Cadogan Cafe

SHORTLISED COMPETITION ENTRY FOR Events, Cafe and Community Space

More and more, our most valued public spaces are not just places to consume. They also serve as platforms for shared instants and experiences. They articulate our common delight in time, traditions, ideas and the presence of others.

Our proposal for Cadogan Café, looked at how we can build a new popular institution, addressing the increasing privatisation of public space, and the divisions this creates, through curating new intensified programmes that are accessible as well as value adding.

00 partnered with curator Beatrice Galilee to imagine not just an expanded café, but an expanded place for experience; an annual programme of art commissions, events & installations. Chelsea’s own ‘fourth plinth’ or ‘turbine hall’. Its architecture is, in some ways, about the opposite of a ‘building’.

Not an object, but the surface of the square itself; a stage. A café that rises in the morning, and goes to sleep at night. Always there, but changed on each return.

It’s an approach that unlocks the particular quality of Duke of York Square: that it, more perhaps than any other space in London, celebrates time, the timeless, the seasons. Nowhere feels more festive at Christmas, more summery during summer, more autumnal during autumn.

Client: Cadogan Estates
Location of project: Chelsea, London

Design Team:               
Beatrice Galilee
Momentum Engineering
Seed Landscape Design
Artelia Group
THD Consulting Engineers

Shortlisted Competition Entry