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Cafes and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display
The design of bars and cafes has played an important role in the development of architecture in the twentieth century. This influence has been felt particularly strongly over the last 30 years, in a time when these social spaces have contributed significantly to the rediscovery and reinvention of cities across Europe and North America.This volume presents and examines this significant urban architectural production, and discusses it against a background of the design of cafes and restaurants across the 19th and 20th centuries. Major themes and developments are discussed and illustrated with case studies, from the functionalist pre-World War Two architects in Central Europe representing modern society through the design of public spaces, right up to the design of sophisticated bars and restaurants as part of the recent urban renaissance of Barcelona and Paris in 1980s and London in the 90s.
224 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 15, 2007
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January 4, 2012
Introductory articles focus on the basics and development of the Public House in all its various manifestations, from the Viennese Kaffeehaus, to the Parisian Café, to the American Cocktail Bar. A welcoming atmosphere, a refuge at some remove from the home that still aimed to present a kind of domestic order and tranquility, but without the concerns or entanglement.
Appropriate to its origins in Asia Minor, the coffee house played on the theme, at first :
"Inspired by the occasional visits of Ottoman envoys and a taste for the exotic, princely courts adopted the custom of setting up tents in the Oriental style in the parks of castles or summer residences. Following these precedents, coffee tents appeared also in entertainment parks such as Vauxhall Pleasure Garden in London and the Prater in Vienna".
At the turn of the 2oth century the style and design had shifted from décor that sought to entrance the customer (ballrooms ! tobacconists ! hairdressers ! billiards !)-- to something more modern; as architects and designers rethought the genre, models as modest as the quietly generic Tea-Shop were integrated…
"…designs by Paul Hankar in Brussels, Loos’ café and his American Bar in Vienna, Mackintosh’s Tea Rooms in Glasgow or the projects designed by various Werkbund architects in Germany ... were examples of the attempts of architects to purge cafes of the mass-produced ornament and brash theatricality of commercial historicist architecture…"
We get into-the-details summaries of the operation and programmatic flow of the various kinds of establishments and, even as the decorative / ornamental aspects are toned into more functional versions, the lingering influences of trans-Europe and the East are still in evidence. Existing quite comfortably alongside the turn-of-century modern railstation and aerodrome kinds of chic. See Bohuslav Fuch’s beautiful Café Avion in Brno, Czechoslovakia, from 1927, here in brief case-study, for the new century’s approach.
Grafe and Bollerey’s Cafes And Bars is a great whirlwind tour of a familiar institution that is taken for granted, something established and codified hundreds of years before our era. And yet, always a kind of work-in-progress, a construct that redefines itself repeatedly in every new pop-up restaurant, nouveau-greasy-spoon or luxe afterhours club that comes along.
The namedropping may be the most extreme I’ve seen in any book; but it turns out to be entertaining. Considering that the last century has largely been devised nearby --if not under the influence of-- absinthe, coffee or alcohol, in the dusky depths of yes, cafes and bars, it is no surprise to see the lists .. Degas, Verlaine, Manet, Voltaire, Monet, Renoir, Joyce, Trotsky, Lenin, Cocteau, Leger, Jarry and Josephine Baker all make cameo appearances here and there. At the Café de la Paix on the Place de l’Opera, one might’ve encountered Emlle Zola, Jules Massenet, Andre Gide, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle or perhaps General De Gaulle. At Café Les Deux Magots, you might find Camus alone, and Sartre and de Beauvoir at the table by the wall, smoking, writing, and ignoring everyone.
And the case-studies are all interesting, from the Avion to the Seagram Executive Bar in the Chrysler Building by M. Lapidus, to Neutra’s Coco-Tree Bar at Hollywood & Vine, to Philippe Starck’s Café Costes in Paris, there is something here for every taste.
Fascinating study overall, way more here than I can summarize, well worth a lengthy browse.
Appropriate to its origins in Asia Minor, the coffee house played on the theme, at first :
"Inspired by the occasional visits of Ottoman envoys and a taste for the exotic, princely courts adopted the custom of setting up tents in the Oriental style in the parks of castles or summer residences. Following these precedents, coffee tents appeared also in entertainment parks such as Vauxhall Pleasure Garden in London and the Prater in Vienna".
At the turn of the 2oth century the style and design had shifted from décor that sought to entrance the customer (ballrooms ! tobacconists ! hairdressers ! billiards !)-- to something more modern; as architects and designers rethought the genre, models as modest as the quietly generic Tea-Shop were integrated…
"…designs by Paul Hankar in Brussels, Loos’ café and his American Bar in Vienna, Mackintosh’s Tea Rooms in Glasgow or the projects designed by various Werkbund architects in Germany ... were examples of the attempts of architects to purge cafes of the mass-produced ornament and brash theatricality of commercial historicist architecture…"
We get into-the-details summaries of the operation and programmatic flow of the various kinds of establishments and, even as the decorative / ornamental aspects are toned into more functional versions, the lingering influences of trans-Europe and the East are still in evidence. Existing quite comfortably alongside the turn-of-century modern railstation and aerodrome kinds of chic. See Bohuslav Fuch’s beautiful Café Avion in Brno, Czechoslovakia, from 1927, here in brief case-study, for the new century’s approach.
Grafe and Bollerey’s Cafes And Bars is a great whirlwind tour of a familiar institution that is taken for granted, something established and codified hundreds of years before our era. And yet, always a kind of work-in-progress, a construct that redefines itself repeatedly in every new pop-up restaurant, nouveau-greasy-spoon or luxe afterhours club that comes along.
The namedropping may be the most extreme I’ve seen in any book; but it turns out to be entertaining. Considering that the last century has largely been devised nearby --if not under the influence of-- absinthe, coffee or alcohol, in the dusky depths of yes, cafes and bars, it is no surprise to see the lists .. Degas, Verlaine, Manet, Voltaire, Monet, Renoir, Joyce, Trotsky, Lenin, Cocteau, Leger, Jarry and Josephine Baker all make cameo appearances here and there. At the Café de la Paix on the Place de l’Opera, one might’ve encountered Emlle Zola, Jules Massenet, Andre Gide, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle or perhaps General De Gaulle. At Café Les Deux Magots, you might find Camus alone, and Sartre and de Beauvoir at the table by the wall, smoking, writing, and ignoring everyone.
And the case-studies are all interesting, from the Avion to the Seagram Executive Bar in the Chrysler Building by M. Lapidus, to Neutra’s Coco-Tree Bar at Hollywood & Vine, to Philippe Starck’s Café Costes in Paris, there is something here for every taste.
Fascinating study overall, way more here than I can summarize, well worth a lengthy browse.
Displaying 1 of 1 review