The great Viennese Café: A laboratory.

A posting from Poetry Café

The “melange”, a drink made of coffee and milk, is a Viennese invention; the coffeehouse produced new variants and saw to this drink’s distribution worldwide. The typical newspaper holder is a relic of low-cost general education and access to the world – long before television or the Internet. The coffee house table hosted writers of literature and composers of music. It was also the place where political and business deals were done at a time when so called “multifunctional furniture” did not yet exist. The coffee house is a home away from home – both for travellers and for urban nomads. A coffeehouse’s interior and guests are indicative of local fashions and styles – or they mix these as the global trends of tomorrow.

A work-in-progress exhibition will kick off the research project with a focus on various aspects of the Viennese coffeehouse. Julia Landsiedl, the 2011 MAK Designer in Residence, will make observations and conduct interviews around the coffeehouse scene and collect examples. A cognitively produced and commented collage—a three-dimensional mind map consisting of historical and present-day ingredients, posters, photographs and objects concerning coffeehouse culture—will offer an initial screening of the topic. The exhibition serves as an impulse and also as research kit for the lab modules which are held simultaneously.

Source: Website MAK

Coffeehouses are like pockets of the public sphere in which space and time are consumed – despite the fact that only coffee appears on the bill afterwards.”