Middle Ground

+Editor’s Choice & Chosen for Yearbook Feature

Location Bali, Indonesia

Program Re-imagined Coffee Shop

Competition Brewed Bali Beach Café Challenge

Collaborators Tuan Pham and Patricia Poiana

Bali has quickly become Indonesia’s most popular tourist destination. However, while tourists come to appreciate the unique sites and culture, they ignorantly destroy them in the process. Middle Ground is the first step in solving Bali’s mass tourism crisis. The solution is not to eliminate tourists, but to attract them in a new way that places them in the middle of a movement that cares just as much, if not more, about Bali’s cultural and environmental preservation than about its economic growth. For too long, the experience of the tourists has been prioritized at the expense of the island’s environment, culture, and people. Thus, a middle ground is proposed, a space that benefits both the tourists and the locals. In this context, the action of getting a coffee is the medium through which the local-tourist relationship is mended interpersonally, through conversation, culturally, through performance and storytelling, and environmentally, through sustainable construction and biophilia.