With Café Fargo, we converted a formerly neglected corner store into a small coffee shop in a residential neighborhood of Buffalo, NY, USA. The former corner store, built in 1929, is a monolithic brick addition to the corner of a 3-story brick house built around 1880.
Typically, for a hospitality space a large amount of the construction budget goes into mechanical systems that provide a uniform indoor climate throughout the year. We took the opposite approach and transformed these invisible mechanical services into two experien¬tial architectural elements. These elements emphasize the distinct pleasures of summer and winter and critically question the dictum of a uniform indoor climate. We built:
1) Extra-large operable windows and skylights that provide natural ventilation and passive cooling, and
2) A large-scale, wood burning kachelofen (masonry heater) which serves as the radiant heat source for the space.
Hardwick Hall (Derbyshire, 1590-97) stood as a case study for the project. This building features a dynamic inhabitation pattern, where occupation is constantly moving between its large fireplaces in winter and back into large bay windows in summer. Similarly, we unfolded the space of Café Fargo between extra-large operable sliding folding windows at the perimeter wall for summer ventilation and a large-scale kachelofen at the core of the space. The heater wraps around the interior corner of the older house, where café patrons can huddle against the radiant cement surfaces.
The space is structured in three bands, wrapping around the corner of the historic house. The innermost band consists of the large-scale kachelofen, which is constructed as a long, horizontal bench and a vertical tower. The tower also forms a spatial pocket that contains the bathroom. The kachelofen bench is the longest in North America and was researched and developed in close collabo¬ration with a local stove manufacturer. Another novelty is the use of microencapsulated phase change material in the outer shell of the stove to increase the thermal storage capacity and to limit tempera¬ture peaks. The outermost band consists of the large-scale folding-sliding windows with thick oak sills extended into benches. The habitable perimeter blurs the barrier between inside and outside; opened-up, the space feels like a covered outdoor patio space. The space between the windows and the stove provides an open seating area for ever-changing seating patterns. The custom designed lights are held-up on the old tin ceiling with magnets, and allow for the lighting patterns to change and following different seating arrange-ments throughout the year.
Because the space offers three different seating options at different heights – the window sills, the chairs and the stove bench, we desig¬ned a height-adjustable table. The table top, fixed to a tripod base with a threaded rod, is able to be spun like a piano stool up or down to adapt to the different seating heights.
Apart from the two added elements (heater and window), the renovation consisted mainly of stripping away the various floor, wall and ceiling surfaces that had accumulated over the years, until we reached a surface with material integrity. We avoided any form of additional cladding, trimming or wall coverings. With this stripping-away approach, we made the space and its relationship to the older house, more legible.
The windows and the kachelofen offer users powerful physical expe¬riences independent from any specific program, making it an alluring space for many more future uses. They also test an alternative to standard practices of climate conditioning.