In the early 1990s, following his graduation from Rice University’s School of Architecture and a stint at Ricardo Bofill’s office in Barcelona, Eduardo Aizenman returned to Mexico City, which still had not recovered from the devastation of the 1985 earthquake. Wanting to create community, breathe new life into the city, and just have a place to hang out, Aizenman and his friends conceived a bookstore-café (or Cafebrería) in the historic Condesa neighborhood, which had been particularly hard hit. The move helped fuel a local renaissance and, over the years, the partners brought their Cafebrería El Péndulo concept to various precincts, with Aizenman designing unique bookstore- cafés for each location.

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The partners have recently opened their seventh—and first ground-up—outlet in the San Ángel neighborhood, along the busy Avenida Revolución 1500, wedged between a theater complex and a government building. Beyond an unassuming, boxy metal and pine-plank exterior lies a striking 26-foot-high interior laced with retail, dining, and lounge seating scattered across its various levels. “The challenge,” Aizenman says, “was, how do you make this big, 10,500-square-foot box and give it human scale?” The theater next door provided cues. “There was this idea of stages, different levels of platforms where you could see and others could see you,” he says. “We wanted to make a big hangar-like space where things would happen.” Indeed, on a recent rainy evening, El Péndulo buzzed with activity as the young clientele browsed the shelves, chatted over drinks, and worked on their laptops.

Besides its range of programming, the building actively engages visitors with its variety of options—stairs, bridges, and balconies—for moving horizontally and vertically through the space. The interior is arranged around two axes: one from the big urban street to the garden at the back and the other from the theater to a high wall of books. At the center is an 80-year-old palm wrapped in a louvered chimney-like enclosure that pops through the roof, helping pull heat up and out of the building, which, save for the kitchen, does not have mechanical ventilation.

Materials help make the large room less imposing. Aizenman used pine for the ceiling slats and shelves and oak paneling to bring a warmth to the steel and glass, for example. And programmed spaces are indicated with different floor coverings: local black stone for the entry and main retail level, wood for the dining area, and resilient flooring for the lounge and bar. Lighting also helps define zones, with long LEDs embedded in the slat ceiling, pendants and floor lamps for the dining and the lounge areas, and LED wash and spot lighting for the bookshelves.

In its newest iteration, El Péndulo continues its mission of turning a retail space into an experiential cultural hub—an approach that’s now very much in vogue. “It’s a bit like WeWork,” says Aizenman laughing, “but we don’t charge.”