Bentel Bentel Monograph

succeed because they are loved by locals as well as newcomers and outsiders.

Further evidence of the integration of restaurants into their locales is given by the diversity of successful restaurants by location within and among cities. We note the all-important differences of character and culture between restaurants in Brooklyn and Manhattan as well as in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston or Amsterdam, London and Beijing. This is as true of the one-off restaurants we have designed such as Cielo in Boca Raton and Island Creek Oyster Bar in Boston as it is of branded restaurants such as Houston's, Bluesmoke or the several Craft Restaurants. What passes in one place will not in another. As with any creative effort, designing a restaurant is a process that passes through distinct phases from the initial conception and development to final execution. We are struck by the parallels between our work as architects designing restaurants and the work of our peers in the culinary arts who first plot their menus in response to the seasonal availability of their raw material and who transform that material through the application of their expertise and aesthetic sensibility. As with any design practice, the medium defines the way an audience will relate to it. In preparing and sharing food, chefs and restaurateurs provide physical and emotional satisfaction. As molders of man-made environments, architects form places that subsequently contain and influence the human activities taking place there. Architects conceive forms and spaces through an unfolding quest to locate a consequential vision in material form. As an introduction to our work we offer brief reflections on that vision as it is evident in our work. Place-making Places are memorable spaces, environments whose image we associate with an event or practice and that stimulate both visual and emotional recollection. As locations simultaneously of social and private engagement, restaurants are predisposed to conjure powerful memories, if not solely because of their physical features then because of the environment in concert with the food, the service, the company and conversation. The architecture of restaurants does not provide the content of these various components of experience, but rather supports them, constituting what some have called a "thick" space, one which performs discretely in response to the various needs of servers and those served. For this reason, as designers we look first to the many overlapping uses of restaurant architecture. Guests arrive, dine and depart. Raw material comes in, is processed and is delivered as food or sent out as waste. These two intersecting arcs of activity underlie the restaurant program. Our design work begins with the orchestration of spaces that service them independently and in unison. This sounds like a rudimentary task and, indeed, it can proceed from a simple diagram of relationships of uses. But this mapping not only distributes parts of the program, it also clarifies the relationship

Figure 1 A,B,C,D: The Modern: Design evolution from Program Diagram to Plan Diagram, Ceiling Diagram to Seating Plan

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