Studio | Location: Tongzhou District, Beijing, China — Year: 2026 — Key materials: mirrored glass, arched structural elements