"With nothing but an unassuming
name Epic Cafe, the new cafeteria at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park,
California, has a cool atmosphere with décor and furnishings that blend the
industrial and the nostalgic. The office responsible for the decoration of the
space is Roman & Williams, signing projects such as the hip Ace Hotel in
New York. Fact is that the couple Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch could
print an ancient atmosphere to the canteen without linking it to any particular
style of the past. The New York Times dubbed the style "design school of
Benjamin Button." It is an imagined past, perfect for the domains of Mark
Zuckerberg, the virtual full of creativity and innovation.
The restaurant
resembles both a cafeteria and a school building that has not been finished.
That is, although the choice of furniture and objects have been careful,
architects strove to apply to architecture speech disseminated by the creator
of Facebook, "Our company is 1% complete - there is still plenty of room to
develop and create."
If the set of buildings
of Menlo Park was chosen and decorated to recreate an urban environment where
every employee is free to change your living room or bay, the Epic Cafe was
thought to function as the point of this social conversion "city".
The idea was that the restaurant is a space not only for food but also a date.
The atmosphere is very informal, with concrete floors, construction systems
supporting exposed, various types of industrial lighting, wooden tables without
treatment and signage painted on the floor, on a large scale. Being on
Facebook, it might be accepted that an employee write your name on a chair. But
in the case of a work of Roman & Williams, this action would be a
sacrilege.
Different from the design
of the Google cafeteria, full of statistical intelligence - that, for example,
set the tables of eight places like friendships and ideas to stimulate
conversation, minimizing the formation of closed groups - the project at
Facebook has a culture more empirical. The different table sizes, for example,
spaces are intended only to provide more or less reserved, enabling both a
large cluster relaxed as serious a meeting between two people work during
office hours. The larger tables also serve to promote the meeting of employees
who are not yet known, according Alesch."
- Casa Vogue
