Chiringuito Cafeteria
After the success of the “Coffee and Tree” Café among the people of Rizhao, our client was offered to build a new cafeteria in a very special and very beautiful location; on the edge between a Black Pine Forest and the Beach of Rizhao. A completely natural and unique location, but where different and messy buildings had been built during the years without any order. The brief included to clean all this mess and to create a new Cafeteria as a bridge between these two natural landscapes.
That´s why we always thought in the building as something very transparent and it ended consisting in three stepped glass rectangles joined together and oriented parallelly to the sea shoreline. So, from every point in the interior of the building, and from its upper terraces you could see perfectly the sea but also you let the clear view through it of the pine forest in the back.
These three clean geometries organize very simply the cafeteria distributing the whole program at three different levels with a step of 70cm between each of them and rising them up from the sand level at 6 meters from the tide level. You can open the sliding doors to the sides to let a totally open space to the beach with the smell of the sea.
The terrace level gets the most astonishing views with the building section measuring just 6.80m above the ground level.
The interior ceiling is a continuity of the outdoor sun protections that are in both cases made of recycled aluminum tubes painted in 5 different colors and that gives the color and sea personality to the whole building.
We called it always “Chiringuito” in remembrance of all this places that are next to the beach all around the coast in Spain, but the client preferred to call it the “Coffee and Sea” as a continuation of different Cafes related to nature that they had planned to build.
From the sea side, the building disappears. It remains visible only through the reflections of the landscape on the glass walls and allowing a glimpse of the pine forest that mixes with the guests of the cafeteria, the real actioners in this clear space.
