Open Restaurants Innovation

RestaurantAdvocacy

May 23

Project Brief

In collaboration with the Alfresco NYC coalition, the Design Corps, Design Advocates, and NYC’s Departments of Transportation and Planning, AIA NY produced a series of workshops that seek to directly influence the future of New York City’s permanent Open Restaurants program.

Design Approach

Open Restaurants Innovation is an effort to galvanize the disparate efforts of numerous individual designers, public space nonprofits, and professional organizations working on Open Restaurants and emerging public space efforts and to ensure that design thinking is part of the process for creating a permanent outdoor dining program in New York City.

We called on all designers and restaurateurs with outdoor dining structure experience, who want to see the Open Restaurants program continue and improve, to share their work, highlighting innovative designs, materials, and methodologies that can inform design policy for the city’s program.

Submitted projects were reviewed and assessed during the course of the workshops, allowing participants to develop design proposals for outdoor structures. These discussions inform an ongoing recommendation report produced by Alfresco NYC, part of the city’s public engagement plan for Open Restaurants, which will ultimately influence the draft of official design guidelines for the program.