Air Cafe Restaurant

Air Cafe Restaurant
Open Air Restaurant · Bangladesh Air Force Museum, Agargaon, Dhaka · 2015

Air Cafe Restaurant sits within the park grounds of the Bangladesh Air Force Museum in Agargaon, a site already defined by open sky, mature trees, and a landscape that resists enclosure. The brief was constrained by budget and by context, a restaurant that had to be low-cost, structurally minimal, and visually deferential to the greenery around it rather than competing with it.

The response treats construction economy as a design principle rather than a limitation. Only the kitchen required a permanent roofed structure, and so only the kitchen received one, a lightweight steel frame supporting a corrugated metal sheet roof that provides the necessary weather protection without the expense of a full enclosure. The roof extends outward beyond the kitchen walls, casting shade over the adjacent open dining area and drawing the covered and uncovered zones into a single spatial gesture.

The dining furniture is not imported or manufactured. The low brick walls built around the perimeter of the outdoor area function simultaneously as structural boundaries, as seat backs, and as table bases, each brick course doing multiple kinds of work. The red brick floor tiles and the rough masonry carry the warmth and texture of the surrounding landscape into the dining space, the material language of the building indistinguishable from the earth it sits on.

A separate vaulted enclosure was introduced subsequently for VIP dining, its arched steel frame clad in corrugated sheet forming a fully air-conditioned interior that contrasts with the open-air dining beyond without abandoning the project's material consistency. The vault reads from outside as a continuation of the same structural logic, its curved profile echoing the informality of the canopy overhead.