2012 national competition project #158 | cafeteria redesign
|Knowing that I'm 1 out of 5129 students at Brooklyn Technical High School puts into perspective the wear-and-tear that our cafeteria endures. Our cafeteria serves students breakfast for 3 periods of our day and lunch for another six. Besides housing the kitchen, pantry, serving stations, and the only lunch-seating for students in our school, it is also home to our Student Government Office, our school store, and our SPARK office.
Our cafeteria serves as a meeting place for classmates and friends, a place to eat and buy lunch, and a hub for school pride and information. Its role in providing these things must be preserved, however improvements in sustainability are necessary to our cafeteria because of the amount of waste- the potential amount to be recycled- is so large in school which such a huge student body.
Our cafeteria takes up almost the entirety of our 7th floor, creating an "H" shape as is. The size of our cafeteria matches the size of our student body, with some lunch periods more crowded than others, however its location on the 7th Floor being so high above the ground yet below our top floors makes renovations that involve other spaces in our school rather limited.
Brooklyn Tech was built in the early 1920s and hasn't been changed much since (perhaps it structurally very complicated or complicated to remove the old building materials properly, and most likely expensive and time consuming either way). Whatever modifications are made to our cafeteria would have to safe, affordable, and manageable regarding the school schedule because it would be practically impossible to displace our large student body in the case that the cafeteria is inhabitable during renovation.
Comments
You've put quite a bit of thought into potential solutions for the problems presented, many of them very good. You also demonstrate a pretty good understanding of the challenges presented by renovating such a large structure in an urban environment. That being said, it would be nice to see pictures and drawings showing the challenges and the solutions. Look forward to seeing what you've come up with!
Thanks