La Exposición | GRIZZO STUDIO

“La Exposicion” is a traditional bakery that opened its doors in 1949 in one of the most recognized corners of Buenos Aires at the intersection of Libertad, Juncal and Quintana streets in the neighborhood of Retiro.

The greatest challenge for this project was to keep the exterior aesthetics of the corner of the traditional building and create a new interior spatiality. Through its large shopfront windows you can see the interior set of wood that invites the customer to enter.

The shop had a double-height that was not used, and the idea was to "fill" the space with some wooden cubes that hang from the ceiling and others by way of mirrors that rest on the floor. These floating cubes have the shop management office spaces, the production site, and hide all the refrigerator motors, and the other cubes that rest on the floor, have the refrigerators and exhibition modules.

Another protagonist in the interior is a large double-height wooden shelf that directs its gaze upwards and visually scans through the entire space.

Wood is undoubtedly the protagonist of this bakery. We looked for a hard wood that was resistant for a shop; after several color tests we selected a light wood like the white parrot.

We use black terrazzo with bronze joints for the floor. On the walls, we use black micro granite, a material with natural stones, resistant to the passage of time.

The signage was a very important point in the renovation of the shop. We decided to keep the original sign of the corner; we restored it and lighted it up. We put a bronze sign on the terrazzo floor.

The sidewalk was also intervened with a polyfan sign that we used as a mold to leave the letters sunken in the terrazzo.

The display trays, boxes, and packaging were manufactured and custom designed in black to highlight the product.

The priority for the construction and restoration consisted of forming a solid team of tradesmen and experts with whom shared capabilities, materiality, and experiences, so that together, we would develop each constructive detail, achieving optimal solutions that exceed the possibilities of the strictly conventional.

The precise knowledge of what existed allowed us a sufficient intervention. We looked for an honest and careful architecture, paying special attention to details, to the chosen materiality, and to the actors in the project and the production processes.

It was a great challenge to carry out this job since we only had 28 days to complete the entire work. It was necessary to have everything very well documented to achieve our goal as there was no time for mistakes. Behind this work there was a great team of bricklayers, metalsmiths, blacksmiths, carpenters, letterers, designers, glaziers, who worked day and night to deliver the work in a timely manner.