A Collage Of Outcasts Coffee Shop And Office / 324PRAXIS

Architects: 324PRAXIS
Area: 810 m²
Year: 2024
Photographs: 324PRAXIS
Lead Architect: Dat Dinh
Contractor: Trung Long Company, lam.weaving space
Category: Coffee Shop
Architect in Charge: Nguyen Cao Hoai Nam
Design Team: Tran Tuan Phong, Huynh Thanh Thien Phuc
City: Ho Chi Minh City
Country: Vietnam

A Collage of Outcasts, a coffee shop and office project designed by 324PRAXIS in Thao Dien, Ho Chi Minh City, reimagines a five-year-abandoned house within a context defined by high privacy walls, urban flooding, and architectural detachment. Positioned on an elevated base of 1100 mm above the sidewalk, the structure gains a new vantage point that redefines its relation to the street and landscape. The design critiques dominant attitudes of comfort, stylistic uniformity, and efficiency, proposing instead a spatial narrative shaped by imagination, bodily perception, and communal thresholds. Thresholds such as windows, balconies, and doors are explored as symbolic and physical mediators between individual and collective life. Ground-floor spaces are shaped around views, landscape characteristics, and light, prioritizing metaphor over measurability. Columns with circular and square sections act as spatial frames, guiding subjective interpretations of natural and built environments. Sequential perspectives along pathways invite reflection and perceptual transformation. A Collage of Outcasts integrates nature, abstraction, and community, becoming a layered environment that fosters coexistence and shared aesthetics.

A collage of outcasts coffee shop and office / 324praxis

Thao Dien is a high-standard residential area in Ho Chi Minh City, primarily occupied by the middle class. The architecture in this neighborhood reveals a sense of detachment from its context, showing a deliberate lack of integration and characterized by perimeter walls that reach 2.6 meters, which is the maximum height permitted for structures in the area. In practice, some houses have exceeded this limit to satisfy a heightened demand for privacy. Before its renovation, the building was left abandoned for five years. The area is also prone to tidal flooding, which led the previous owner to raise the base floor level to 1100 millimeters above the sidewalk, including the garden.

When the potential for transforming the interior spaces into an open environment was evaluated, the elevated base level immediately emerged as a defining element that separated the building from the street. This shift in height redirected the view upward, providing a wider perspective that nearly encompassed the entire area and allowed for a more profound sense of place. At that stage, the surrounding landscape became one of the most important components, confirming its complementary role and influence on the interior and informing the initial approach to the project’s development.

Three “restrictive elements” were identified as limiting the potential to strengthen the connection between the building and the surrounding landscape: comfort, extreme consistency in style, and outdated ideas of efficiency. Beyond these, a deeper issue was recognized—the need to redefine how happiness is understood and how design can be used to shape a life that is stimulating, meaningful, and whole.

The role of the body and imagination in experiencing meaningful places can also be reconsidered. In this context, imagination is understood as a “comprehensive vision,” without which reality becomes a collection of equally significant yet unintelligible events. When examining boundary walls that separate private spaces from the street or exploring new concepts related to the use of “thresholds,” it is believed that personal environments and collective community intellect remain inherently connected, even if that connection is not always visible.

The concept of coexistence was explored through the question: how can diverse individuals live together? This inquiry is closely tied to the idea of thresholds, with windows naturally forming a part of this relationship. Windows, along with other architectural elements such as balconies and doors, function as thresholds that significantly impact how people coexist. These components define the boundaries between public and private, individual and collective spheres. They carry contrasting qualities such as warmth and coldness, visibility and invisibility, cleanliness and dirtiness.

These architectural elements should be carefully considered for their ability to mediate between contrasting states and qualities more effectively than other components, providing a renewed understanding of thresholds in architecture. The ground floor space is composed as a collection of views that respond to the landscape characteristics of the area, the conditions of the site, and the behavior of natural light. These scenes are appreciated not for their measurable attributes but for their metaphorical significance.

Several columns positioned at the boundary or threshold of the structure function effectively as visual frames. Those with circular sections offer minimal expression when observed from different angles, producing a simple abstraction similar to that of a picture frame. Others feature square sections and are set back into the building’s shadow, asserting a sense of independence through both their shadow and substantial mass.

In this project, despite the simplicity of the overall experience, it was intentionally divided into smaller parts to allow visitors to engage with each perspective individually. Reality and the natural beauty of the surroundings are interpreted through concepts and metaphors expressed in morphological terms, remaining open to subjective interpretation and transformation when viewed through the structural frames. As one moves along the pathways from the exterior toward the building, the scenes unfold and shift progressively, enabling perception to extend beyond physical sensation. In this sense, the space actively engages perception and moves through the individual. The awareness of reality, shaped through sensory experience and imagination, is regarded as a creative act, offering a deeper level of understanding beyond documentation, validation, or control.

This project has emerged as a result of the relationship between humans and nature, supporting a range of behaviors and lifestyles while fostering a shared intellect and aesthetic that encourages the local community to live in harmony with the natural environment. These values cannot be measured by efficiency. Tangible and abstract elements merge into a unified form, ultimately becoming a collage of outcasts.