The Cafe Itself

Escondido Village was built for economy. Many of the buildings are made with cheap siding and seem very flimsy. I wanted to import the solidity of the heavy brick East coast buildings without being too offensive to the California setting.

I thought if I opened up the building with lots of glass, I could let the California sunlight in, but also let viewers on the outside explore the brick structure. Think of it as a sort of East Coast/West Coast cultural exchange.

What I ended up with was this sort of glass box punctuated by brick pillars. The project became about contrast: heavy and light, transparent and solid:






What's important to me here is that the planes of brick and glass are offset. The brick extends beyond the glass in the vertical direction, as you can see above, and on each side of the building, as you can see in the plan:



I also like this following perspective, even though it's not technically correct, because it shows how the glass box is meant to appear sort of squat:



In this way, it is the glass that is enclosing you up in a box, but the brick that is crashing through the glass and setting you free from it. This subverts how these materials normally behave (glass usually provides windows, escapes out of a brick box) which is intended to emphasize the solid/transparent contrast.


here are a few more drawings about which I will comment later: