Piazza in a room

The Manpoli Cafe designed by Wutopia Lab opened in February 2023 on the first floor of the west building of the Shanghai History Museum. Shanghai has more cafes than any city in the world, offering Japanese, Korean, American, Taiwanese, and Southeast Asian styles; even a dilapidated but proud 1980s Taiwanese-Japanese cafe can be found on Yongkang Road, but there is no truly Shanghai-style cafe. Yet Shanghai's cafe history is long: in her 1945 essay Shuang Sheng published in Tiandi magazine, Eileen Chang wrote that whenever she went out with friends, whatever they did, the final destination was usually a cafe. At that time, Shanghai cafes were public spaces in the city, offering coffee and snacks while serving as dance halls, meeting rooms, and libraries, the information center and everyday social venue of Shanghai. The cafe plan is a knife-handle shape. The Cultural Heritage Bureau required that the exterior facade not be altered, and because the west building was originally the stable of the old racecourse, the windows are high clerestory windows that must be frosted glass, causing insufficient interior daylight and preventing outdoor scenery from entering. The cafe is sealed into the first floor of the west building. The designer's insight was to treat the exterior wall's inner face as a facade, so that the main space becomes outdoor. Redirecting the lost view inward unseals the space. What should be at the center, given that a giant column occupies it? The most social place in the urban typology is the European piazza. Drawing on A Pattern Language, the designer assembled abstract piazza elements inside the first floor to create a cheerful social place, a Shanghai cafe. The central column is converted into a monument with a wishing well, with fragments of the designer's novel carved on its back. Around it are steps, a colonnade, a stage with fireplace, and glass boxes serving as balconies. There may be flowers, coffee, a little wine, love, gossip, pets, stand-up comedy, a sudden rendition of Recuerdos de la Alhambra, and impromptu tango: noise, joy, and hidden jealousy. Customers enter through the overpass on Huangpi South Road; the former shared anteroom between the cafe and public restrooms is opened up by removing three glass doors to become a gray space, an outer corridor echoing the interior colonnade. The black bar area occupies the handle of the knife shape; passageways become exhibition areas and loose seating. One side of the entrance is a green handmade-brick takeaway waiting area that is also a small gallery in collaboration with the Shanghai History Museum; takeaway coffee is handed out through a hidden picture frame. At the end of the museum is a stainless-steel sliding door; beyond it lies a white colonnade whose floor is raised to museum level, so that the high windows become normal-scale windows. Descending from the colonnade, one reaches the white piazza; looking back, the black bar is embedded in the white colonnade, where the designer has kept a hidden seat to drink and observe the comedy of the piazza. Low sofas line the colonnade along the exterior wall, a rewriting of the designer's memory of the water-pipe cafes of Istanbul.