Sawerdō Coffee & Bakery / OFFICE

Descriptive text provided by the architects. Two years of covid have brought everyone to a certain level of mistrust. We started the Sawerdo project fearing that putting people around a table was an endangered meeting format. The risk was taken, a kind of hopeful leap of faith on the part of the founders, believing that the hopping microbes of a too-close neighbor would never get in the way of being together.

Instead, the opposite scenario was opted for: one in which proximity is a simple vector towards spontaneous conversation and exchange far beyond the fear of a viral other.

Our project spatialized and built this “moment” of our lives and put everything and everyone around a staged and very material table.

Beyond the obvious references to traditional bread-making materials, such as marble and steel speed racks, the idea became quite simple: a hosting table that would allow for a variety of configurations. Somehow, the setting is half domestic, half professional, between sharing “table d’hôtes” and dining inside a bakery.

Jeff Wall’s Dressing Poultry (2007) was filmed on a farm near Vancouver, celebrating a fun time while working, preparing what will become food. With an aesthetic in the antipodes of Sawerdo’s project, this image has the same intention: to bring the act of cooking, nourishing and sharing to a unifying whole of life.

Like Jeff Wall’s light boxes, the Sawerdo had the opportunity to be in a very beautiful space that the project reveals as much as possible: an inhabited light box where scenes of life happen and will continue to happen as long as we understand that we all we are biological beings. or “other virals”.