08. Lybra Cafe

Professional Project, Tehran, 2015 Freelance architect, collaboration with Sarvenaz Kalhornia, Saman Yamini

Construction management, Design development, drawings, presentation.

Shortlisted project in Memar Award 2016

Lybra Cafe is a renovation project. In this project we turned an unprofitable restaurant, built inside an old building into a cafe.

The building is located in a cultural zone, surrounded by lots of universities and cultural spaces, as well as commercials and residentials. Therefore the aim was to make a gathering point for every kind of customer. We were seeking a modern project, still cozy and cool-looking to attract its main target group, university students.

mixing the concrete

Adding a mesh palte to concrete Flower pots on the entrance area’s wall

Filling the molds

Adding hole hoders

First floor

Lybra is a very low budget project, the client could not spend so much on the materials and highly skilled construction forces and workers. Never the less design team and client wanted to meet high standards and were not eager to satisfy the quality.

To cut the prices design team decided to make some materials at the site and by ourselves. Therefore we invented some techniques to make a kind of prefabricated concrete panels. By inventing this new material we could make it at the site by teaching how-to to our workers and by providing the very initial instruments. Later we installed the panels on walls by using the common method for installing stones in Iran. All of these factors ended up having a considerably cheap material and construction, compared to buying panels and hiring someone from the providing company to install them. To make it more interesting some of the wall panels are flower pots and electricity sockets.

The same idea applied for rusty iron on the facade. It’s done by first learning the technique by ourselves, and then transferring this knowledge to workers and doing it at the site by our team.

Costly services

Free of charge services

Lybra is designed in a way that can respond to the variable needs of different customers. By constructing different zones in the cafe; each with a different purpose.

The majority of consumers are students from nearby universities. therefore, the first floor is dedicated to them; offering a variety of different accommodations. They can enjoy free electricity and are welcome to bring their laptops here and do their work for as long as they want and they will not be charged for being in the free zone unless they order something. The entrance is allocated to takeaway customers. They can order a cup of coffee and take it with them or instead have a short rest on the exterior bench and enjoy their time. They won’t be charged for using this bench as well. This zone can also be a stage for street musicians; mostly students of art schools in the neighborhood. The upper floor is the smoking area for the people who want to smoke while eating food or having a drink. They can also use the beautiful view of the balcony if they wish.

Entrance and facade is designed in a way that grabs attention of the passing people. They can have a take-away coffee.

People or musicians can have a short rest in the triangular entrance zone while drinking their coffee.

Those who don’t want to spend much time in the cafe but would like to enjoy interior atmosphere of cafe can sit here

First floor is dedicated mostly to students who want to sit and work on personal project in their free time or between classes.