Times change

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2000

Design of a New York cafeteria for a large publishing company with stylish expectations provided an opportunity for material experiment.

Frank Gehry's continuing experiments with materials have strayed into glass. In his design of Conde Nast's cafeteria in New York, he has treated glass as if it were fabric, creating billowing veils of the stuff like transparent curtains dividing one area from another.

Faced with the prospect of housing all its titles in one building at Four Times Square, Conde Nast asked Gehry to design four private dining rooms and a communal cafeteria for 260 or so people (which for atmosphere had to rival the Royalty's restaurant booths, the favourite Philippe Starck refuge of the more style conscious staff). In asking for a democratic ambience, the clients knew that Gehry's version of democracy would have visionary edge.

The cafeteria was inserted into one big 4200mm high space. Within this amorphous volume, Gehry has employed biological mimicry to shape cafeteria space horizontally and vertically.

Transparency suggests the communal and the cliquishness that the cell arrangement implies is dispelled by extraordinary walls of billowing glass that veil the central booths. Walls are composed of immense laminated panels, 22mm thick, 3650mm high and 1200mm wide, all of them different. Weighing up to 360kg, each panel is fixed with stainless-steel connectors at top and bottom to a steel frame (hidden at the top by curving soffits). Modelled by computer, the panels were fabricated by a Californian firm, CTEK, which specializes in automotive glass engineering.

Under a titanium-lined ceiling, clusters of cells (Gehry's version of Starck's booths) flow around three sides of the building and into the centre to form islands. Around the periphery where the clusters are tight, they are lined with titanium ('Giotto blue') and feel more secluded than those snaking around the centre. Booths are defined by curving banquettes; in the centre they are elevated on concrete, wood-clad bases, and between and around them winds a path which rises and falls with the seating's change in level.

This complex essay in material science and engineering was poetically inspired for Gehry has observed he was thinking of landscape and that the dark edges of the glass panels look like reeds 'swaying in the breeze'. Elsewhere, in the private rooms glass walls under sinuous floating ceilings take a slightly different form. Panels overlap and glass has been sandblasted, so that undulations are shaped by the play of translucent light and shadow. Part of Gehry's appeal as an architect is that the interiors he creates do work. Here, where with glass and titanium you might have expected unbearable noise, he has taken measures to reduce it -- mainly by perforating the titanium and lining it with acoustic panelling -- and the place is not noisy.

Otherwise, something approaching an old-fashioned cafe ambience is impressed by bright lighting from suspended luminaires (designed by the practice) and downlights, by furniture (tables covered with yellow laminated plastic and quilted Naugahyde banquettes) and by the light ash used for floors and ceiling soffits.

Architect

Project team:

Frank O. Gehry & Associates, Los Angeles

Associate architect

Frank O. Gehry, Randy Jefferson, Edwin Chan, Christopher Mercier, Michelle kaufmann, Leigh Jerrard, Kamran Ardalan, David Nam

Photographs

Mancini Duffy

Eduard Hueber