The Road to the Cafe

Our final project was to choose a site and design a cafe, more or less from scratch. This resulted in a flurry of initial ideas: a cafe in the surf of a beach, a cafe under a bridge ('Leebow's Under the Bridge' from the 2002 unpublished work "Restaurants."), and so on. At the same time, I felt a strong urge to come up with a design principle that wasn't parasitic on a gimmick.

What eventually became the idea for the final design struck me when I spent a week back on the East Coast. The architecture of Boston and New York has a richness to it that is lacking out here in the South Bay. Once you start paying attention to Stanford, and begin to notice more besides the whole faux Spanish mission thing, it turns out that campus is stuffed with monstrously depressing ranch houses (ultra modern monoliths near the medical school notwithstanding).

At the same time, Boston interiors with their wall moldings and leather upholstery have a tendency to get stuffy. I wanted to build something in the spirit of a Boston brownstone to inject a little life and texture into the thin siding jungle of Escondido Village. At the same time, I wanted my building to be open, bright - to let the Californianess of the outside penetrate into the interior.

I began with a freehand sketch of a cafe in the spirit of a brownstone, just with more windows.



sketch.

But this was a bit too literal (I won't bother to explain the details of the sketch above, it's just meant to set a brownstone-y mood). Please note, however, the shape of the bay window (top left sketch), as it was important in the segue to the next step, and fragments of it are still around in the final design.


It then occurred to me that what I was really trying to do was contrast the heavy brick of the brownstone with the brightness of Sunny Palo Alto. I took those bay windows and wrapped them all the way around the building, and sometimes used the same shape in solid brick. I kept trying to create more faces within the building, to heighten the contrast between bay windows and brick walls (and also to have more surfaces to display art), and ended up with this octagonal interior:


front.



I liked this perspective because it really emphasized the play of solid and glass.


I showed this design to Charles who said something very interesting, which was "don't let the architecture interfere with the design." That certainly sounds very wise, and it struck me as a curious use of the word 'architecture,' which here means "windowpanes and things." Of course, he was right. I was trying to suggest the bay windows of the brownstone with large picture windows set into the brick. But those don't juxtapose against the solid brick nearly as well as simple panes of glass.

Here's the same building, but with glass faces where there were once windows (also the material is rendered with color):


front.



perspective from top.




Here's that same perspective I liked earlier. But this also led me to the idea of offsetting the faces of glass and brick. The idea that the brick faces are penetrating though, almost shattering, the glass faces. This idea led me all the way to the final design.