Kontum Indochine café

Kontum Indochine Café is part of a hotel complex along the Dakbla River in Kontum City, Central Vietnam. The building serves as a Cafe and venue for hotel guests. From time to time, it also functions as a semi-outdoor banquet hall for wedding ceremonies.

Located at a corner of the hotel, the Café is composed of two major sections: the main semi-open cafe space under the horizontal bamboo structure and the stone annex kitchen. 

The Café has an open rectangular footprint surrounded by a shallow artificial lake: the south facade faces the main street along Dakbla River, the east to a commercial street, the west to a restaurant and banquet building belonging to the hotel complex and the north to the annex kitchen. The evaporating water the lake helps cooling down the shelter space without any air conditioning devices. The roof is covered by fibre-reinforced plastic panels and thatch, creating a thick insulation while providing natural sun light to the center of the cafe area.
The roof of the building is supported by a pure bamboo structure composed of 15 inverse-cone-shaped units. Inspired by the traditional Vietnamese fishing basket, the columns form gradually narrow shapes the top to the bottom. This structure helps maximizing the wind flow into the building during summers while offering a strong resistance against harsh storms during windy seasons. From the Café, hotel guests can enjoy a great panoramic view of the mountains and river framed with the bamboo arches. Inside, the panoramic views of mountains and rivers are framed by the stunning bamboo arches, creating a sense of a nature continuity throughout the spaces.   

Kontum Indochine Café is an expression of what bamboos are capable of as a building material. Regarding the detail of construction, bamboo outperforms steel and timber in terms of cost by using traditional treatment methods and low-tech joint details such as ratte-tying and bamboo nails. Above all, the structure kept its simplicity while remaining elegant and sophisticated.