Rogers Marvel Architects
   
    St. JOHN'S BREAD and LIFE - Brooklyn, NY
    Rogers Marvel Architects created a welcoming, comfortable and efficient soup kitchen and community resource center in New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The client, St. John’s Bread and Life, provides daily meals as well as literacy classes, job placement programs, legal assistance, and related services to its Brooklyn and Queens patrons. RMA organized the project’s programming sequence so that patrons drawn to the popular food programs would also come into contact with the center’s social services.  The library, for example, offering resume help and computer access, is located along   the largely transparent street front and is visible to  everyone who enters the dining area.

RMA worked within a tightly constrained budget to convert the former factory warehouse into a series of gracious spaces that take advantage of the existing structure’s eccentricities.  The main dining room ceiling, for example, is lit with overscaled custom light fixtures that negotiate an irregular column grid and were more affordable, and more distinctive, than most off-the-shelf options.
  Project Status
Completed - 2008
Scope
22,000 SF
Awards
AIA New York State
2009 Award of Excellence
Green Buildings NYC:
"St. John's Bread and Life Soup Kitchen is First in Country to Implement Green Design"
by Stephen Del Percio