Modern Cafe Design in Vienna: Lala Leung’s Brewed 2020 Editor’s Choice Café Concept

Lala Leung’s Editor’s Choice entry for Brewed 2020 presents a refined example of modern cafe design that responds directly to its urban surroundings in Vienna. Located along Arsenalstraße, the café is positioned between a contemporary museum, a private office building, and a public park. This location gives the project a strong civic role. It is not simply a coffee house, but a transitional space where museum visitors, local residents, office workers, tourists, and casual passersby can pause, gather, and experience the city through architecture.

The design takes inspiration from traditional Viennese cafés while translating their social and cultural atmosphere into a contemporary architectural language. Rather than reproducing historic forms, the project studies the essence of the Viennese coffee house: conversation, performance, public life, hospitality, and intellectual exchange. These ideas are then reinterpreted through modern massing, exposed materiality, controlled natural light, and a carefully layered spatial sequence.

At its core, the café explores contrast. Public and private, open and enclosed, loud and quiet, formal and informal, artificial and natural light all coexist within a single linear architectural composition. The project uses this contrast to shape different levels of privacy, allowing the café to function as both a public gathering venue and an intimate retreat.

  Project: Brewed: Café Design Competition

Project by: Lala Leung

Recognition: Editor’s Choice entry of Brewed 2020

Site Context: A Café Between Museum, Office, and Park

The master plan shows the café placed near a public park and close to cultural and residential activity. Its position along Arsenalstraße makes it highly visible from the street, while its proximity to the museum gives the café a strong programmatic opportunity. It can serve tourists visiting the neighboring Contemporary Museum, while also providing a daily social destination for residents in the developing neighborhood.

This relationship between culture and community is central to the modern cafe design strategy. The café becomes an architectural connector. It mediates between the larger urban institutions around it and the smaller everyday rituals of coffee, music, conversation, and rest.

The surrounding landscape also influences the spatial atmosphere. The park and greenery to the east of the site are used to soften the building’s private volume, creating a quieter ambience away from the more public street edge. The building is therefore not isolated from its context. It absorbs the surrounding conditions and turns them into part of the café experience.

Concept: Connection and Separation in One Linear Form

The primary concept of the project is based on the coexistence of connection and separation. Following the shape of the site, the café is developed as a long rectangular mass. This mass is then divided into two distinct volumes: one public and one private.

The first volume is designed as an airy, open space that can connect visually and physically to the surrounding environment. It supports the more active public functions of the café, including entry, bar, seating, service, and music. This space is transparent, welcoming, and flexible, allowing the café to operate as an urban gathering spot.

In contrast, the second volume is lower, quieter, and more enclosed. It is positioned toward the rear of the scheme, where greenery and landscape create a stronger sense of privacy. This volume is intended for more intimate conversations and a calmer café atmosphere. The transition between the two volumes is controlled by a courtyard, which acts as both a spatial pause and an acoustic buffer.

This courtyard plays a critical architectural role. It blocks direct noise and sightlines between the public and private zones, while still allowing light, vegetation, and movement to shape the interior experience. As a result, the café does not rely on walls alone to define privacy. Instead, it uses volume, landscape, light, and circulation to create a gradual shift in atmosphere.

Programmatic Vision: A Coffee House for Music and Museum Culture

One of the most distinctive aspects of this modern cafe design is its integration of live music. Vienna is historically associated with classical music, yet traditional Viennese cafés are more often linked to writers, intellectuals, and literary culture. Lala Leung’s proposal expands this tradition by introducing music as a central programmatic element.

The café includes seating, bar areas, service spaces, staff zones, and music functions within a clear linear organization. By combining live music with the coffee house typology, the project creates a café experience that can change over time. Every performance brings a different atmosphere, allowing regular customers to encounter something new with each visit.

This programmatic decision makes the café more than a static hospitality space. It becomes a cultural venue. Music adds rhythm, presence, and social energy to the café, while the neighboring museum creates an additional layer of public engagement. Visitors can experience the café before or after visiting the museum, purchase coffee products or souvenirs, and use the space as a cultural extension of the surrounding district.

The result is a coffee house that works for both residents and tourists. For local users, it offers a recurring neighborhood gathering place. For visitors, it provides a designed pause within a larger cultural itinerary.

Case Study Influence: Café Liebeliebe by PLS Architects

The design process takes inspiration from Café Liebeliebe by PLS Architects in South Korea. The case study influenced two main aspects of the proposal: planar interior organization and a simple roof plan.

These ideas are not copied directly, but used as a starting point for the café’s spatial logic. The project adopts a clear and disciplined plan, where linear circulation organizes movement from the public entry zone toward the more private rear spaces. The simple roof strategy helps unify the building’s volumes while allowing shifts in height, light, and enclosure to define the interior experience.

This approach gives the café a strong architectural clarity. Instead of relying on decorative complexity, the design uses planes, volumes, courtyards, and material contrasts to create identity.

Architecture and Form: A Modern Interpretation of Viennese Café Culture

The form and façade of the café reinterpret traditional Viennese café culture through a modern architectural lens. Vienna’s historic cafés flourished between the 18th and 20th centuries, often within Baroque architectural contexts. This project recognizes that cultural history, but it does not imitate the Baroque language. Instead, it asks what the café of the present architectural period should look like.

The surrounding museum is understood as a 20th-century modernist reference point. In response, the café uses a modern architectural composition based on intersecting vertical and horizontal planes. The influence of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe can be felt in the clarity of the planar language, the disciplined massing, and the relationship between structure, surface, and open space.

The building’s form is direct, symbolic, and contemporary. Large horizontal roof planes frame the public areas, while vertical elements define entries, thresholds, and façade rhythm. The arched opening in the front volume introduces a subtle reference to older architectural traditions, but its execution remains clean and modern.

This balance between historical memory and contemporary expression gives the project its architectural character. It acknowledges Vienna’s café heritage while placing the new coffee house firmly within a modern design vocabulary.

Material Strategy: Concrete, Stone, Wood, and Natural Texture

The façade concept uses natural and exposed materials to strengthen the building’s modern identity. Concrete and stone give the café a sense of permanence, mass, and urban presence. Wood introduces warmth, tactility, and human scale.

The images show a carefully controlled contrast between solid masonry-like surfaces, transparent glazing, and vertical wooden screens. These screens provide rhythm and shading while softening the public façade. The material palette also supports the project’s broader idea of contrast. Hard surfaces meet warm finishes. Heavy planes meet transparent openings. Public exposure meets private enclosure.

Inside, the café uses warm wooden flooring, a prominent marble-like bar counter, dark shelving, and a generous relationship to the landscape outside. The interior view upon entry shows a bright public space where seating, service, and exterior greenery are visually connected. The material atmosphere is elegant but not overly formal, suitable for both daily neighborhood use and cultural visitors.

Light, Circulation, and Spatial Distribution

Lighting is another key component of the design. The diagrams show a balance between natural and artificial light. Natural light enters through large openings, courtyards, and glazed edges, while artificial lighting supports the evening atmosphere and live music program.

The building’s linear circulation creates an intuitive route through the café. Visitors move from the public entry and bar area through seating zones, toward the courtyard and more private spaces. This movement is simple, but the spatial experience changes along the way. The café begins as open and social, then becomes calmer and more intimate.

The space distribution diagram identifies public, fluid, private, and service areas. This layered organization is important for the success of the café. Service functions remain efficient and accessible, while guest areas are allowed to shift in mood. The plan avoids a single generic café atmosphere and instead creates a sequence of experiences.

Courtyard as Buffer, Light Source, and Social Pause

The courtyard is one of the most important spatial devices in the project. It separates the two main volumes while maintaining a connection between them. It filters views, softens sound, introduces vegetation, and brings natural light into the interior.

The render showing seating behind the courtyard captures this quality well. The space feels sheltered but not closed. People can sit near greenery, enjoy filtered daylight, and remain slightly removed from the more active public zone. This supports the project’s intention to create varying levels of privacy within one café environment.

In a dense urban context, this kind of courtyard strategy is especially effective. It gives the café a breathing space and creates a microclimate of calm between the public street and the private rear volume.

A Café Designed for Everyday Urban Life

Lala Leung’s Brewed 2020 proposal succeeds because it treats café design as an architectural and cultural problem, not just an interior design exercise. The project considers context, movement, program, privacy, materiality, light, and urban identity.

As a modern cafe design, it responds to the needs of a developing neighborhood while also serving the museum and park nearby. It provides a gathering point for residents, a cultural stop for tourists, and a flexible venue for live music. Its architecture is restrained, but its spatial experience is rich.

The design demonstrates how a café can become a small civic building. It can invite public life, support cultural exchange, and still provide quiet corners for intimate conversation. Through its linear massing, split volumes, courtyard buffer, and warm material palette, the project creates a café that feels both urban and personal.

This Editor’s Choice entry of Brewed 2020 by Lala Leung offers a compelling vision for modern cafe design in Vienna. It draws from the traditions of Viennese cafés, the cultural identity of music, the presence of a nearby museum, and the calm of a public park. These elements are brought together through a clear modern architectural language.

The café is defined by contrast: connection and separation, openness and privacy, performance and quietness, concrete and wood, city and landscape. This layered approach allows the project to function as more than a place to drink coffee. It becomes a cultural threshold, a neighborhood living room, and a modern interpretation of Vienna’s enduring coffee house tradition.