The Future of Dining
SCAD Interior design professor Christine Van Duyn knows what it takes to accomplish world-class work. Before joining the faculty at SCAD, she worked as an architect specializing in award-winning restaurants, bars, and lounges, including marquee projects like the Columbia Room, named “The Best American Cocktail Bar” (Tales of the Cocktail, 2017) and The Dabney, both in Washington D.C.
A SCAD alumna, Prof. Van Duyn (B.F.A., photography, 2004) is challenging her students this quarter to examine the future of the restaurant industry as they design spaces that will function in a post COVID-19 landscape.
Christine E. Van Duyn:
Restaurants have unique obstacles in our world today. Social distancing guidelines, capacity limits, and mask requirements are all impacting businesses in ways that restaurateurs are still trying to figure out. Here in Savannah a few places have developed to-go menus, begun taking reservations, and changed their hours of operation.
Industry professionals learned numerous lessons over the summer, and those learnings are months if not years away from fully being implemented to ensure the struggles and shutdowns we’ve experienced will never happen again.
With that understanding, I am working closely with my interior design students this quarter to re-think, re-imagine, and re-understand what a restaurant experience will be going forward. The conversations have been fun to lead and I am excited to see how the students develop their projects over the course of the semester. Here are some of the original ideas that have really sparked our imaginations:
Outdoor Dining: We are seeing our downtown sidewalks and streets turn into funky pop-up patios. While these are fun and needed adjustments, they are not long-term solutions. Outdoor dining will be necessary in the world going forward. We must look to design designated outdoor spaces from the beginning rather than the end.
Back to Booths: We have all been to an old-school Italian restaurant where the lighting is dark, the décor is dated, and the waiters served your parents butter and noodles when they were young. The one thing that those restaurants did right was booths. Booths provide a barrier from other parties and will slow the spread of germs and air born pathogens. Booths will make a comeback, and we need to ensure the spaces we design allow for easy flow of movement and safety of staff.
To-Go Windows: Food delivery systems will only be more important to the success of our community as we move forward. Today, your delivery driver physically walks into a restaurant and often times interacts face to face with individuals in order to ensure they are walking out with your food. We can already see the inherent risks in this system. While that was fine 12 months ago, it will not be the norm going forward. Restaurants will design specific windows and locations for food pick-up, limiting risks for both the staff, delivery drivers, and patrons.
Safety has always been paramount when it comes to design, and these shifts will be seen as exciting new challenges throughout the industry. The fact that they will play out in real time, across the entire world, will be entirely brand new — and I can guarantee you that SCAD students will be right there as it happens.
Visit Christine Van Duyn at her wonderful website.
By Robert Almand
