Coffee(TwentyOne): A Cafe That Trades Coffee for Unwanted Objects Beside Belvedere 21

What if the price of a coffee were an object you no longer need? Coffee(TwentyOne) builds an entire cafe around that question. Visitors hand over things that have lost their use, receive coffee tokens in return, and watch those objects become part of the building: stored, displayed, claimed by artists, transformed, and eventually returned to public view as new work. The cafe stops being a place where people only consume. It becomes a place where they contribute, and the architecture is designed to make that cycle visible.

The project was designed by Ahmet Batuhan Akdemir, Emre Karcı, Onurcan Mızrak and Emir Karcı, and was shortlisted in Brewed 2020. Its site sits beside Belvedere 21, and the team treats the museum as more than a backdrop. Rather than borrowing the museum's prestige as scenery, the cafe sets out to act as a working cultural counterpart: a smaller, more informal institution where art is not only shown but made from what the public brings through the door.

Starting From the Familiar Coffee House, Then Leaving It Behind

The presentation opens with references to the traditional coffee house: a vaulted hall of stone columns and globe lamps with a pastry case in the foreground, and a crowded timber-ceilinged room hung with paintings and a balcony gallery above the tables. These are the cafes that taught Europe how to gather, and their mix of art, conversation and spectacle is exactly what the team wants to recover. The designers' critique targets the contemporary version of the type, which they see as relying on comfort, familiarity and recognisable visual formulas.

Coffee(TwentyOne) keeps the essentials of preparation, service, seating and informal gathering, but it adds a mechanism that changes the visitor's role. A customer can also be an exchanger, an observer or a catalyst for artistic production. Read against these historical images, the proposal feels less like a break with cafe culture and more like an attempt to return the coffee house to the civic and cultural ambition it once had.

A Central Column and a Triangulated Glass Wall

Inside, the space organises itself around a central column wrapped in a round planter, with tables turned toward a triangulated lattice glass wall. In daylight the lattice reads as a fine structural screen, filtering views outward. At dusk the same wall fills the room with deep blue light, and a circular ceiling recess above the column becomes the room's quiet focal point. The pairing of these two renders makes a useful argument: the cafe is meant to change character over the course of a day, just as its contents change over time.

The lattice also does conceptual work. A gridded, cellular surface suggests a framework waiting to be filled, which suits a building whose identity depends on the objects passing through it. Storage becomes exhibition and the facade becomes an installation wall, so the glazing is less a neutral envelope than a display frame for evidence of participation.

Timber Balustrades, Stepped Platforms and a Planted Edge

A view along a timber-clad balustrade leads toward a stepped platform and another stretch of lattice, with vertical slats framing a cloudy sky. The level change matters: it lets the cafe separate activity from seating without walls, and it gives visitors vantage points over the exchange and display zones. Circulation routes, in the designers' own terms, are part of the exchange process, and the stepped section is where that idea becomes physical.

The planted bed of palms and agave beside a green stone wall adds a slower register. Lattice shadows fall across the stone, carrying the geometry of the glass wall onto the landscape. It is a small moment, but it shows the team thinking about atmosphere alongside programme, giving the busy logic of tokens and objects a calmer counterpoint.

Five Zones That Turn Exchange Into Programme

The drawing sheet is where the proposal's strongest idea is easiest to read. Alongside four elevations and two sections, five axonometric diagrams map the building into kitchen, activity, seating, storage and installation wall zones. Crucially, the exchange is not tucked into back-of-house operations. The activity zone is positioned as an accessible part of the cafe rather than an isolated service counter, and storage is treated as a visible layer rather than a cupboard.

This is where the cycle described in the brief gains spatial form: items arrive, are swapped for tokens, are held and shown within the architecture, are acquired by artists, and come back as new works. Each stage has a place in the plan. The diagrams make clear that the building is less a finished interior than an apparatus, one whose appearance is expected to shift as participation accumulates.

Why This Project Matters

Cafe competitions often reward mood: a good material palette, a well-lit counter, a memorable facade. Coffee(TwentyOne) earns its place on the Brewed 2020 shortlist by proposing a system instead. Its exchange of objects for coffee tokens is simple enough to grasp at a glance, yet it reshapes the plan, the facade and the role of every visitor. Art is not hung on the walls after the fact; it is produced by the building's own operating logic.

The open questions are practical ones: how the collection is curated, how artists are brought in, and how the cafe avoids becoming a storeroom. But the ambition is the right one. By sitting beside Belvedere 21 and acting as its informal counterpart, the project suggests that small hospitality buildings can carry real cultural weight, and that the most interesting thing a cafe can offer may be the chance to take part in something larger than a cup of coffee.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Ahmet Batuhan Akdemir, Emre Karcı, Onurcan Mızrak, Emir Karcı

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Project credits: Coffee(TwentyOne) by Ahmet Batuhan Akdemir, Emre Karcı, Onurcan Mızrak, Emir Karcı Brewed 2020 (uni.xyz).