Brew Hub: A Viennese Café Reimagined as a Concrete Network of Counters, Terraces and Voids

Before the newsfeed, there was the coffee house. In 19th-century Vienna, the café was where people read newspapers, argued, played chess and picked up the gossip of the city. Brew Hub starts from a simple but productive question: if the café was once a social network, what would it look like to build one on purpose? The answer is a curving concrete pavilion in which counters, stairs, terraces and patios behave like nodes, and the act of moving through the building becomes the act of exchanging information.

Designed by Heloise Guo, the project was recognised as an Editor's Choice entry in Brewed 2020. Set against the deep coffee house tradition of Vienna, it avoids nostalgic reconstruction. Instead, it abstracts the social qualities of the historic café, its layered rooms, its circulation and its public character, and recasts them in a flowing form drawn from baroque painting and 19th-century Viennese art.

An Arcade That Softens the Edge Between Lawn and Café

Seen from the lawn, Brew Hub reads less like a shop and more like a garden folly that has grown up. The grey concrete shell bends rather than turns corners, and its sloping walls are punctured by a rhythm of arches that let the interior bleed outward. Café tables sit right at the threshold, so the line between street, landscape and interior is negotiated rather than drawn. With an office tower rising behind it, the pavilion stakes out a slower, rounder counterpoint to the gridded city.

The arches matter here as more than a historical reference. They are the building's first act of connection: openings that frame views in both directions, so people outside can see activity within and visitors inside stay aware of the passing city. That mutual visibility is the raw material of the project's social network idea.

Coloured Counters as Nodes Scattered Through the Section

The most telling design move is that service is not concentrated in a single bar. A blue counter tucks against an upper terrace, framed by arched wall niches holding plants, while a yellow counter anchors a café level among tapered concrete columns, open to the sky and marked by a hanging ring light. Colour does the wayfinding work: each counter becomes a recognisable point where people gather, order and linger before drifting on.

This is where the conceptual diagrams of information spreading outward from hubs become architecture. Distributing counters across levels pulls visitors through the building and seeds smaller clusters of conversation rather than one crowded room. The slanting sunlight and curved balustrades keep these spaces calm, so the network feels like a sequence of rooms in a house rather than a busy transit system.

A Spiral Stair Threading Stacked Floors Under One Curved Roof

The sections reveal how the idea holds together vertically. One long cut and three short ones show stacked floors gathered beneath a single curved roof, with a spiral stair acting as the main connector between café levels. The stair is the spine of the network, the route along which people, and the conversations they carry, move from one node to the next.

Read together, the cuts also show how voids and terraces open views across levels. Someone pausing on a landing can look down onto a counter or across to a terrace, which turns circulation into observation. It is a direct translation of the coffee house habit of watching the room, given a third dimension.

An Elongated Organic Footprint That Expands, Narrows and Bends

The plans of the ground, second and third floors show the baroque influence most clearly. The footprint is elongated and organic, swelling into rounded chambers and pinching at concave edges, with stairs, café counters and patio seating distributed along its length. Rather than a rectilinear box divided into zones, the plan reads as a continuous body whose widenings and narrowings suggest where to gather and where to keep moving.

The inclusion of parking on the plans is a quiet reminder that the project engages with practical arrival, not just atmosphere. The transition from car or street into progressively deeper interior zones is part of the experience, a gradual movement from public edge to the more intimate chambers at the heart of the building.

Why This Project Matters

Many café proposals treat the brief as an interior design exercise: a counter, some seating, a mood. Brew Hub treats it as an urban and social question. By framing the café as an information-interchanging hub, Heloise Guo gives every spatial decision, from the distributed counters to the spiral stair and arched openings, a clear role in a larger narrative about how people meet and talk. The building does not simply host social life; it is organised to produce it.

Just as importantly, the project shows a respectful way to work with heritage. Vienna's coffee house culture is easy to imitate and hard to reinterpret. Brew Hub sidesteps pastiche by extracting what made those spaces valuable, visibility, layered rooms, lingering and exchange, and rebuilding them in concrete and curves. In an age when most information travels through screens, it makes a persuasive case that architecture can still be a medium for conversation.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Brew Hub

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Project credits: Brew Hub by Brew Hub Brewed 2020 (uni.xyz).