Sax appeal - cafe design

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1995 by Penny McGuire

In a busy square in the centre of Graz, an ice-cream cafe is an elegant retreat.

Discussing the sources of cultural movements, Peter Blundell Jones draws interesting parallels between the conditions that have made the city of Graz so fertile in all the arts at present, and those in other 'second cities' where the arts seem to have suddenly taken root and flowered. Glasgow at the turn of the century is an obvious example. Another is Barcelona. A crucial factor seems to have been a perception of a regional identity strong enough to form the crucible by which other influences can be transmogrified, producing a new school, a new spirit, that both belongs to the place and transcends it.

A concomitant of heightened artistic consciousness and important to its survival is a new wave of enlightened patrons at even the most modest levels. In the ancient centre of Graz, as in Barcelona, a scattering of small new shops and bars has appeared inset into the old buildings, and you are reminded that while the international influences are plain, there is also the Austrian tradition (of which Hans Hollein is the modern master) of the small exquisitely designed and crafted shop. As in Barcelona, such small projects have provided the means by which young Graz architects have been able to hone their skills and experiment.

Manfred Zernig is a good illustration of a home grown architect. Heir to the internationalism imported by a previous generation during the '60s, he is one of a third generation (with Giselbrecht and Eisenkock) of New Graz Architects. He studied at the city's university and subsequently worked with Szyszkowitz and Kowalski before setting up his own practice in Graz with his wife Ingrid in 1984. Since then, the practice has designed a series of housing schemes in and around the city, as well as the spare and elegant interiors shown here: the Cafe Sax and the baker's shop (p32) in the city centre, and the winery in south Styria (p36).

Zernig possesses the art of subtle exaggeration, by which the deficiencies of a space - too long and narrow, too high and so on - are transformed and the space given drama. The approach is exemplified by the practice's design of the Cafe Sax, an ice-cream bar inserted into a dauntingly long and narrow site running back from the Jakominiplatz. Zernig has seized hold of the main characteristic of the space - its length - and emphasised it by a 15m bench with tables running back from the glazed facade and entrance. On the opposite side is the bar with a counter selling ice-cream onto the square, and at the rear are the kitchen and washrooms.

The severity of the plan is softened by graceful treatment of the interior and the echoes of Mediterranean links in the colours: the walls washed in sunshine yellow and inset with fragments of blue Murano glass, the bar of warm beechwood, and behind it a wall of blue stucco. These echoes are distant, like the presence of the city seen as if distilled from the back of the cafe.