COFFEE BEANS & BEINGS / A CAFE SUSPENDED BETWEEN RUIN AND REFLECTION

The museum's purpose-built cafe-lounge is shown to the right of the image.

AGE ALONG SIDE BEAUTY

The café inside the Zhang Yan Cultural Museum, on the western outskirts of Shanghai, is not the usual museum afterthought—a counter, a few tables and an espresso machine installed near the exit. It is one of the building’s most persuasive rooms. Enclosed almost entirely in glass, the café-lounge occupies the ground floor of a new two-story wing. 

A garden lies on one side; a long, dark reflecting pool on the other. The glass reduces the boundary between indoors and outdoors to little more than a shimmer. One does not simply sit down for coffee here. 

One pauses between water, stone, trees and the carefully preserved evidence of another century. There is no reliable published evidence I found describing the coffee menu, pastries, prices or service, so this is necessarily a review of the café as a place rather than as a restaurant. 

Yet cafés have always been judged by more than what arrives in the cup. Some are memorable because of the room, the company or the view. This one earns its distinction by offering a seat within an architectural conversation between survival and change. 

 

The museum stands in Zhang Yan Village in Chonggu Town, an ancient settlement whose history reaches back roughly a thousand years. As younger residents left and old houses deteriorated, the village became part of a broader effort to revive China’s aging rural communities. 

The museum was completed in 2019 as a group of exhibition halls devoted broadly to the village’s past, present and future. The designers were Horizontal Design, the Shenzhen-based practice led on this project by chief creative design director Ju Bin. The chief architects were Zhou Zhimin and He Bin, supported by an architectural team that included Zhang Jia, Deng Shuyu, Song Wenyu, Hu Yao, Huang Ping and Xu Weiwei. 

Horizontal Design also handled the interiors. Their achievement is not that they made an old building look new. It is that they resisted doing so. Parts of the former Zhang family residence were too damaged to inhabit, but its weathered outer walls remained. Rather than remove them or manufacture a picturesque imitation, the architects inserted a sharply modern white-concrete gallery inside the surviving shell. 

The new structure is held approximately 30 centimeters away from the old masonry, a slim but eloquent gap acknowledging that the two belong to different moments. Elsewhere, a better-preserved village-history hall retained its wooden load-bearing structure and courtyard. 

A third exhibition space was built on the discovered footprint of a building that had previously disappeared. The result is neither restoration in costume nor modernization by demolition. 

Old brick, dark timber, pale concrete, water and glass are permitted to remain visibly themselves. The café is the project’s gentlest expression of that philosophy. The ruined walls elsewhere in the museum speak of fracture and endurance. 

The café answers with transparency and calm. Its glass perimeter allows the garden and reflecting pool to become part of the interior decoration without being reduced to decoration. A mature tree rises beside the water. Large stones sit with the composure of sculpture. The white planes of the new building are doubled in the pool, while the old village remains close enough to prevent the scene from becoming an abstract modernist retreat. 

 A good museum café restores the visitor without removing him from the museum’s ideas. This one appears to do exactly that. The coffee break becomes another gallery experience—less formal, certainly, but still concerned with memory, proportion, material and light. One can imagine sitting there after walking through the surviving timber hall and the contemporary concrete galleries, watching the reflections move slightly as a cup cools on the table. 

The surroundings ask for quiet without enforcing it. They offer refinement without the international luxury-hotel habit of erasing local identity. That is where the Zhang Yan café rises above handsome design. It belongs unmistakably to this museum, this village and this particular act of preservation. 

 

Horizontal Design has given Zhang Yan an internationally significant work of architecture, but it has not turned the village into a stage set for visiting aesthetes. The ancient walls retain their wounds. 

The additions do not disguise their modernity. 

The café, poised between garden and water, gives visitors a graceful place from which to contemplate both. Many cafés sell escape. This one offers something better: the pleasure of remaining exactly where you are. 

FRIDAY FILM / INTRO TO 'SQUARE AUPAIR' A NEW CHARACTER IN TOY STORY’S MORAL TALE

 

The fifth film turns the arrival of a children’s tablet into a warning about the world that created the “iPad Kid.” 

Toy Story film series has always understood that toys matter because children give them life. The newest chapter reverses that compact: what happens when a glowing screen asks for the child’s complete attention and the old companions are left staring from the floor? Sociologist Aarushi Bhandari sees more than a movie plot. She sees a moral tale about technology, exhausted parents and a society that has allowed a tablet to become the village.

GUEST BLOG / By Aarushi Bhandari, Davidson College Originally published by The Conversation-- In the trailer for “Toy Story 5,” a little girl named Bonnie is playing with her toys when a package arrives in the mail. 

She opens it to find Lilypad, a tablet for children. 

The iconic toys from the series—Woody, Buzz Lightyear, the Potato Heads, Forky and Slinky Dog—watch in dismay as Bonnie casts them all aside in favor of the bright tablet screen. Rex the dinosaur exclaims, “What? Extinction? Not again!” 

The film zeros in on a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: the “iPad kid,” a term used—often disparagingly—to describe a generation of children who grew up enchanted by screens. 

A lot of the discussion around tablet use among kids shames parents, framing it as an example of lazy or bad parenting. Yet factors such as long working hours and lack of access to affordable childcare compel many parents to rely on tablets. 

"As a scholar of the attention economy—and also as a mom to a 4-year-old—I’ve noticed a disconnect between the resources U.S. society offers parents and what’s expected of them in the digital age," points out article author Bhandari. 

THE PANDEMIC AND THE “SQUARE AU PAIR” 

When the first “Toy Story” came out in 1995, many single-income families could still afford to comfortably raise multiple children. It was more common for new parents to live near extended family members, such as grandparents, who could provide childcare support. Federal policies provided some low-income families with cash assistance that helped ease the transition to parenthood. 

Since then, parenting has become much more challenging. Single-income households with children under 18 have steadily declined as wages have stagnated, forcing both parents into the workforce. At the same time, it has become harder to qualify for government benefits. 

Even when mothers earn a paycheck, working moms experience what sociologists call the “motherhood penalty”—career disadvantages, including lower wages and barriers to promotion following childbirth—even as U.S. parental-leave policies remain weak. 

So it is hardly surprising that fewer Americans are choosing to become parents under these conditions. Those who did have children in the years leading up to 2020 then ran directly into the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The lockdowns that began in March 2020 closed schools and many workplaces. Some parents worked from home; others continued essential work in grocery stores, hospitals and elsewhere. Children stayed home as schools shifted to remote learning. 

It is important to remember that institutions with social legitimacy and authority encouraged tablet use during the pandemic. School systems around the world normalized screens for remote learning. Children as young as four were given tablets, allowing parents space to complete their own work and household tasks. Some mothers called the device “the square au pair.” 

In this sense, the tablet became a form of school-sanctioned childcare. Economic activity was minimally disrupted. Productivity hummed along. And the kids? Comfortably distracted. 

FOR SOME HOUSEHOLDS, THERE IS LITTLE CHOICE 

When lockdowns ended, tablets remained integrated into the education system. In 2021, four in five U.S. households with children had a tablet. Beyond schoolwork, children also use tablets for video games and television. 

The adverse effects of excessive screen time have been documented for decades, but scholars have only recently begun to unpack the specific harms of interactive tablet use among young children. 

Children who use tablets are more likely to experience emotional dysregulation and dependence on screens. Researchers have also found tablet use among children to be significantly associated with ADHD diagnoses. 

At the same time, screen use among children is tied to social class. Parents in working- and middle-class households are more likely to rely on screens than high-income parents who can hire childcare services such as full-time nannies. 

Parental education is another factor. Americans generally have little grasp of digital hygiene—the best practices that can minimize the negative effects of screens. Households in which parents did not graduate from college are even less likely to receive useful guidance. 

While schools hand out tablets, most fail to provide students and families with comprehensive education about the adverse effects of excessive screen time. 

In other words, this is not merely a Generation Alpha problem. Most people—adults included, with or without children—are not properly educated about their choices around technology. Yet adults continue to be shamed if they hand a child a tablet, even while parents bear the burden of challenging an educational system that has normalized those same devices. 

FRANKENSTEIN’S VILLAGE 

When work is the only sturdy pillar in a society where government benefits for low-income people, family ties and community institutions have eroded, tablets replace the metaphorical village—the web of social support that helps families thrive. 

In pursuit of jobs or affordable housing, many young parents move farther from their extended families and the communities where they grew up. Working parents forced to rely on daycare—sometimes for children only a few weeks old—spend an exorbitant amount for the service. 

Some have no alternative but to send infants to expensive daycare centers often staffed by underpaid workers who are mothers themselves. 

Meanwhile, traditional gender roles ensure that many mothers still go home to a second shift. Working women continue to perform a disproportionate share of cooking, cleaning and childcare. No matter how overworked or exhausted some parents are, they cannot afford help as inflation and the cost of living remain high. 

Big Tech takes advantage of this crisis with a “solution” that ultimately treats children as products, manipulating their emotions and mining their data. As I argue in my book, “Attention and Alienation,” children’s dependence on screens is a key component of the attention economy. 

The earlier a life is monetized, the longer it is profitable. 

“Toy Story 5” and its critical view of the tablet may be helpful. But it will take more than a blockbuster movie to protect small children from the harms of too much screen time. It will require strong parental-leave policies, expansive and affordable childcare, fair wages and shared household labor. 

In other words, there needs to be a full rehabilitation of the village. 

*** 

About the author: Aarushi Bhandari is an assistant professor of sociology at Davidson College. The original article appeared in TheConversation.com

Illustration: AI was instructed by the blog to create the posted image in the style of the late Sidney Paget, a gifted Brit illustrator of the early 20th century.