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Architects: 100A associates
- Area: 490 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Jae-yoon Kim
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Lead Architects: Kwang-il An, Sol-ha Park
Text description provided by the architects. The inception of Korean coffee accompanied our painful history and is a form of Western culture that took its place during a time when, due to the sweeping currents of modernization, our distinct cultural and aesthetic values were becoming lost. Despite this, we did not dismiss coffee, so deeply rooted in our establishment for the extended period of 140 years, as merely a Western cultural aspect, and decided it was the right time to contemplate the aesthetics of coffee in a location containing our spatial aesthetics.
Thus, as we were pondering how to make two contrasting cultures co-exist in one venue without damaging one another, we met an aesthetic concept called “grafting.” The aesthetic concept of “grafting” signifies bringing two opposing entities together to coexist without being combined, and through it, we strived to weld the visualization that had been accumulated for a long time into the space while respecting the individual appearances of these two conflicting concepts, the splendor of the East and the West, without merging them.
The form expressed through the restrained and crude proportions of the exterior provides depth following the flow of visual perspective, endowing the space with immersion, and we made the beauty of untechnical homeliness expressed as such the medium leading the extended scene connected to the interior. By placing an espresso bar containing the client’s management philosophy of pursuing the originality of coffee and a roasting room in the space first encountered upon entrance, we manifested the emblem of sincerity toward coffee with heaviness and depth.
The second space encountered following the heaviness and depth is produced with four scenes, designed to allow feeling a variety of emotions and contemplation through the harmony of openness and closedness, the dynamic and the static, and the space was endowed with a refinement that can harness warmth even with shaded light by dressing it with naturalistic materials such as lacquered hanji and hemp cloth, etc.
We do not mean to speak of traditionality through this space. However, I merely wanted to know what was held in the curiosity about worn-down and old vestiges and the aesthetic visualization inherently nested deep within me. That something within me speaks to me in a language I do not even understand, much like the trace of a faint trail.
What is enjoyed in this space is free to all, but I simply hope that it implants the senses of comfort and familiarity. I hope that in this mysterious tranquility, someone will follow my path and find what I could not.
