Rogers Marvel Architects created a welcoming, comfortable and efficient soup kitchen and community resource center in New York's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The client, St. John's Bread and Life, provides daily meals as well as literacy classes, job placement programs, legal assistance, and related services to its Brooklyn and Queens patrons. RMA organized the project's programming sequence so that patrons drawn to the popular food programs would also come into contact with the center's social services. The library, for example, offering resume help and computer access, is located along the largely transparent street front and is visible to everyone who enters the dining area. RMA worked within a tightly constrained budget to convert the former factory warehouse into a series of gracious spaces that take advantage of the existing structure's eccentricities. The main dining room ceiling, for example, is lit with overscaled custom light fixtures that negotiate an irregular column grid and were more affordable, and more distinctive, than most off-the-shelf options.

AIA New York State Award of Excellence

photography © David Sundberg/Esto