In its debut in the largest exhibition of architecture, interior design and landscaping of the Americas, CASACOR, the office TRPC Arquitetos, signs two spaces, the “Loft do Colecionador” and the “Cafeteria Coffeetown”. For a cafe, young architects Adalberto Vilela, Cecília Miscow, Tiago Schultz and Vanessa Sampaio worked on a recurring theme in their architectural investigations: the architecture of the house, a combination of volumes and scale, considering a careful setting in the food court of the event.

With a simple architectural gesture of extruding the silhouette of a house, the architects designed a cafe that attracts attention at first sight. A “house” was designed with two opaque walls that are used for displaying products sold in the café’s grocery store, and a large glass curtain wall that extends from the walls to the roof, natural light during the day and illuminating the square at night. The volume defined by the walls surrounding the cafeteria is 6m long, 4m wide and 5.30m high, giving 24 m² of floor space.

The dark green hue of the facade unifies the structure and connects it to the surrounding landscaping. The café acts as an entrance to the event square, with a transparent and symmetric volume that invites visitors to take a break for coffee and cake while watching the actions that take place during the whole CASACOR event. The glass wall facing east expands the space by integrating the interior with the exterior and gives a very diverse day and night visuals.

During the day, even from the footbridge that connects the two main houses of the event, it’s able to see the café, but, during nightfall, the interior glows illuminated by a constellation made up of 20 pendants with apparent lamps, becoming a focal point of the event’s main square. For the external environment, the architects designed a deck with chairs and tables for a quiet outdoor cafe among the garden plants, with indirect and intimate lighting, showing the elegant ‘house’ gable which reveals the minimalist trait of the architects.