At the invitation of the Everson Museum at Syracuse University to produce a conceptual image for the design of a new café incorporating the newly acquired Rosenfield Collection of functional ceramic art, this proposal used techniques of superimposotion to synthesize the two dominant qualitative conditions of the museum—the grid within a figural mass of I.M. Pei’s museum building and the diversity of forms and colors of functional art pieces in the Rosenfield Collection.

A field of shaped tables take cues from the shapes and lines of pieces in The Rosenfield Collection and accommodates myriad seating arrangements for varying group sizes, university events, and community services. The tables can be dispersed as a field (as shown) or positioned together as a few mega-tables. Moveable podiums migrate throughout the café space, providing additional opportunities for displaying pieces in the collection. Each podium has a square top, reflecting the underlying logics of the museum grid and providing a safe display surface, but each podium also has a figural bottom, reflecting the qualities of the pieces in the collection. The podiums, like the tables, can be dispersed as a field (as shown) or placed tangentially to create a large platform for displaying the collection as a whole.

This image was developed as a conceptual image at the invitation of the Everson Museum as part of an invited competition of 25 architects, however it was not selected for construction.