TABlE FOR TWO

Spring 2021

 

Table for Two is an image-based sociological project that examines the rise of outdoor dining in New York City. In the midst of a global pandemic, and at the epicenter of its destruction, New York City restaurant owners, workers, and citizens adapted existing social and cultural structures associated with the dining experience, reshaping it into a twenty-first century phenomenon that we’ve come to know as outdoor dining. Not only did it physically recontextualize the dining experience into the streets of New York, but it also brought new elements to the dining experience such as dining bubbles, QR code based menus, physical dividers, new legislation governing its existence, and a multitude of outdoor dining enclosures. Outdoor dining enclosures as rudimentary as a table and chairs with no physical structure governing its boundaries, but still capable of upholding the social structure of the dining experience, to individual glasshouses with decorative plants, and fancy lighting that neutralizes the stark reality of eating in the middle of the street in the scorching heat or freezing cold. These outdoor dining enclosures quickly filled the streets of New York, occupying a space that was never intended to serve this purpose, resulting in subtly disguised eyesores, masked by the promise of food, socialization, and intricately designed dining enclosures. By employing one of pandemic-driven design’s own mechanisms, idealization, against itself, the images in this project idealize outdoor dining on a formal and aesthetic dimension, subverting the spectator’s attention away from the stark realities taking place in the extra-visual dimension. And by doing so, these images bring attention to the existence of hidden realities, and the mechanisms used to mask them. More importantly, though these images document the physical forms that the newly renovated social structures take shape in, while simultaneously highlighting formal and aesthetic elements of pandemic driven design. By doing so, this project illustrates humanity’s ability to adapt existing social and cultural structures to sustain social connection when it’s needed the most.