Lunch at the Greenhouse

While Frary Dining Hall’s kitchen and servery are being renovated this year, Pomona students are enjoying a true “college in a garden” experience at mealtime. Thanks to designer and architect Iggy Sardinas, students who would normally eat at Frary will dine in a 4,000-square-foot greenhouse located adjacent to the Walker Student Lounge. 

“The ability to use a garden as interior space is unique,” says Sardinas.

To enliven the space and to make use of the greenhouse’s function, the steel and polycarbonate building has been filled with hundreds of tropical plants. 

Several other options were considered for a temporary facility, says Sardinas, but the greenhouse offered benefits that a typical temporary structure could not. Many of the materials have been recycled from other campus projects, like the mobile kitchen that Sardinas designed for the Coop Fountain during construction of the Smith Campus Center. And when the greenhouse is removed from Walker Beach in summer 2003, it will be reassembled in the Science Quad for use by the Biology Department.

Photo by Michael Larsen '89 and Tracy Talbert