Wutopia Lab takes customers back in time under the vaulted arcades in this cafe in Shanghai

Wutopia Lab has designed a cafe adding emotions, historical details and touches within the space in Shanghai Historical Museum, China.

Named Piazza In A Room, the interiors of a cafe takes its customers on a journey through time with movie-like details derived from a movie set.

Overall of the project

Wutopia Lab has used vaulted arcades to give a sense of historical time to its visitors. Piazza In A Room, the Mapoly Coffee is situated in the first floor of Shanghai Historical Museum’s West Building. The museum was opened to the public in February 2023.

The Mapoly Coffee is simply defined by a Piazza, Museum, Gallery, Porch and Arcade, alongside a Wishing Pool, Stairs, Stage and Balcony. Read the full design story with the architects’ own words.

The café is sealed in the first floor of the west building

Coffee and Shanghai

You can find Japanese, Korean, American, Taiwanese or Southeast Asian cafés, and you can even find a run-down but proudly maintained 1980s Taiwanese Japanese café on Yongkang Road, but there is no such one that represents Shanghai. However, Shanghai has a long history of cafés. In Eileen Chang’s essay “Double Voices” published in Tiandi magazine in 1945, she began by saying that when she went out with her friends, no matter what they did, they would always end up in a café. At that time, cafés in Shanghai were communal spaces in the city, serving beverages and snacks, but they could also be dancing halls, meeting rooms, libraries, information centers, and everyday social places.

Details of the exterior facade

Coffee and Piazza

The plan of café is shaped like a knife-handle. The bureau of cultural heritage requested to preserve the facade. In addition, the west building is the former stables of the horse racing hall, so the windows of the façade are all high and require frosted glass, which causes a lack of indoor lighting and exterior views.

The café is sealed in the first floor of the west building. It suddenly occurred to me, if I regard the interior façade as exterior, isn’t the main space outdoor? Such exterized-interior could lift the seal.

The vestibule turned into an ambiguous space

The interior space is actually hard to deal with since there is also a huge column in the center. The most public place in the urban typology would be those small squares in Europe. I decided to create a cheerful communal place, a Shanghai café, by combining various building components into an abstract square implanted in the interior of the first floor of the West Building, referring to A Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa, 1977).

The huge column in the center

The central pillar was repurposed as a monument with a wishing pool, behind which a segment of my novel is inscribed. Around it, there are stairs, a colonnade, a stage with a fireplace, and a glass box as a balcony. There can be flowers, coffee, a little wine, love, gossips, pets, stand-up comedy, a sudden song of memories of the Alhambra and an impromptu tango. There can be hustle, cheerfulness as well as hidden jealousy.

“Yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.” (The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran, 1923).

The social atmosphere of a small European square

A clip of the micro-city

When customers entered from the South Huangpi Road arcade, they originally had to reach the café through a common vestibule and public restrooms. We decided to remove the three glass doors and turn the vestibule into an ambiguous space, a porch echoing the colonnade of the indoor plaza.

From there, we pushed open the doors and took a few steps up into the bar area of the café. The black bar area is the handle part of the “knife handle”, and the service space takes up the main area. We turn the aisle into an exhibition and casual seating area. On one side of the door is a take-out waiting area made of green handmade bricks and a small gallery in collaboration with the Shanghai Historical Museum, where you will be surprised to see take-out coffee being handed out from a hidden frame.

The central pillar was repurposed as a monument

At the end of the museum is a stainless-steel sliding door with a white colonnade behind it. The floor of the colonnade is elevated to level with the museum, so that the high windows would fit in the scale of a human being.

From the colonnade, the steps lead people down to the white plaza. Looking back from the square, the black bar is nestled in the white colonnade, where people could have a seat to rest and drink while watching the comedy in the square. And the colonnade along the outer wall was filled with low sofas, a rewrite of my impressions from the hookah cafés of Istanbul. Sun shines through the smokes flowing in the colonnade. Being cozy, life is just like that.

The wishing pool

Mapoly Coffee, from the colonnade into the museum with exhibition halls and then walk to the square with colonnade, is a fragment of the miniature city I envision. Scaling up this ‘Piazza in a Room’, it is then my ideal city – Shanghai.

“Nobody learns without getting it won.”Stairs and a glass box as a balcony

Ornaments

My Shanghai is never minimalist. She needs some very restrained decoration, markers of memories and symbolism. The floor of the entrance gallery is inlaid in the middle with tiles from the stables that were found during the renovation.

The horseshoe symbol commemorating the stables can also be seen on the arches of the colonnade in the black bar. The high siding, enamel floor tiles, parquet flooring and green handmade tiles in the black museum are shaping a Shanghai that is both real and unreal in its memory, which is dramatized by a stained-glass ceiling inspired by coffee cherries.

The aisle turned into an exhibition and casual seating area

I covered the bar area with black wood and the entrance gallery and plaza with white stone. The flooring is all white stone parquet with grid line pop-ups. The stone corners, including the niches, are continuously fillet. You can see the ground niche at the entrance with candles, while the niche in sight, representing cave entrance, the green take-out area, the black bar and white monument behind it faintly visible. It’s not very architectural, but decoration is never a sin, it’s the very little bit of meaning we need to satisfy ourselves.

“Because we need a witness to our lives.”

The take-out waiting area made of green handmade bricks

Shall we dance

I am a man facing a middle-aged crisis. But creating this café, where Yakusho Hiroshi or El Pacino could improvise a tango, I fulfilled my dream from my youth time. I leaned against the stairs, being a little tipsy with champagne, and the door on the stairs was actually a canvas for my thoughts to linger. The tango in the square by my good friends, dancers Zhou Jitian and Zhu Liqian, reminded me of the 90’s, a time of possibilities and bravery.

Shall we dance？Well, I don’t know how to dance, but I want to dance with you awkwardly and clumsily, and the ceiling on the monument will always be sunny, no matter if it is storming outside.

“All I want from you is another day.”

The white colonnade

Shanghai in my eyes

The city where Mapoly Coffee can showcase the alternating day and night lifestyle is a certain clip of Shanghai in my eyes. I had once lost faith in Shanghai and sighed because I was struggling in the hospital bed. But when I pushed open the heavy black doors, a familiar and brave Shanghai came crashing down on me. Well, Shanghai has been alive.

“Sometimes if you love someone, you gotta be strangers to them”

Leonard says, it’s the poignancy of life, and not only do we have to embrace its meaninglessness, but celebrate life because it has no meaning – Café Society.