The Condé Nast Cafeteria
Gehry Partners, LLP

March 30, 2003 /

New York, NY, USA

Photo: arcspace

The Condé Nast Cafeteria is located on the fourth floor of the Condé Nast Publishing Headquarters designed by Fox & Fowle Architects at Four Times Square in New York City.

The 260 seat cafeteria, providing employees with a convenient lunch time dining and meeting facility, includes a main dining area, a servery, and four private dining rooms. The main dining area is organized to provide a variety of seating arrangements in an atmosphere that is both intimate and open.

Custom designed booths that accommodate 4-6 people each are distributed along the perimeter walls. The perimeter walls, which are clad in blue titanium panels that include an acoustic backing to insure acoustic absorption, undulate in response to the geometry and overall configuration of the booths. Additional booths are located on a raised seating platform which is enclosed within curved glass panels in the center of the main dining area. The floor of the main dining area is an ash-veneer plywood, and the ceiling is clad in blue titanium panels that match the perimeter walls.

Gehry is the Paganini of architects, able to build anything, including the swirling glass panels that turn space into a liquid in the Conde Nast cafeteria. But less obvious is the way the space has changed the culture of the company: first you enter the scramble for food, and then filter past all the open banquets. Gehry's formalism has produced an informality that encourages chance encounters of the friendly, and even romantic, kind. Gehry's space defrosts the chill in what had been a frosty social climate.
/Joseph Giovannini

Photo: arcspace

The servery, which is adjacent to the main dining area, is a fully equipped facility that provides a selection of different hot and cold entrees. The servery's curvilinear angel hair finish stainless steel counter tops, blue titanium walls and canopies, and ash veneer floor and ceiling compliment the sculptural and aesthetic character of the main dining area.

Photo: arcspace