Cocktail Bar & Bakery
Trieste, Italy
2021
competition project – 1st place
built
photos by Metroarea + Camilla Bach
Trieste lives with a singular contradiction: it is a city open to the sea like few others, yet it offers very few meeting places that actually overlook it. One of them was the Terrazza a Mare in Barcola, at Viale Miramare 72 – literally the “terrace on the sea”: a small building from 1971, the only one built over the water along the entire seafront, devastated by a fire in 2008 and left in ruins for almost ten years, turned from a gathering place into a symbol of a missed opportunity. When the concession was put out to tender again, some forty proposals came in: Metroarea’s project was ranked first, and it won on the strength of a simple idea.
The Barcola seafront is the “beach of the Triestines”: a long paved strip between the road and the sea, with steps down to the water, the “Topolini” bathing platforms and a life that goes well beyond summer – swimming, strolling, running and fishing, fine winter days included. It is the largest stretch of the city in direct contact with the water, along the cycle and pedestrian axis that leads towards Miramare. Giving this place back its only building on the sea was the starting point of the project.
A bakery built on the sea: only in Trieste is that possible.
The competition project imagined a place to be enjoyed all year round, open to events, parties and performances. Reality added something unexpected: the operator that arrived, il Pane Quotidiano – “Daily Bread” – brought not only a bar and a restaurant but also a bakery onto the water, and the Terrazza has become the place where the people of Trieste buy their bread with the gulf in front of them. You enter straight from the promenade, through a glazed vestibule, into the main hall with the bread counter, the bar and the restaurant area, which opens onto the terraces facing the sea. So that access to the water remains free and open as it has always been, the bathing facilities were placed at sea level.
The functional programme is organised by levels, distinct yet closely related to one another. At street level the hall, with bar and restaurant; on the roof the belvedere, with bar, solarium and space for events and parties; at sea level the terraces, for the bar, the solarium, bathing and events, together with the bathing facilities (showers, changing rooms, WCs) and the kitchen with storeroom, changing rooms and staff facilities. Protected vertical connections hold the three levels together.
The old venue was made of two parts that did not speak to each other: a hall at street level and a deck at sea level, divided by a wall. To get from one to the other you had to go out on the street side and walk around the outside, with enormous operational difficulties and no relationship between those inside and those out on the water. Of the forty proposals submitted, all of them kept this arrangement. Metroarea’s project turned it on its head: the deck becomes a stepped terrace, a true grandstand overlooking the gulf, directly connected to the hall through the glazing and the openings of the building.
A grandstand whose stage is the sea.
The advantages are all-round. For bathing: a sea view for everyone, with no second-row seats, more air and more privacy, whereas under the old wall in summer the air did not circulate and it was very hot. For service: a single continuous space, with the counter and facilities reachable from anywhere and faster service times. For safety: the new deck is better protected from storm surges. For events: the theatre-style layout, conceived in the competition project with movable tiers, turns the terrace into an auditorium for presentations, performances, fashion shows or an open-air cinema at sunset.
Today the platform over the water is a single continuous space with the hall: you move from the counter to the tables on the sea without leaving the premises. The terrace on stilts, sheltered by the breakwater, holds the bar tables, the sun loungers and the free bathing area, and service flows uninterrupted between inside and out.
Given the delicate position of the only building on the sea along the entire seafront, fitting into the landscape was the central theme, addressed through two principles: maximum transparency and camouflage in the choice of materials. The walls facing the sea are fully glazed and can be opened; the encaustic-tile-effect porcelain stoneware floor, the ceiling and the wooden cladding bring the material of the terrace inside as well, in a continuity between indoors and outdoors that makes the use of the spaces intuitive.
Natural thermally treated wood, together with glass, stainless steel and encaustic-tile-effect porcelain stoneware, makes up a “nautical” palette designed to age well under salt and sun. The building systems are high-end and highly energy-efficient.
From the boats’ route the coast is a single line, and we wanted the building to be nothing more than a dot, a pixel in a panoramic photograph.
From the road, too, the project seeks maximum openness: the view of the sea from the Viale is freer than before, and the structures on the belvedere can all be removed or folded away. An essential volume that does not compete with the landscape but frames it.
The visual axes, already marked in the project diagram, guided the design of the openings: towards the open sea, towards the city and the Faro della Vittoria lighthouse, towards Miramare Castle and towards the sunset. Each window frames one of these horizons, and the belvedere and the terraces are their most evident result.
On the platform the railings were partly removed to make the relationship with the water more direct: in their place, along the perimeter, nets suspended over the sea – safety elements, but also a new way of sunbathing at water level or relaxing with a drink in an unexpected setting.
The key to the project can be summed up as a love letter to Trieste, written with the courage of the entrepreneurs (some of them private citizens, no longer part of the management) who made it possible to give the Triestines’ promenade back its most precious jewel, abandoned for far too long, and which today serves as the city’s calling card for those arriving by sea, by road or from the Karst.
