The Santa Cecilia neighborhood in São Paulo, where Kraut is located, is characterized by an intense sociability in its streets, which are heavily used as places for gathering, commerce, and festivities. New buildings that have recently been established share space with old townhouses, small shops, and more traditional services. Our premise when designing Kraut was not only to preserve these relationships, but to try to enhance the contact with the street, as if the project could also enliven and contribute to keeping this network of meeting spaces active / alive.
The project needed to organize a bar with few resources, designed to operate both during the day and at night, in a single rectangular hall 15 meters long that has only a front opening, facing an outdoor area that connects directly to the street.
Our proposal sought to define the bar’s space with as few elements as possible: the counter, the wall painting, and the lighting.
The counter was conceived as a single piece that organizes the space of the hall. While it concentrates the work functions and bar service, it is also shared by the public. Its freer design contrasts with the regular volume of the hall and, at the same time, intends to create diverse possibilities of use, being able to accommodate groups of different sizes, with a more collective sense.
The lighting was conceived as a more graphic element, occupying the high ceiling and maintaining a sense of unity: a set of fixtures that could be read as a single piece, composed of minimal elements – wires and lightbulbs – drawing in the void.
The painting then defines these two distinct areas in the hall: it organizes the volumes, openings, and heights into a band that brings the scale closer to people, and a void, the "air space" where the lighting is the protagonist, but which also houses more technical equipment and infrastructure.
The furniture – tables, stools, and small side tables – was designed to allow different arrangements and organizations and provides more intimate environments than the counter.
