By Kimberley Mok, Source: Treehugger

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Compact and stealthily moving through city streets, the bike is the perfect way to provide seemingly unrelated services like mobile libraries, year-round shelter and even pop-up workshops. Inspired by the local street food carts, Swiss architecture firm Bureau A’s super-sized version in the streets of Vietnam’s capital of Hanoi takes the cake: towering a relatively impressive two-and-a-half storeys, the multipurpose and mobile structure can serve out street food, host exhibitions and provide temporary shelter.
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Originally cobbled together by a local steel worker using blue-painted steel and a modified tricycle, the framework was re-adapted by Bureau A for Tadioto, a bar and cultural centre. Envisioned as an “unexpected urban animal” which could be fluidly adapted into anything from a “mini-concert hall” or a “poetry podium,” the project takes advantage of Hanoi’s resourceful spirit:

Everything is dense in Hanoi, including the milk in your coffee. Everything is used. In unexpected ways “things” live different lives, they reincarnate continuously into new functions, passing from one life to another without a moment of respite. In Hanoi, this magic of creativity ends up in everyday life as opposed to art museums. The blue, a vertical Bia Hoi [a popular local beer] for Tadioto accompanies this creative movement.
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We’ve been seeing many examples of designers proactively addressing problematic issues of urban decline and strengthening urban ecosystems, sometimes on a large scale, yet also through small interventions that nevertheless make a difference in creating more livable cities. Though these solutions will take different forms in different places, ultimately, the point was to make use of what is already there, says designer Daniel Zamarbide: “The main purpose of this mobile device was to do a sort of humble ‘performance’ using local know-how and culture.”
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Another intriguing urban intervention, facilitated by the bicycle; more over at Bureau A.