About Design Lab

In addition to its offerings as a café/bar, IF DOGS RUN FREE is a place where people have access to new ideas in art and design outside the traditional context of a gallery. The ceiling plane is reserved for artists, designers, and students of art and design to create site specific installations.

Inner Space/The Interior is a yearly course taught in the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts / dieAngewandte. The course is taught by Chieh-shu Tzou and Gregorio Lubroth, two of the co-owners of IF DOGS RUN FREE and the founders of Tzou Lubroth Architekten. The course allows art and architecture students to test atmospheric experiments as built installations using the space at Dogs as their design laboratory. The students are charged with creating a spatial intervention that remains in place for an entire year in a space that is open to the street and caters to a particular informality of urban life. This gives them a unique opportunity not only to test their ideas as a resolution of a collective design process but also as an actual public artifact in constant interaction with a transient body of people that populate the space itself or interface with its presence from the street.

As such, Dogs will undergo a revolving transformation every summer as students recalibrate the atmosphere to realize their concepts.

The current ceiling installation

Making Room for the New

September 2023
Chieh-shu Tzou & Gregorio Lubroth, Tzou Lubroth Architekten
Welded steel frames suspended from the ceiling plane

In preparation for the first student intervention in the summer of 2024, the owners at Dogs wanted to create a bridge between the past and the future. Making Room for the New leaves hints and traces of the first installation, designed and installed by the owners themselves, that came to be so integral to the identity of the bar. It is at once an ode to the first twelve years at the bar, but it is also a gesture that describes the space needed to allow new ideas to flourish. The former panels, which represented an inverted mountain landscape through the manipulation of a single geometric tile, are reduced to steel wireframes. The patchwork of tiles that once shifted in tone to create two interwoven color gradients, are now ghosts, leaving the surrounding space bare and open to new potentials.