2012 national competition project #052 | cafeteria redesign
|Cafeteria Flaws Paper
Bath County High School cafeteria is not at its best. There are many changes that should be done to the cafeteria, which most people over look. Most cafeterias our huge compared to ours, but that’s because they refer to how many people that is in the school and Bath County High School is different from others. When you think of a high school, you think of teenagers, and teenagers usually are the ones who get messy and don’t like to clean after they finish eating or snacking on their food. My intention is to provide this paper of the many flaws of our high school cafeteria.
I think that if we changed the flaws that we have now in our cafeteria, that it would be a great atmosphere to eat and enjoy with friends. To make the room more inviting, maybe an efficient idea would be to use a different kind of walls instead of concrete block that we have now. I have researched that the kind of color that you use affects your appetite. Blues and grays are a suppressant toward a good appetite. Instead of our cafeteria walls being white, an idea would be to paint them a different color, like yellow (which is a suppressant), or something that is cheerful.
Our lighting is very dull, and it makes the cafeteria a very dreary atmosphere. We have windows on the right side of our cafeteria, but the rest is lighting fixtures. I think an easy solution would be to have more of a natural lighting to the room, like sky lights, for example. It gives the room a cheerful and enjoyable place to eat and chat with friends.
The heating system in the cafeteria is not at all bad, but it’s big and bulky, which takes up some space we could use for something rather than the heating system itself. The heaters we have now are magnets for food and other unnecessary items. The box radiant heaters have open vents at the top so that’s the hotspot for food to find its way in, and mess up the heating system in our school. A good way to change that would be to put radiant floor heaters in the cafeteria. This way we have more room to put more tables and chairs to sit at, and more usable space for the people at Bath County High School.
Another flaw is how loud the cafeteria gets when kids go to eat. This is a problem for people who take the lunch time to study or do homework. In other words, they need a good, quiet room to get this done. A good solution would be to have sound absorption ceilings that take all the sound away, for a more indulging atmosphere.
Also, our floors are an attraction for food. The way the floors are built, they have crevasses which are a hard way to clean. Maybe a good way to change that would be to put marble floors, instead of panel flooring in our cafeteria.
Comments
I agree. Many students do their school work during lunch. Absorbing more sound is good. Perhaps looking at divided seating areas like booths or seating areas set aside for quite study should be a consideration in your solution.
The above comment is a good and clear strategy to focus more of your attention on if you think it's important to you. You do have a lot of ideas which is great! It's good to think about everything. But there needs to be a clear concept or something that you are going to focus more than the others and will be the main driving force of your design!