TIMS

In Lisbon’s Santos district, a former port quarter that has gradually evolved into a landscape of studios, small galleries and independent restaurants, NWDS has completed TIMS café & padaria and Aea Space for culture and art embedded within the Museu das Comunicações. Aea Space is curated by Aea: Culture Initiative — a culture project by NWDS Agency and occupies a ground-floor unit in the museum’s foundation building and extends the institution’s focus on communication into the everyday ritual of bread and coffee.

The existing space was stripped back to its masonry shell, revealing original stone flooring and traces of earlier layouts. The interior unfolds as a compact square encircled by arches, whose structure extends the architectural language of the museum itself. Establishing a distinct rhythm across the room, the arches define a sequence of interconnected zones without closing them off, preserving a sense of continuity and unity between the interior and the museum as a whole.

An eight-metre counter integrates bakery production, coffee service and display, with preparation fully visible from the seating area. Opposite, a raised platform functions as a shallow amphitheatre. Mobile plinths and stackable furniture allow the space to shift between café, exhibition and talk format. A translucent textile screen enables large-scale projections while maintaining visual permeability across the room.

Material interventions are restrained: existing brickwork is preserved, new surfaces are rendered in microcement, and mirrors amplify depth within the compact footprint. Lighting differentiates production and communal areas while allowing the kitchen to become a singular illuminated element at night.

Aea Space does not treat culture as a separate layer applied to daily life, but as something that can unfold within it. Bread, coffee and exhibition share the same spatial field. In this sense, TIMS & Aea Space recall a longer cultural tradition — from Lisbon to Paris and beyond — in which cafés have served as informal laboratories of thought, places where ideas are tested collectively before taking form. Developed in collaboration with invited curators, the programme invites multidisciplinary artists to inhabit the space, turning it into a platform for conversation, collaboration and public presentation.