Los Angeles Jewish Home | Cyber Café

Café Rendezvous is an open and inviting space, intended to provide increased connection to distant family and  friends for residents, through easily available access to the internet. The space includes 14 computer stations positioned on free-form tabletops. The result of a generous gift from Annette and Leonard Shapiro and their family, the Café occupies a central position along the main route through the Prop Center, which also houses the synagogue and main dining hall, at the heart of the residential complex. The Gift Shop, which formally occupied the space was underutilized  and did not generate the level of activity needed for the heart of the building.

The lines of communication and the ties to family and friends over great distances, facilitated by the invisible lines of connection the computers and Internet provide, were given expression through the use of a branching tree metaphor throughout the space. Where the tabletops connect to the rear wall of the Café, a deep recess in the wall splays out in stages as it extends to the top of the partition. This creates abstract representations of trees in the pattern of relief across the length of the wall.  The open pattern of overlapping branches cut from a large, curved metal panel, separates the north end of the Café from the main entrance to the Dining Hall. This same element is used to surround the deli case on the north side of the dining hall entrance, and the soffit at the southern edge of the space. The Cali Lily-like lamps mounted to the tabletops appear to feed off the undulating centerline of the tables. Finally, the shape of the shade structure in the courtyard reverses the angle of a typical four-legged trellis structure to reach up and out from the open center space.