Project: Canteen 2012

©Paul McCredie

Canteen is a food catering and dispensing facility on a college campus.

Four possible sites were considered for Canteen, each with difficulties inherent in a tightly constrained existing context. The final site was selected by the college in many ways as a provocation: how would this site inform the building, and the building inform the site? This location was perhaps the most audacious, and the resulting programme similarly unorthodox.

Canteen occupies the residual area in a corner between two buildings and a courtyard. The available site comprised a series of ‘given’ and largely immutable spaces, which the new canteen occupies and connects volumetrically. An additional linear circulation element completes the resulting deterministic planning logic, which is akin to that of a submarine.

©Paul McCredie

The brief for Canteen called for a flexible, all-weather food preparation and serving ‘machine’ for student lunches, which could double as a catering facility for functions held in the gymnasium and its foyer. Concern with the intrusion of a service facility in the social heart of the campus defined in earlier work drove a conceptually monotone ‘non-building’ form. A finned edge of the circulation element provides a sculptural opportunity as a source of discrete processional lighting to the forecourt during evening functions, and visual connection with daylight and movement while in use.