The designers at FORSPACE STUDIO started work on the Cream & Bean café in Taipei's Datong district with a question: will daily coffee ever become history? They decided to answer it using the method of Daniel Arsham, an artist who turns contemporary objects into ruins of the future.
Columns, split pedestals and chunks of blocks are cast by hand in concrete, with reinforcing bars left sticking out here and there. Rome is only a shell here, and the dig is staged as a coffee shop of the future. The authors themselves call the interior a rehearsal: every cup is served here as a resource worth looking after. It is brewed behind a smooth metal counter in the middle of the debris.
The café takes up about 45 square meters on the ground floor of a new residential building on Chengde Road. FORSPACE is led by William Chen. The fragments also work as furniture: you sit on them, and they are arranged so that guests walk past them one at a time, in the order in which an archaeologist opens up a dig.
Visitors meet real stone at the entrance. The door handles are made of roughly hand-hewn stone in a black metal frame, so the first thing a person touches is the material that all the concrete inside is finished to resemble.
Besides coffee, they sell bagels and gelato and hold DJ days and DJ nights. One floor up, judging by the description of a Taiwanese blogger, there is a restaurant serving brunch.
