It is in Guatemala that Saúl Bistro’s Madero venue gives Taller Ken an opportunity to showcase its carefully crafted whimsy, where, overlooking a busy highway, a 49-foot-tall structure takes the street traffic and immobilizes it in a sculpted exterior of cut-up car chassis. To a great extent, it represents the most appealing interpretation of an asphalt jungle par excellence: The parking space, in a black-and-white zebra-like motif, also elegantly signifies the (zebra) crossing into a different space. Inside, the space is set up as a tropical sanctuary, filled with colours, plants and light. It almost looks like an industrial space made in the Play-Doh factory, half-innocent, half-strict where the floors burst with colours from the hand-made tiles in various shades of green and red, and the tropical planting, rising up in different parts of it, are watered by rainwater which is collected through the roof into bright blue tanks. The furniture, which is also brightly coloured, harks back to a world a few decades back, as suggested by the cars that are used even in the building’s interior design.

The exposed steel framework and the plumbing, along with the high skylights play with the inside-outside borders, providing a space concealed but not confined –a point stressed by the patio furniture in the middle of the hall. At the same time, the tropical vegetation, that even drapes the lighting fixtures, highlights the pastiche of colours and the blending of a natural and constructed environment, as the latter finds its expression in the automobile.

Saúl Bistro’s Madero venue is a diner, a parking lot and a destination for urban safari enthusiasts. Rather than cars per se, it is a celebration of what drives progress forward. And in architecture, as in all art, the drivers of progress are quite often the “artistic weirdos”.