Snapshot: We think your dentist’s office should be as sharp-looking as your dentist expects your teeth to be. Pedra Silva Architects agree. The award-winning Lisbon-based architecture firm have designed a high-level, state of the art dental clinic where sculptural wooden planks droop down from the ceiling to address the site’s pertinent programmatic challenges.

Located on a high-fashion street in Sydney, Care Implant Dentistry stands as firm’s first project in Australia. The team was confronted with a project brief that requested two reception areas with two entrances that could function separately but without compromising the sense of spaciousness and its relationship with people passing by. Also a challenge was a stubborn structural column that seemed to impose itself in all the attempts of trying to integrate it into the design.

The solution was no threat to the architects, who curiously asked themselves: how do we transform a problem into a unique opportunity? In this case, the chosen aesthetic is a clear response to problem solving. To address the space planning requirements, a structural wooden element falls from the ceiling in an undulating formation, lending itself as a partition between the two reception areas. The architects cleverly formed the suspended planks to start with narrow elements that then widen to engulf the existing column.

The remaining space of the clinic is stark white and arranged around a central corridor that starts in the reception area that connects all the intricate parts of the dental clinic, from examination areas, surgeries, client areas and technical spaces. In the middle of this corridor is a transparent central core made of glass allowing for natural light to filter through the interior of the space.

Photography by Fernando Guerra at FG+SG Fotografia de Arquitectura. Follow Fernando Guerra on Instagram.