A commercial commission designed and installed by MaW Design Group in 2018.
Goal:
The project’s goal was to design elegant ornamentation which visually expanded a restrictive volume with an eye-catching and efficient design.
The Coffee Lab is the result of MaW Design Group’s first commission: to design one of the smallest cafés in the world. By arranging a flattened Donatello’s David upon several deepening planes of classical signifiers, the Group forced perceptively deepened, simultaneously multi-dimensional interpretations to the fore.
David and his ornaments were unfolded onto a two-dimensional plane, then re-enclosed onto the surface of the Coffee Lab’s interior to generate a lighthearted, rhythmic progression that persistently changes shape as the audience’s viewpoint travels across distance and axes.
The Coffee Lab project is located at Richmond and Spadina in Toronto, a wealthy commercial/residential area with an abundance of office space. It is built into a window display unit next door to Wide Open - an entire bar fit inside a shipping container slipped into the alley-way between two buildings.
Adapted spaces are a foothold for small businesses and non-oligarchic commercial entities in the current urban economic environment. Designing for ‘retail in-fill’ sites on its own represents a step towards a more complete political, economic and ecological design philosophy.
Studio MaW is comprised of Sebastian López Cardozo, Neil Xavier Vas, Kian Hosseinnia, Adriana Sadun and Daniel Lewycky.
Features:
The Toronto Star
NOW Magazine (Apr. 2018)
The National Post (Jan 2019)
James Sarner (Toronto Life, Nov. 2019)
