Food Hall Design Theory

Conceptually, the idea of a food hall isn’t entirely new. Collections of local, varied food and beverage vendors in a dedicated retail space have been around for centuries, both globally and nationally. The impulse to concentrate commercial activity is an old one. It allows for a more controlled urban environment and the easier access to products. The Romans tried it – the market of Trajan survives, its brick structure and concrete vaults forming a curved shopping arcade. The modern food hall can trace its roots back thousands of years but when did the market hall become an arcade or mall, a place with permanent shops, bars and restaurants? There was no simple historical evolution from one to the other. 

Those that have persisted are often in urban centers, and, in North America, include spots like the Pike Place Market in Seattle, established in 1907, Reading Terminal Market, in Philadelphia since 1893, and Boston’s Quincy Market, which dates back to 1742.

The ubiquitous food courts contained within shopping malls, airports, train stations, and department stores are undoubtedly familiar, too, and have been around for decades. But food halls in the most current sense are something inherently different. The definition of what defines a food hall is still being debated, but it’s generally accepted that ‘food culture’ including the farm-to-fork and slow food movements is largely responsible for kick starting the modern food hall concept as is at the resurgence of experiential retailing.

And it’s likely the internet has played a role in shaping food halls, too. As e-commerce continues to change traditional brick-and-mortar models, accounting for an increasing percentage of retail spending with each passing year, retailers have been forced to keep up with the times. Shopping malls are fewer and further between now than only years before, and the traditional food court concept that once provided a chance for a shopping break has changed, too.

Programmatically, specific design choices are geared towards differentiating food halls from other places to dine out, with a mix of characteristics seeming to apply in whole or in part to each. Food halls regularly offer highly curated and visually appealing experiences that showcase local businesses and, in some cases, have a greater goal of urban development.

These modern food halls offer all day dining and house multipurpose communal spaces. Baltimore’s R. House, for example, proudly markets itself as a space meant for more than just eating: “This is your living room, your kitchen, your office, your hangout spot, your Baltimore stoop, your happy place.”

Design

The built environment housing a food hall is often as much of a draw as the food and drink on offer. Fareground, in Austin, Texas, was designed with a distinctive, wood-laden space. The Bourse in Philadelphia, opened recently in a historic landmarked Beaux Arts building that formerly housed the states’ first commodities exchange market. Aster Hall which opened in Chicago creates 16 stations offering things from street tacos to sushi to cocktails in what they call “food vaults”, because of their unique recessed architecture. It’s surely no coincidence that these design-minded halls photograph as well as their food does, an especially important consideration when aiming to appeal to younger generations of customers.

Location

In other cases, food halls’ physical environs are significant not only in isolation, but within a larger context. Mixed use developments that incorporate food halls can be appealing to real estate developers and tenants alike, allowing landlords to ask for more per square foot from tenants who view a conveniently located collection of quality dining options within the same building as an amenity. As such, food halls are increasingly appearing in newly constructed high-rise office and apartment buildings.

Further still, food halls have the potential to shape the neighborhoods around them. New Orlean’s Pythian Hall, for example, now occupies the first floor of a historically significant nine-story building originally constructed in 1908 for a fraternal organization. It sat vacant for years after hurricane Katrina, but the new food hall has spurred revitalization efforts. This food hall is an early step in realizing a larger vision for the surrounding downtown neighborhood’s resurrection.

Current Planning Trends

While some food halls serve as second locations for existing, established spots others are looking to provide space for new businesses.

Tastemakers which opened this past April in D.C.’s Brookland neighborhood, is doing both. It’s an incubator and food hall in one; the commercial kitchen space currently helps to meet the production needs of 15 businesses (with room for more), while the food hall houses eight vendors, a bar, and a grab-and-go grocery section. Of the food hall’s current tenants, two businesses have locations elsewhere, while the rest are vending for the first time. Participants’ contracts are initially for six months, so there’s plenty of changeover potential which creates varied offerings and a constantly evolving market.

Detroit’s newest food hall, the Fort Street Galley, also took a unique approach, modeling its selection process and business strategies after tech incubators. Opened in the city’s historical Federal Reserve Building, it currently features four businesses who participated in a competitive application process in which experienced chefs and aspiring restaurateurs alike applied, and finalists pitched their concepts to local judges. At the end of their first year at the Galley, restaurants can choose to extend their lease, move on to their own space, or nix their business altogether.

From a consumer standpoint, models like these certainly help to keep things interesting, ensuring that food halls, on both an individual and collective level, are continually evolving.

Typology

Past and Current

The impulse to concentrate commercial activity is an old one. It allows for a more controlled urban environment and the easier access to products. The Romans tried it – the market of Trajan survives, its brick structure and concrete vaults forming a curved shopping arcade. The modern food hall can trace its roots back thousands of years but when did the market hall become an arcade or mall, a place with permanent shops? There was no simple historical evolution from one to the other.

A certain ambiguity surrounds certain grand shopping structures of the late Middle Ages, such as the Palazze della Ragione of Italian cities like Padua and Bergamo. These have vaulted undercrofts populated by shops in the former case and occasional stalls in the latter, and both overlook squares with regular markets. These buildings, the name of which means ‘palace of reason’, were multi-purpose affairs, with council chambers and law courts occupying the upper stories. As such they are a kind of built metaphor for the argument that modern rationality sprouts from commercial foundations.

More provincial market halls of the late medieval period, of which a few survive, as at Châtillon-sur-Chalaronne in Ain, are purer examples of the type, mere roofs supported on spindly legs. Indeed, the ideal market hall is all roof, and as such it is a Modernist antecedent in the sense that it floats almost on columns, allowing light and fresh air to penetrate the space below.

Splendid though these complex timber constructions are, they can’t hold a candle to the great souks of the early modern Islamic world, among them Al-Madina in Aleppo, Khan el-Khalili in Cairo, and the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. The last of these was begun in 1455, and, with its more than 4,000 shops, is perhaps the largest covered market in the world. The enclosure of the market with masonry vaults was a means of securing the goods that were left behind while the complex was closed at night. In plan, the Grand Bazaar resembles a city district, with 61 covered streets and a number of squares of varying sizes. The effect of the irregular layout is quite disorienting to the uninitiated, but there is a stringent zoning logic at work: as well as collecting retail in one place, the vendors were grouped according to their merchandise, with streets devoted to leather, jewelry, textiles, and so on.

This rationalization was taken further in later centuries. In Versailles, a covered market of four forms the perimeter of an open-air market square. As a piece of urban planning, it evinces an impressively logical design concept thoroughly executed, something that could best be achieved under the absolute rule of its patron, Louis XIII. In the 19th century, the new materials of the Industrial Revolution, together with changing understandings of public health and changing expectations of urban cleanliness, created great new central markets, of which Les Halles in Paris was the undisputed king. In these marvelously vast and lightweight structures, trades could be gathered.

The two giants of 19th-century market design were Victor Baltard in Paris and Horace Jones in London. Baltard, city architect from 1849, was the creator of Les Halles, the 12 elegant pavilions of which were linked by covered walkways to form an iron metropolis of food – or, as Hugo put it, the belly of Paris. Baltard had previously worked on the Abattoirs de la Villette with Jules de Mérindol (the impressively spare Halle aux Boeufs has since been refunctioned as an events venue within Parc de la Villette), Marché Secrétan (now a supermarket) and the Marché de La Chappelle, the only one that still functions as intended. Les Halles is of course long gone, swept away by Pompidou in 1971 and replaced by an unpleasant subterranean mall, itself since removed.

Horace Jones, working a little later in London, produced Leadenhall Market, old Billingsgate, and Smithfield. In contrast to the spare neoclassicism of Baltard, we are now in the florid heyday of Victorian historicism – Jones’s final, posthumously completed work was Tower Bridge – and the ironwork structure of his buildings is flamboyantly decorated. Beyond the capital, great iron-roofed markets were built all over Britain, including Leeds in 1857 and Stockport in 1860 – again, two polar examples of encrustation and restraint, partly motivated in this instance by differing municipal budgets.

Perhaps the most enjoyable markets in the world are to be found in Spain, among them numerous exemplary iron-framed buildings. Mercado Colon and Mercado Central in Valencia are extraordinary cathedrals dedicated to epicurean pleasure; Lonja del Barranco in Seville is smaller but exquisitely detailed; likewise the famous San Miguel market in Madrid. These, and the British and French examples mentioned above, exemplify a gamut of approaches to planning, from the covered streets of Leadenhall, via the ecclesiastical nave and aisles of Mercado Colon, to the modular agglomeration of steel shed-like units in Stockport. The versatility of the new material permitted permit even wider spans and more fantastic spatial effects.

The pioneers of concrete took a variety of approaches to their new material. A very early example (1909) is to be found in Wroclaw, a center of architectural innovation at the turn of the century when the city was called Breslau. Hidden behind a historicist facade of uncertain derivation, the parabolic arches of the market form a soaring concrete nave. There were to be some further historicist excursions before the golden age of concrete arrived – among them the attractive concrete Romanesque of Stuttgart, and the bizarre Neoclassical battleship of Ribera market in Bilbao. Then, beginning in the late 1920s, there was an explosion of new forms: les Halles du Boulingrin in Reims by Émile Maigrot and engineer Eugène Freyssinet has a fantastic parabolic vault only 70mm thick, while in Bologna, the old Mercato Ortofrutticolo has a typically virtuosic roof by Pier Luigi Nervi.

These innovations soon spread, depositing offspring in Trieste’s big shed of a market with its quasi-Constructivist spiral corner, Smithfield’s stunning saucer-domed poultry market, and the pendulously bulging roof of Zhitny market, Kiev. Most striking of all is the covered market in Royan, completed in 1955 to the designs of Louis Simon, André Morisseau, and engineer René Sarger. It marks the culmination of a ceremonial route stretching down to the beach, a clam shell-shaped temple to food.

While material innovations were transforming the type, the onslaught of the automobile led to the exile of the great central wholesale markets. Les Halles was demolished in 1971 and the market relocated to the suburb of Rungis, Covent Garden was sent to south-west London in 1974, Billingsgate to Docklands in 1982, and Spitalfields to east London in 1991. The huge Abasto Market in Buenos Aires was relocated to a hangar near the airport in 1984, but happily the exuberant Art Deco structure remains, now occupied by a mall, and, in its vaulted upper story, a somewhat surreal funfair. These translations all coincided with the rise of a non-productive industry and its white-collar workers. None of the replacement markets are in any way remarkable.

The food hall shelters an abundance of delights and lots of signs, aromas and sights. The architecture of the food hall or market is the stage for this enthralling drama. In some cases, however, the backdrop upstages the culinary stars.

There have been some notable recent additions to the food hall building type, among them MVRDV’s tunnel of love in Rotterdam.

The Modernist motif of the floating roof, whether cantilevered or supported on impossibly spindly legs, found its ideal functions in the factory and the market. Historiographic prejudice has tended to favor the architecture of production, but the heroic pioneers of iron and concrete also crowned vendors of fruit and vegetables with stunning spans. This tradition was given a Postmodern flavor: the rainbow-tiled roof rests gently on the extant historic fabric rather than sweeping it away in favor of structural clarity. This idea was returned in the recent redevelopment of a market in Talinn. Established after the break-up of the USSR, when the black market came out of the shadows all over the former bloc, the old warehouse buildings have now been given a new zigzag timber roof resting on iron trees. This structure is drawn out into the square to shelter temporary stalls.

Architectura and VLDG

A passion for architecture. The vision to create exceptional and timeless design. The ability to craft innovative solutions to complex problems. Flawless project execution and management by an experienced staff. Successful architecture is not only about design. It's not just about beautiful drawings. The real success of architecture in practice is the seamless integration of project goals, innovative design and a commanding understanding of business.

Team members possess significant experience in hospitality and residential design. Architectura Principal and Founder, Conrad Roncati, has designed multiple urban hotels and thousands of residential apartments. VLDG principal Paul Vega was responsible for the evolution and development of the Design Aesthetic, Direction and Narrative Positioning as Vice President of Design for W Hotels Worldwide during an unprecedented period of growth for a Lifestyle Luxury Brand in cities such as Santiago, Chile, Barcelona, Koh Samui, Thailand, Bali, Dubai, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Milan and St Petersburg to name just a few of the 30 W Hotels designed and currently being constructed globally. Additionally, collaboration in the Concepting for the Creation of “Culinary Concepts”, the innovative Food & Beverage collaboration between Starwood Hotels and internationally renowned chef, Jean-Georges. VLDG principal Vennie Lau was responsible for Sourcing and Design Development for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide for Sheraton & Four Points properties.

VLDG's current collaborators and accolades include:

Designing for a celebrity & the strategic global expansion of a European Hotel Company.

Pestana Hotel Group joint ventured with soccer super star, Cristiano Ronaldo to create a lifestyle hotel brand, Pestana CR7.

The vldg concepted & designed hotel, the 4th property and first outside of the EU is scheduled to open in New York City Q3 2020.

Co- creators for a new Lifestyle Hotel Brand:

VLDG was selected by Hyatt Hotels to develop and create the design language and principles for a new lifestyle hotel brand Front of House and innovative Retail Food Market and Restaurant concepts for HYATT Centric.

HYATT Centric’s portfolio is growing strong and spreading across the globe, including the vldg designed property in Silicon Valley & the first NYC hotel scheduled to accept guests Q2 2020

Recent Accolades:

Hospitality Design - Hyatt Herald Sq, NY. BOUTIQUE/LIFESTYLE PUBLIC SPACES – WINNER

Wallpaper – Memorable Hotel Openings 2015 - HYATT Herald Sq, NY

GOLD KEY AWARD EXCELLENCE IN HOSPITALITY DESIGN – Hyatt Union Sq, NY. BEST LOBBY - LUXURY

Fodor’s Top 100 Hotel Awards – Hyatt Union Sq – “Sleekest City Hotels”

Conde Nast Travelers HOT LIST – Duane Street Boutique Hotel, NYC, NY.

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TarLan Design Build

TarLan Design Principals Saverio Tarantino & Richard Lanciers, Jr have designed and managed New Mixed Use Developments, Restaurant renovations and build outs, Ground up Hotels and Residential Apartment Buildings throughout their careers in the fast paced market of NYC. We have provided consulting services for a broad range of companies, facilities and projects. Client satisfaction has always been their top priority.

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Jacob | Doland | Beer

Jacobs | Doland | Beer is a New York City based foodservice design firm specializing in the planning and construction of commercial foodservice and hospitality venues.

The planning of projects involving commercial foodservice facilities has become increasingly complex. Energy conservation, efficient labor utilization and cost effectiveness are just a few of the areas the planner must be concerned with.

We are uniquely qualified by years of actual experience in planning and overseeing the construction of innumerable foodservice facilities to assist with the planning of this project. Among the services we offer are programming, space allocation, arrangement of kitchen equipment and dining areas, selection and specification of equipment and assistance with the securing of the competitive bids. Many additional planning and management services are available.

J|D|B is an independent management and planning consulting firm. We are not in any way associated with the manufacture, sale, or promotion of any product or system. Our only interest is to provide each client with the highest level of professional planning available.

We believe that a consulting firm can only be as effective as the personnel they employee. Therefore, every project regardless of size receives the personal attention of our Project Director who then assigns specific consulting tasks to associates. Total project responsibility always remains with the Project Director who maintains personal contact with each project and oversees its progress. Our approach to planning has always been and continues to be close interaction with the architects, engineers, and other project team members. We communicate often and well, and strive to avoid problems by questioning, analyzing and advising wherever our input can be of value.

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