More about staking out working territory in cafés: Malcom Gladwell takes a light-hearted look at the ambiguity of writing in coffee shops and looks at a few cafés around the world he’s written in over at the Wall Street Journal.

“The problem with writing in coffee shops is that everyone hates the kind of people who write in coffee shops—especially the kind of people who write in coffee shops.”

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Over at The New York Times, a review of a slightly sideways take on literary cafés by nemaworkshop called D’Espresso. Am I wrong to suspect that the coffee won’t be that great? I hope I am—I’ll check it out soon and let you know. Even if the coffee stinks, the design looks worth a macchiato, though it doesn’t strike me as a great place to try to get work done, or even read.

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And lastly, Brooklyn Based reviews some local cafés, with an eye toward workability (but points for good coffee—who can work with sludge burning a hole through their stomach?). I don’t agree 100% with all their ratings, but they’ve reminded me about a couple of places I need to check out.

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Alas, no, I am not writing this at a café. My laptop battery has died and funds are a bit scarce at the moment, so I’m sticking to the old home base for the now (which isn’t so bad—there’s excellent coffee and entertainingly frisky cats gamboling about). I have spent plenty of time as a coffee shop writer, though—I wrote most of my architecture thesis in cafés, and most of the early catasterist posts, too. And maybe some time I’ll even get to design a café—wouldn’t that be fun?

After an afternoon of wrestling with an uncooperative job application on some antediluvian library computers with limited session times (‘Your session will terminate in 6 minutes. All unsaved work will be lost.”) I was seriously in need of a pick-me-up. Luckily I was on Tenth Street, two doors down from Ninth Street Espresso, a serene spot with most excellent coffee. I sat on a low bench while I waited for the barista (did you know barista means bartender in Italian?) to compose my macchiato (which means ‘stained’ in Italian, either coffee ‘stained’ with a bit of foamed milk or vice versa, though usually the former in the US), and noticed that Ninth Street has one of my all time favorite details: bag hooks under the lovely solid-wood bar. Every bar and counter in every coffee shop and bar should have these. So simple! So useful! But man, feeling under a bar to see if there are any hooks there is the worst. Blech–who knows what you’ll find. I wish there was some kind of signal they were there, like a band wrapping up over the bar or a post extending through the bar to the top surface. Even without that, though, bar hooks are the best.

Maybe some other time I’ll tell you more about that, but for now a few words on the in-and-out coffee bar trend. In the article seatless coffee bars (like the Stumptown digs in the Ace Hotel) are compared to Italian espresso bars. Well, in my limited experience, yes and no. Italian espresso bars have universally fantastic coffee, often have a very working-class feel, and are somehow convey the feeling that it’s fine if you want to gulp and run, but it’s also fine if you want to stand around and chat with the policeman on your left or the professor on your right. Partly they manage this trick by being more ubiquitous and better integrated into the life of their surrounding neighborhoods than most (though happily not all) of their American cousins. I think in the US bars have historically been more in that great-good place role, though coffee houses could certainly catch up in many places. To do that, a look at how the best bars work and a look at coffee bars in many places in Europe, is the way to go.

It’s a tricky balance, keeping enough turnover to maintain profitability while making a place welcoming. And none of that matters if the coffee is crap. Much of that (besides the quality of the coffee) is a question of design: materials, proportion, light all speak to us about the expectations and functions of a place. What does your local coffee bar say to you?

I myself have gathered (and finally displayed) a small collection of coffee cup lids—all those I from the hot coffees I have drunk in 2010 (minus maybe 2 or 3 I distractedly chucked). I started collecting these for a complicated mix of reasons: I was inspired by LTL Architects’ (no longer extant) Ini Ani Coffee Shop wall (I LOVE that wall and would like to do some kind of riff on it), I hate throwing away well-designed things, I am kind of a quirky exhibitionist—I like revealing my nearly invisible habits, but most strongly, I just love and admire the design of these intimate, inescapable objects.

They all fit on standard size cups (I’ve only ever seen two sizes of lids—small and large—though there are usually three coffee cup sizes), they’re round, and they have an opening from which coffee can be poured, sucked, or drizzled, but beyond that there are myriad variations. Some are nearly flat, others deep enough to avoid crushing whipped cream. Some have a simple ovoid hole, others a segment that lifts up and locks back, still others cover the hole with an elaborate sliding mechanism—modest and safe. Many have those lovely push-buttons (like fast-food soda lids) to indicate decaf or other mysterious options, though they are rarely (in my experience) used. The only two colors I’ve seen are black (somewhat rare) and white (the default), though the hole-covering-slider-mechanisms are red.

I am certainly not the first to appreciate these marvels of on-the-go coffee drinking. Steve Heller wrote a paean to them for the New York Times last month, Flickr user sarcoptiform posted photos of a small collection of found lids (which I found by way of Rob Walker’s Murketing blog), and way back in 2005 Cabinet magazine featured a column by Louise Harpman & Scott Specht about their collection of lids, a carefully curated collection aiming to encompass the entire breadth of variation in the to-go cup lid (their must be a less awkward name for these things) category, and billed as the largest such collection in the United States.

I’ve got room for a few more rows in my own modest display, so I’ll keep going for a bit. After that, though, I’m not sure. I like small, personal collections, so maybe I’ll stop there. But then again, I’m sure I won’t stop drinking coffee and there are other empty walls in my house…

That detail—a small wall made of cast coffee cup tops—stuck with me.  I heard one of the architects (I forget now which) talk about it and show a some slides a few years ago, and I haven’t forgotten. I wish I could have seen it.  Maybe I’ll have to recreate it myself some day…

In a way this is just a spiffed-up version of the livejournal blog I started for my trip two years ago to Rome and Istanbul but left off updating a while ago. This is roomier and more customizable and just, you know, less livejournally.

In another way it’s a kind of extension of my old webzine wburg.com, which I handed off when I left for architecture school. My interests have shifted a bit since then and I’m more interested in writing and drawing and photographing now than editing, but I still feel fondly toward that site.

I have big ideas_big ideas!_for this site (I hope it will become a launch pad for all kinds of projects), but for now I’ll leave off with this:

How amazing and wonderful are the stainless steel coffee carts that caffeinate New York (and maybe other cities? I’ve never seen them elsewhere_have you?) every weekday. A tiny streamlined room of pillowed stainless steel with windows to display donuts (just point and choose), urns to store coffee, and wheels on which to roll away when the city-wide coffee break is over. All that piloted by some of the nicest New Yorkers I’ve met. And they will give you coffee and a donut for less than $2! Genius.

The only downside is that these creatures are morning-glory-like: come noon they all fold up and roll away into what I like to imagine are shiny subterranean grottos where they rest and replenish themselves for the next frantic weekday morning.

The whole thing is small enough to be pushed by hand, though usually has a hitch so it can be towed (coffee and donut road trip anyone?) Mobile architecture made of pillowed stainless steel—a miniature shiny diner you can just hose down at the end of the day. What’s not to like about that? And no, I have not yet seen the movie, but it’s in the ole Netflix queue. In the mean time I’ll just keep marvelling at these little miracles of modern architecture. If only they’d stick around into the afternoon…