Your second and final project is to design a restaurant for the lower floor of a loft building in New York City (The apartments on the upper floors of the same building will be totally independent with a separate entrance and staircase, which you may disregard for the purposes of this project). You may decide in which NYC neighborhood your restaurant is located (Tribeca, Brooklyn, Upper East Side, Bronx, Wall Street, etc.) and develop your concept accordingly.
There are a number of qualities, which attracted the owners to this space:
You will be responsible for identifying the type of food offered at the restaurant and developing a profile of the restaurant’s chef and clientele. You will also need to carefully consider the relationship of the interior to the street. While you must retain the structural elements of the façade shown in your base plan, all other aspects of the window and the entry design are up to you.
Please refer to the project description for the functional requirements of the project.
Image from: Cohn, David. "Enigma Restaurant by RCR Arquitectes and Pau Llimona." Architectural Record. 1 Sept. 2017. http://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/12938-enigma-restaurant-by-rcr-arquitectes-and-pau-llimona. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Searching for journal articles may allow you to find literature and research specifically related to your topic/project, e.g., restaurants for a specific cuisine, dining style, or group of clientele. They are also excellent sources for finding case studies relevant to your project.
NYSID Library's subscription to EBSCOhost service includes the following three major databases: Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, GreenFile, and Art & Architecture Source. Combined, it provides you with access to full-text articles of over 600 journals. Although many of the records in the Avery Index are citations only (i.e., not full-text articles), it is very likely that either NYSID's Library or NYU's Bobst Library may have the print versions of the journals quoted in the citations. The Library can also issue a METRO pass to our users for consulting a particular book or journal in the Avery Library of Columbia University.
When searching EBSCOhost, you can simply use the search term "restaurant design" to retrieve more than 1,700 articles on restaurant design. To narrow your search, you can add keywords to your Boolean search specific to your project/research topics, such as "restaurant design" AND "fusion," or "restaurant design" AND "France."
Before your design process and research on the restaurants, you may want to obtain a general understanding of the type of the food offered at the restaurant and the typical clientele of restaurant. The type of cuisine and the profiles of the restaurant's chef and clientele may affect the layout and aesthetics of the restaurant's interiors, e.g., is it a high-end French restaurant offering classic haute cuisine with an impressive wine list from its enormous cellar, or simply a casual Japanese izakaya offering a variety of drinks or sake with light meals or snacks? A simple Google search of the cuisine may retrieve some basic information about the food and beverages served in your restaurant. However, reference resources in CREDO or some general e-books in EBSCO may give you more authoritative sources of information related to the cuisine, e.g., in CREDO, you can learn about the various aspects of food and cuisine in the Cambridge World History of Food.
The online library guide for the course Residential Design III: Cultural Research may help you to find some basic information about the culture and aesthetics of the country or ethnic group associated with the cuisine.
The NYSID Library has a significant collection of print books on restaurant or hospitality design. Keyword searching of the following suggested subject terms in the Library's online catalog, Bobcat, will retrieve many results relevant to the topics. You can sort the results by the newest date if you want to find out the latest research on restaurant design.
Suggested search terms:
You can add additional keywords to your search if you want to narrow down your search to a particular aspect of restaurant design, e.g., restaurants AND Japan.
Recommended NYSID Books:
Architectural Record is an excellent place to find articles on the industry's most current and high-profile projects. To access the magazine from home or from campus, first sign into the NYSID Portal, then click "Student" on the top bar and "Library Resources" on the side of your screen. Under "Electronic Journals" you will see a link to Architectural Record and the library username and password. The screenshot below highlights the relevant sections of the student portal.
Once you have signed into Architectural Record, one way to look for articles is to go to the Toolbar at the top of the page, select Projects and then Building Type Studies. They have organized the articles by category, and you can browse by Restaurants, Healthcare, Retail, Libraries, etc. Here you will find articles with detailed project descriptions, images, and floor plans.
