Cafe With Pipe Wall
The redesign of Masa’s original cafe an bakery on 70th St. in Bogota. We transformed what was a cramped storefront into a spacious cafe by reorienting both front and back of house spaces to open towards the street and extending a terrace to wrap the entire building at its corner. A distinctive perimeter wall, built with re-purposed concrete pipes, lines this terrace and becomes the defining feature of the design. It projects a new urban identity at street level while screening spaces above with greenery.
Inside, all existing walls were removed and freestanding elements were introduced to modulate the space within the raw shell. A diagonal marble counter, a changeable wood display, a stainless steel cooking station cube and a cylindrical bathroom, wrapped in custom triangular concrete tiles, are the only elements organizing the space in plan. To reinforce the continuity between exterior and interior, a highly graphic terrazzo floor dotted with inset circles extends over all public areas inside and out. The floor becomes the unifying device tying disparate elements together within the continuous room.
These figural interventions not only provide specific services but also help define the character of the space. In this project, architecture attempts to function as furniture does within a room, where the room itself remains unchanged yet engages in a dialogue with the objects placed within it. A set of limited gestures that redefine spatial conditions and overlay a new identity over an existing structure both inside and out.
