QUINCY
Quincy dining hall is what every Harvard student believes himself to be: overworked and underappreciated. Too many students take advantage of its proximity to the Yard (it's the closest viable option), making Quincy an ideal arena to stage the struggle between institutional necessity and residential comfort.
Quincy is an Orientalist's wet dream, a melange of all things exotically Asian done up with clean lines and simple geometric shapes (triangular ceiling sconces, cube chairs). The screens that separate the serving area from the dining area are like Japanese privacy screens, their slatted design evoking "exotic" bamboo. Various Ming-style vases and tureens once lined up like eager Maoists atop the salad bar, but have since disappeared in a fit of Amerocentrism. A rather unflattering painting of a beaming (and vaguely sickened) Buddha watches blissfully over the entire proceedings, as "offerings" of fruits and sweets (the traditional gifts given to the god) are heaped at his feet for students' consumption. In winter, you can hear the "ohm" of the House's generator beneath your feet.
Fetishization aside, however, the touch of the "Oriental" does much to help Quincy reconcile its dual roles of private gathering place for House residents and public nexus of interhouse dining. Much of Japanese architecture struggles with combining the world of man and the world of man's environment (nature). Quincy picks up on this idea with the giant floor-to-ceiling windows that run the length of the dining hall: The privacy of the Harvard dining experience is integrated into its constantly visible environment--the University and the city.
The interior of the dining hall is itself a schizophrenic attempt to address three different realms of the dining experience, separated by giant ribbed columns (that appropriately echo the faux-bamboo of the other separating screens. The central area surrounded by the colonnade is the "public" space, where long tables do not encourage "gathering around" for shared commensality, and the prominence of the salad bar (and the way it violently disrupts the unified space) proves that this space is for eating, not chatting. The colonnade separates this from the "private" space, which is filled with individual tables that are each self-contained universes of intimacy.
Capping off one end of the dining hall is the "stage," a raised portion of the dining hall blocked off by curtains on all sides and set against a mural that looks like the bastard offspring of a Picasso and a blender. The elementary school cafeteria-cum-auditorium look makes the stage the ultimate in public-private reconciliation, offering one of the most postmodern dining experience on campus (the Pforzheimer lovers balconyaside): the private, commensal experience of eating a meal becomes a dramatic public performance--life as an intermission between play acts.