Jokopi

Object : Office, Cafe, & Hub Stages : Project Constructed

Surabaya, Indonesia

April 2020 - January 2021

Roles: Lead Architect and Project Manager

Project along with: ARA-Studio, Surabaya

Principal Architect: Hermawan Dasmanto

Architect Team: Tiara Indah

Chrisnanda Januar Nandhita Narendratmaja

Construction: Jokopi

Indonesia’s coffee-to-go boom in the last decade has seen a surge of coffee shop demands from business owners and consumers alike. One of the pioneers of this new-age beverage is Jokopi, one of the first to surface it to the mainstream market with their now-famous ‘Kopi Susu Blusukan’ is setting the trends for thousands of coffee shops in the country.

With a fast-growing food and beverage industry, the brand needed to set up headquarters fast, which could accommodate its administration activities while also serving as one of its cafe branches in the heart of bustling Surabaya.

Back Page

Front entryway of Jokopi Compound

Up Left

Site’s existing condition

Down Left Intervention proposals

An old 3000m2 now-defunct car workshop set to be repurposed as a mixed-use office for their brand to reduce cost significantly and for ease of construction. One of the main challenges to this decision is the transformation from its contrasting functions of a former workshop to a coffee shop- the former being greasy and damp, while the latter is brightly lit and dry.

The initial design method analyzed the available structures, objects, and boundaries. After determining these constraints, the design carefully crafted the site’s elements, such as the existing wide-span roofing to the steel rolling gate. The design intervention toward the area is based on these existing materialities that saw as potential character-defining, and also, less intervention means less budget that needs to be spent.

Programs injected into the existing structure are classified according to their functions. The coffee shop is nearest the entrance, serving its purpose as a main attractor to the outside world and establishing a public space that integrates into the surrounding context. The headquarter office is then placed across the coffee shop, between its transitional space to occupy the central area.

An open path for pedestrians and vehicles cuts across the site to pass through every program, giving access to customers, staff, and services. It also doubles as a transitional space giving ample space for users to experience the architectural atmosphere between existing structures and injected areas. The existing wide-span structures of the roof are preserved to provide a much-needed canopy in the Surabaya climate while also providing an architectural constraint to the new design.

Its new tectonic characteristics come from the marriage of the rusty steel of the workshop structures with the brand’s usual wooden surfaces and popcorn walls, thus retaining the feel of a car workshop with a new-age cafe. This resulted in the leftover areas being free to explore, whether repurposed as an enclosed or a newly opened space. In one way or another, the recently injected programs and design will be constrained to the preserved structures.