The Street café provides a human setting, special to cities: a place where people can sit lazily, legitimately, be on view, and watch the world go by.
Studio DOTCOF from Shanghai recently completed a street café – FOOOO, which based on the concept of “terrace”. The site is adjacent to one main entrance of AUX mall in Chengdu, and adjacent to an outdoor square. Beyond the square, there are the subway station and a busy road. The social nature in street café requires the openness in space. However, we have within our nature tendencies towards both communality and individuality; both our participation with a public world and the intimacy of a private haven. In this site existing condition, the “openness” space will easily be overwhelmed by the adjacent over-scale square and the crowd to the entrance, if not defining it carefully.
Our research is to create a space which is open and friendly, also avoid the interruption from adjacent over-scale square and crowd to mall entrance, further to improve their relations, building a new human place. Early in his career, Frank Lloyd Wright experimented the relations between interior and street, on both Cheney house and Roby house. He built a wide terrace between private living room and street. Raise the terrace slightly above street level and protect it with a low wall, which you can see over if you sit near it, but which prevent people on the street from looking into the living room.
Studio DOTCOF use this pattern to build a big terrace connecting the interior and exterior, raise the indoor and outdoor floors up on a same level, and place planters surrounding the terrace. The only division inserted in between is a full-length sliding glass door. When the glass door is fully open, interior and exterior space are merged completely. The only solid partition is a wood box mass on the big terrace, which includes a kitchen, a dishwashing room and a small intimate dining area.
The designer Xi Chen from Studio DOTCOF said: “in this street cafe design, we refused the “spectacularity” design strategy which often used in commercial space in today’s consuming society, but a more human and peaceful design instead.
