Designing Student Pavilion Cafes: Fostering Interaction and Community

Student pavilion cafes are emerging as vital spaces within educational institutions, serving as more than just places to grab a quick bite. They are becoming hubs for interaction, collaboration, and community building. Thoughtful design plays a critical role in shaping these spaces to meet the diverse needs of students and enhance their overall educational experience.

The Evolving Role of University Spaces

Business schools are increasingly recognizing the importance of creating environments that foster interaction and collaboration among students, faculty, and business leaders. LMN has been helping business schools plan, design, and deliver new facilities for business education since 2000. Post-occupancy studies have revealed the significant impact of well-designed spaces on student engagement and learning outcomes.

The Edward J. Minskoff Pavilion: A Case Study in Collaborative Design

The Edward J. Minskoff Pavilion at Michigan State University's Broad College of Business exemplifies the modern approach to designing business school facilities. Completed in late 2019, this 100,000 SF addition to the Eppley Center (1961) and the North Business Building (1992) was designed to create a new front door for the Broad College of Business and a new social heart to the business program on Michigan State University’s campus in East Lansing.

The project includes 11 classrooms, 25 team rooms, a leadership lab, an MBA lounge, an event space, a café, and 5,600 SF of informal learning spaces ranging from café seating to quiet study lounges and small team nooks. Organizationally, the new building connects back to Eppley Center and the North Business Building with two links that create a circuit of circulation through all the business college buildings. It creates a new front door to Shaw Lane on the south that spills out to an event lawn on the north along the Red Cedar River and a courtyard between the addition and the existing buildings.

One key metric LMN tracks is the ratio of instruction (classroom) seats to interaction seats, which serves as an indicator of how collaborative a building is designed. Prior to the completion of Minskoff Pavilion, the entire business college complex had a ratio of 9:1.

Impact on Student Interaction

Surveys conducted before and after the opening of Minskoff Pavilion revealed significant shifts in student priorities regarding interactions. The priority on student/faculty interactions reduced by 17% while the priority on student/student interactions increased by 5% and the priority on student/admin interactions increased by 73%. This suggests that the new facility successfully fostered peer-to-peer learning and increased engagement with administrative staff. Consistent with previous studies, friends, family, faculty, and classmates top the before list.

Valued Spaces Within the Pavilion

Students identified their favorite spaces in the business college complex as the team rooms (45%), atrium/café (42%), tiered classrooms (20%), and informal learning areas (16%) in Minskoff Pavilion as well as the business library (25%) in the adjacent College of Law building - an existing facility providing quiet study and collaboration spaces. The students show the value they place on the various spaces in the building with their presence throughout the day - bringing reality to the original vision of the building as a place for community and collaboration. Even before the building officially opened and classes started, students found the team rooms and study spaces and took them as their own. This underscores the importance of providing a variety of spaces to cater to different learning and interaction styles.

The location of welcoming program and career management offices adjacent to the building entrance and primary circulation paths helped create significantly more interactions with program staff and increased appreciation of those programs. Providing a rich range of formal and informal learning environments promotes more - and more-valuable - interactions. These interactions support students’ self-identified goals and extend to a broader range of people beyond faculty members. Physical spaces for gathering and digital/virtual capabilities in classrooms and interview rooms increase access to business leaders, alumni, recruiters, and other departments which support academic, personal, and career growth.

Montana State University's Dining Pavilion: An Invitation to Campus

Montana State University’s new flagship Dining Pavilion serves as an 'invitation' for students, staff, and the community to campus from the north side. In keeping with the MSU Masterplan that will eventually see the replacement of the old student dorms at the campus edge, the new Dining Pavilion faces the MSU’s “North Mall” culminating in the gateway to campus. The Dining Pavilion provides seating for 700 in a $19.5 million, 50,000 SF building which includes a mezzanine and a basement with offices and support spaces. The building reflects MSU’s commitment to providing an outstanding dining experience to its rapidly growing student population, featuring eight serveries offering diverse fare including Mexican, Asian and Italian cuisines, comfort food, a European-style bakery, salads and sandwiches.

Collaborative Design Process

Program requirements were developed through a collaborative process. Goals and priorities were identified by MSU staff leaders, the building committee and the architects during team workshops and a case study road trip.

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Sustainable Design

The building was designed to achieve LEED Silver certification, in keeping with MSU’s dedication to sustainability. Strategies include passive solar design, with transpired solar collectors lining the south wall to preheat outside air.

Design and Materials

The animating idea of the design is that of the pavilion (hence the name!), with a sense of open sides under a wide, beckoning roof. Inflections in the building’s exterior respond to visual alignment of the Bridger Mountains to the northeast and historic Montana Hall to the south. Mezzanine seating, in particular, benefits from dramatic views to these landmarks. The building’s design character and materials reflect the preference expressed by students and staff for quality materials (wood, glass, steel, masonry) handled in a contemporary fashion. Weathered Corten panels provide a rustic counterpoint to the sweeping brick volumes and generous swaths of glass.

Interior Design and Functionality

Within the Pavilion’s crisp, angular shell, the interior creates a sense of marketplace: serveries each have a distinct, colorful visual character suiting their cuisine and are arranged in an organic fashion while subtly managing the traffic flow. The dining experience is enhanced with many venues featuring food prepared in full view. A retail servery featuring coffee drinks and fresh baked goods is accessible both from within and outside of the main dining hall, allowing operation outside of the dining hall’s hours. In all, the New Dining Pavilion is a handsome, functional and vibrant addition to a proud campus.

SelgasCano's Café in Bailuwan Town: A Colorful Antidote

Wiggling through a phalanx of mid-rise housing blocks, a covered walkway and attached café serve as a colorful antidote to the regimented architecture all around it. Designed by the Madrid-based firm SelgasCano, the irrepressible explosion of angled-steel tubing and corrugated-metal roofing is a social magnet for the thousands of residents in Bailuwan Town.

Context and Design Approach

As has happened throughout China during the past three decades, the area two hours’ driving distance from the coastal city of Qingdao has been rapidly transformed from farmland. The developer makes its profit from the housing components-which are heavily formatted in siting, plan, and scale and usually designed by large Chinese firms-but entices buyers with a series of eye-catching, break-the-mold structures often designed by foreign architects. At Bailuwan, in addition to Junya Ishigami, the developer commissioned Sou Fujimoto, Ryue Nishizawa, and SelgasCano to create these special elements, each firm working independently of the others to add a different spice to the architectural stew. The architects enlivened the town with color and trees-along a walkway (top of page), on balconies (1), and at a café (2).

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José Selgas and his partner Lucía Cano had never worked in China. But Xu Qunde, the chairman of the Shandong Bailuwan Company, approached them and traveled to Madrid shortly before the Covid pandemic began. “He turned out to be one of our best clients,” says Selgas, who found the chairman thoroughly engaged in the project and willing to solve any problem that arose during construction. Although the apartment buildings on-site had already been designed, Xu allowed SelgasCano to add curving, yellow-accented balconies on one side and devise a color scheme and new composition for fenestration on the other. The project goal was to enliven the housing blocks and create visual connections, which was also achieved with the promenade and café that would snake through the center of the site.

Integration of Architecture and Landscape

Selgas and Cano at first considered relating their designs to Chinese antecedents. Xu rejected that approach, the only time he dismissed an idea outright. He agreed, however, on integrating architecture and landscape, blurring indoors and out. While this strategy has deep roots in Chinese pavilion and garden design, the Bailuwan walkway and café would make no direct historical allusions. “We always try to do less,” says Selgas. “Use less material, consume less energy, make it lighter.” So the firm’s 575-foot-long covered passage dances gracefully above the ground, open on all sides and allowing air and daylight to trickle through gaps in the irregularly shaped roof pieces. Known for their vibrant use of color, Selgas and Cano eventually selected a progression of tones ranging from willow green and olive to beige and tan. Paired angled-steel tubes serve as columns and hold up the same kind of tubes used as beams to support corrugated-steel roof panels. Those tubes become benches when laid horizontally and connected to the columns; SelgasCano originally proposed using a custom connector for attaching tubes, but the client ended up welding the pieces. The canopied path, café (3 & 4), and multihued housing (5) are among new local projects that include Ishigami’s art museum.

The "Coffee-and-Tree Café"

The north end of the walkway attaches to an amoeba-shaped canopy that from above looks like the bulbous lump in the gut of a snake that has just eaten its prey. At the head of the serpent, the architects designed the café with holes cut out of the roof for trees to grow through. The “coffee-and-tree café” is the only portion of the project with an enclosed space. It is wrapped on all sides with clear floor-to-ceiling acrylic panels, 2 inches thick and a little more than 8 feet high. SelgasCano often uses acrylic in projects, because it’s half the weight of glass, is recyclable, and requires much less energy to fabricate, being heated to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, rather than 3,000 for glass.

Landscape as a Key Element

“The most important part of the project is the landscape,” says Selgas. Whether you’re on the walkway or in the café, you’re always surrounded by trees and plantings. “On most projects, landscaping is the last thing considered and the first to get cut. A curving steel stair with tubular railings leads to a rooftop sitting area above the café. For the top surface of the concrete-slab roof, Selgas and Cano specified a material made of recycled tires. For the ceiling in the café and the soffit of the cantilevered roof, they used a recycled-wood-and-resin material that has the feel of wood. The architects also designed two wave-shaped bus shelters, clad on the inside with slender yellow and white tubes and on the outside with a reflective metal skin that helps them disappear within their setting. Along the access road, they designed colorful metal awnings for a long retail structure and six sinuous pavilions made of painted rebar that sit in a rooftop garden.

Social Impact

A high-energy jolt of architectural exuberance, the walkway and café projects entice residents to come and relax, to explore and play, to stroll and hang out. Bisecting the property, they serve as common ground for kids, parents, and seniors. They’re both a line and a hub.

Barkow Leibinger's Campus Restaurant and Event Space: A New Typology

Neither a factory nor an office building this freestanding pavilion introduces a new typology to the factory campus. Urbanistically, the new restaurant helps to complete the entrance courtyard spatially. Formally, its crystalline pentagon plan is a continuation of the crystalline ground plans of the new (existing) office building it is adjacent to. An external concrete stair connects the building's floors. Inside there are four levels. The third floor is designed with a more "domestic" feel. "It's like a big treehouse with a range of varied informal spaces distributed inside and out: big, small, dark, bright, cosy and expansive," said KoningEizenberg principal Nathan Bishop. "We riffed off the surrounding brutalist buildings, turning them inside out and warming them up," said Bishop.

Key Design Considerations for Student Pavilion Cafes

Based on these examples, several key design considerations emerge for creating successful student pavilion cafes:

Flexibility and Variety of Spaces: Providing a mix of seating options, from individual study nooks to large group tables, is essential to cater to diverse needs and preferences.
Integration of Technology: Incorporating power outlets, Wi-Fi access, and charging stations ensures that students can seamlessly integrate technology into their learning and social activities.
Natural Light and Ventilation: Maximizing natural light and ventilation creates a more inviting and comfortable environment, promoting well-being and productivity.
Acoustic Design: Addressing acoustic challenges is crucial to minimize noise distractions and create a conducive atmosphere for focused work and conversation.
Sustainability: Incorporating sustainable design principles, such as energy-efficient lighting, water conservation measures, and the use of recycled materials, demonstrates a commitment to environmental responsibility.
Aesthetics and Ambiance: Creating a visually appealing and welcoming atmosphere through the use of color, materials, and lighting can enhance the overall student experience.
Accessibility: Ensuring that the cafe is accessible to all students, regardless of their physical abilities, is a fundamental design consideration.

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