Franziska Bollerey

Christoph Grafe

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 past thirty 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 bars across the nineteenth and twentieth 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 cafes as part of the recent urban renaissance of Barcelona and Paris in 1980s and London in the '90s.

The Architecture of Public Display

Cafes and Bars

Mark Pimlott

Edited by Christoph Grafe, Mark Pimlot and Mechthild Stuhlmacher. Essays by Adam Caruso, Irina Davidovici, Tony Fretton, Mikel Van Gelderen and Patrick Healy.

Ornament

Oase #65

Klaske Havik

Madeleine Maaskant

Over its more than 20 years in print, "OASE" has evolved into a reflective, critical journal, an excellent venue for the theme of this, its seventieth issue, "Architecture and Literature." A favorable economic and political climate encourages single-minded designing and building, as the 'SuperDutch' phenomenon has in "OASE"'s native Netherlands, but "OASE"'s editors suggest that a boom is exactly the time to look for new perspectives and approaches in literary reflection, to seek encounters between artistic disciplines, to see what reciprocal exchange might offer to architectural practice. "OASE 70" discusses the (auto-)biographical novel, in which highly personal descriptions and narratives challenge us to look at architecture in a different way, and at what literary reflection can represent for architectural practice.

Architecture & Literature Reflections/imaginations

According to urban academic myth, the first restaurants emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. From the very beginning in the elegant salons of the latter days of the Ancien Régime, the design of restaurants has been closely related to ideas of how food should be presented and how it may be consumed in public. The appearance and atmosphere created by restaurant owners reflects culturally embedded ideals of comfort, sociability and the good life. As a product of the modern metropolis, the restaurant encapsulates and illustrates the profound change in how its patrons viewed themselves as individuals, how they used their cities and how they met friends or business partners over a meal. The architectural design of environments for the consumption of food necessarily involves an exploration and a manipulation of the human experience of space. It reflects ideas about public and private behaviour for which the restaurant offers a stage. Famous architects were commissioned to provide designs for restaurants in order to lure in an ever more demanding urban clientele. The interior designs of restaurants were often employed to present this particular aspect in consciously evoking an imagery of sophisticated modernity. This book presents the restaurant, its cultural and typological history as it evolved over time. In this unique combination it provides valuable knowledge for designers and students of design, and for everyone interested in the cultural history of the modern metropolis.

Christoph Grafe

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