Morrison Dining Hall
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
Our design for the Morrison Dining hall combines Cornell’s educational, social, and culinary missions in a dynamic open setting. The space is organized around 11 different food concepts – a series of “micro restaurants” dispersed throughout the center of the hall that create unique social spaces clustered around each food experience. Students are invited to interact with the culinary staff by selecting ingredients and seasonings as their meal comes together in front of them. The focus is on freshness, nutrition, and choice.
The focus is on freshness, nutrition, and choice.
A sense of choice and openness carries over throughout the dining areas. Both high and low seating and a variety of table types are utilized to craft pockets of social space that respond to the different needs of the student body, while larger areas outside the food lab give students more space to complete classwork or conduct club meetings. Our design is ultimately intended to maximize the visibility, transparency, and functionality of the open kitchen. The materials themselves are unpretentious: stained concrete floors, quartz counters and decorative tile. Large skylights bathe the room in natural light during the day. In the evening, lighting integrated into the food stations and custom lighting among the seating areas establish distinct and intimate zones.
A sense of choice and openness carries over throughout the dining areas.
Our design is ultimately intended to maximize the visibility, transparency, and functionality of the open kitchen.
The centerpiece of the dining hall is a glazed food lab – a research and teaching kitchen that literally brings the worlds of academia and student life together around food and nutrition. The food lab has been designed as a multi-function space. It is a teaching facility shared among different departments of the University, as well as a research kitchen for the dining hall’s culinarians and an event space to be programmed throughout the day. It features 18 individual cooking stations with visibility and access directly from both the exterior and the interior of the dining hall.
