dhanie & sal wraps bandung cafe in acid glass and glass bricks

dhanie & sal draws on skeletons and x-rays for cafe design

Within a home’s front yard in a residential area in Bandung, Indonesia, Sawo Rontgen is a small outdoor coffee shop that takes its cues from the name of its street. The second home of Sawo Coffee sits on the ‘rontgen’ street, with the name translating to ‘x-ray’ and the site bearing a strong link to medical facilities. Playing with this concept and drawing on it to devise the project’s visual identity, Dhanie & Sal creates a bare steel beam structure, wrapping its exterior in a delicate, semi-transparent skin. The cafe is clad with glass bricks stacked in a geometric composition and acid glass which exude a blurred visual element meant to resemble the skin and bone quality of the rontgen visual.

all images courtesy of Dhanie & Sal

sawo rontgen takes shape as a semi-transparent floating box

In order to achieve a ‘rontgen-like’ character, Dhanie & Sal explored different mores of transparency and experimented with materiality and structural qualities. In a floating box composition, the architects arranged glass bricks along the front yard to demarcate the space as a cafe, forming a pseudo-boundary against the house. Acid glass wraps the pavilion like a delicate frosted skin and conceals elements of the existing house while rejuvenating it with an additional layer without making significant alterations. The juxtaposition of the two new modern materials against the exposed steel beam structure and engulfing natural materials results in a broad spectrum of visual transparency that remains sensitive to the structure’s context.

Sawo Coffee opens its second home in a residential area in Bandung

Dhanie & Sal composes the glass bricks in a zig-zag pattern to ensure a a geometric visual feature as well as a strong connection with even weight distribution. Once placed the bricks were stretched to create vertical gaps between them, allowing airflow in and out the wall while reducing material usage by twenty percent. In an extension of the wall’s pattern, which initially came about as a pragmatic approach, this then developed into a definitive language throughout Sawo Rontgen.

The glass pavilion holds within it a stark white coffee bar, a signature feature of Sawo Coffee, greeting customers as they step inside the café area. Hidden inside the box is an outdoor seating area arranged in a fluid circular shape, taking cues from the brand’s logo. Its strong form and connection with nature evokes a calming atmosphere for guests to unwind. Beside the pavilion, a steel staircase leads to the indoor seating area on the upper floor.

a circular outdoor seating area emulates Sawo Coffee’s logo