In the dense intersection between cinematic ambiance and material experimentation, the Berlin café designed by About Space condenses an architectural vision where rammed concrete, ash wood and terrazzo flooring orchestrate a spatial choreography of radical yet sensitive brutalism, drawing direct inspiration from the dystopian visual language of Zardoz (Boorman, 1974), a film whose speculative aesthetics here become a matrix for tactile, monolithic composition, and existential spatial drama, allowing the visitor to inhabit a mise-en-scène of stone and grain, shadow and reflection; the café counter, a mass of striated terracotta-toned earth, emerges like an artificial sedimentation, its weight anchored by a colonnade of vertical cuts that evokes both archaeological remains and modular future ruins, while the seating area contrasts this density through a language of geometry in ash wood and charred timber stools, arranged against a long bench that underlines the space with horizontal calm, activating dialogues between natural textures and industrial echoes, further intensified by a corrugated chromed wall sculpture that reflects and distorts human presence into a continuously shifting digital fresco, anchoring the futuristic mood with sculptural intensity; a revealing moment lies in the isometric drawing, where the project’s programmatic clarity and volumetric balance unfold like a mechanical diagram, confirming its systemic yet expressive logic, one that never neglects sensorial proximity in favor of abstraction; ultimately, this café transcends typology by embracing brutalist warmth—a paradox where rawness becomes intimacy and matter becomes narrative, transforming the simple act of coffee into a ritual within a sci-fi scenography reinterpreted through architectural tactility.
