The Fav Café: How to Maximize Small Urban Spaces
The Fav Café is a thought-provoking experiment in how we use the space around us. With urban areas becoming denser and more expensive, the cafe challenges the way we traditionally design and build establishments.
Here, the focus is on maximizing functionality within a limited space. Which raises the question: Are we building our establishments in a way that adapts to the urban environment? Can we adapt our current methods to create efficient and inviting spaces in a more compact and cost-effective way?
Built in Ciudad de Córdoba in Argentina last 2023, the small establishment’s design and planning was led by Rare Studio Experimental, with four lead architects working on the project. The design takes care to introduce itself as a way of making a space tailored for the city street. With its bustling activities and the way one weaves from the collective to the self, it necessitates a new approach to use space efficiently for customers on-the-go and those moving at a more leisurely pace.
Adapting to Urban Spaces?
What’s interesting about The Fav Café is how it exists as a street corner. When the coffee shop is closed, the windows are shuttered with solid metal windows and doors, complete with graffiti. A passerby could mistake it for a normal street corner.
Rare Studio Experimental designed the cafe to make it look like part of the sidewalk. Except for the small round table tops jutting out from the wall, it would be easy to see this as just another walkway.
But once the store opens and the metal shutters raised, the efficiency of the design becomes even more apparent. Inside, you find a plaza within the cafe, blurring the lines between the interior and exterior. This serves as a public space, inviting the neighborhood to gather and use it even beyond the cafe’s operating hours.
There’s street art on the wall, and the round table tops connect to a long bench where you can enjoy your coffee with some company. There are two ways you can order coffee here. You can go inside the plaza and line up, or you can go through the take-out counter outside next to the benches and tables.
How Do We Utilize Our Small Spaces?
Unlike many other coffee shops that utilize a lot of space to create the perfect atmosphere, Fav Café crafts an experience for the on-the-go city dweller in mind. The store only has six tables in total, with most of its space used for the counter where they serve the coffee.
It seems like it was an intentional choice by the designers to use an open space concept as a way of reclaiming the sidewalk and encouraging mobility in the community. Moreover, it’s designed to encourage actual community. Reducing the borders between the store and the street makes it a meeting point for the neighborhood.
Coffee shop chains like Starbucks tend to encourage exclusivity in their usage of space. The Fav Café, however, asks us to question this: why can’t the shop be open to everyone in the community? It’s an experiment with its own repercussions (the exclusivity in Starbucks, for example, is used by freelance workers to be their office away from home), but one worth wondering about.
The Fav Café functions as a worthwhile experiment on how architects can merge public and private space, even with a small area. As we continue to urbanize further into the future, such solutions are important to try in order to create a closer-knit community in our cities.
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