Ground Café – Yale New Haven, Connecticut
Ground Café brightens a part of the Yale University campus that is well populated daily but had been lacking in public amenities. The new oasis is tucked into the ground floor of the Becton Center, a ruggedly handsome poured concrete structure designed by Marcel Breuer and completed in 1970 for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Besides offering a convenient and congenial setting for coffee, pastries, and light meals, the café was intended to encourage interaction among faculty and students of the engineering school — along with those from other Yale departments. In adapting a former seminar room on the building's street floor, the architects first expanded it by a third of its original area. The existing aluminum-framed glass wall that had been tucked behind the structural columns was replicated in an extension that gives the café visibility from the street, while still being sheltered under the overhang of the upper floors. Inside the café, the architects did not entirely conceal the rough-textured cast-in-place concrete enclosure of the former seminar room, so integral to the architecture of the building. But they gave the space a richer, more intimate quality — and improved acoustics — by layering a palette of walnut planks and perforated aluminum sheets over its walls and ceiling, leaving some of the original textured concrete visible. The variegated bluestone floor had existed here — inside and out — and new stone was obtained from the original quarry for the room extension and a wainscot along one wall. In a bolder move to enhance the cafe's appeal, the design incorporates a 23,000-diode LED "digital canvas" rising up one wall and across the ceiling, a display that is visible to passersby through the new glazed wall. The installation was inspired by the products of research going on in the Becton Center itself, which the architects found "not only computational, but visual — and beautifully so." The installation makes these digital images visible not just to students and staff of that building, but to the Yale community at large, "manifesting the connection between science and art." Although the programmable LED device originated to display work of the engineering school's researchers, its administration soon agreed to make its programming available to the university's entire faculty and student body, underscoring the idea that the café was intended as a link between the school and the rest of Yale.
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