This project is located in La Ceja, a small town 30 km to the southeast of Medellin, the 2nd largest city in Colombia, focusing on the coffee production and the social, economic and cultural influence of coffee industry on local community. Coffee industry, as a key industry of the state, has been generating unstable yet generally decreasing income for a long time. What’s worse, as one of the major coffee production countries, Colombia has a poor coffee culture. Nobody knows much about coffee except for coffee producers; young people tend to flow into cities rather than stay in rural area to inherit the coffee production from their parents; the low profit of the industry even turns coffee fields into poppy fields which become the roots of evil.

This project aims at both coffee production and the recognition of coffee culture. The building is significant in different ways for different users: a production base for producers, a community center for local residents, and an exhibition platform of coffee culture for tourists. Such a mix it is.

The project is defined by the tropical culture. The tropical culture is ambiguous. When an object or a concept is open to multiple interpretations, it is ambiguous. In tropics, you can never clearly tell the climatic seasons or geographical borders or social principles, which, architecturally, reflects into dissolved edges and ambiguous time and space. Based on this, I imagined a raised open courtyard and a dramatic complicated section. The courtyard is both open and close, inward and outward, and the section demonstrates multiple narratives simultaneously. The courtyard prototype and the dramatic section is what this project is based on.

In Colombia, there is a unique interrelationship between coffee industry and tourism in terms of the seasonality: the harvest seasons of coffee are from March to June and from September to December, while the tourism seasons are from June to September and from December to March. The interrelated conditions of coffee seasons and tourism seasons are taken advantages of in this project so as to define the seasonal pattern of the transition of programs and space.

The intertwining of space and circulation is essential for this project, which means appropriate comprehension of different space and programs is necessary. Coffee production is a complicated process: Picking-up, peeling, washing, drying, packaging, etc. Each step to some extent defines its space. On the other hand, museum and community center, as typical public space, indicate blended programs and intersected space. Then, introducing coffee production programs will add on interesting moments for the journey.

Courtyard A: Coffee beans fall down from the well on the roof platform of the courtyard A, peeled by the peeling machines underneath the floor, and get into washing sinks in courtyard B. Meanwhile, tourists start their journey from the lobby of the museum under courtyard A, enjoying the skylight going through the peeling machines from up above. After taking the elevator to the rooftop platform, tourists follow the beans and go down the stairs.

Courtyard B: Tourists keep moving forward until the end of courtyard A, pass through the infinite pool with an open view of the rural landscape, and meet the beans again at the washing sink in courtyard B before continuing with the exhibition tour.

Courtyard C: Coffee beans, after washed, get dried on the rooftop of courtyard C, and fall down from the narrow gaps to the packaging space. The exterior space is both an outdoor cinema for community and also the passage for local residents to access the building.