A Research On Functional Arrangements Of New Middle School Dining Halls

With years of experimental practices, middle school dining halls have adopted marketmechanisms, outsourcing a certain amount of managerial and operational functions, whichsignificantly improved the services rendered to students. In addition, modern dining hallsintegrate barber’s shops, supermarkets, bathrooms and bookstores, and become a one-stopservice center, catering a wide range of needs of students.With the rapid development of society and economy, improvement in technology, dininghalls have transformed themselves in many ways, such as upgrading kitchen equipments,adoption of new fuels and technology, improvement in kitchen process, and reduction instorage. The current <Primary and Secondary Building Design Specification> has few linesregarding dining halls, while most of the middle schools follow <Diet Architectural DesignSpecification>. It is necessary to take account of the difference between dining halls andcommercial food outlets as the target audience, middle school students are distinctive fromcustomers in restaurants.Based on concrete field work, this paper draws a comparison between traditional middleschool dining halls and modern ones, highlighting changes in functions, space arrangements,and kitchen process. Rationale behind these changes are also analyzed.Taking the functional design of Ninghai Zhengxue Vocational Middle School, the paperanalyzed functions, kitchen and organizational process, space designs of kitchens and dininghalls. Built upon this, the paper proposes new design methodology and provides theoreticalframework and foundation for dining hall designs.The paper concluded with a discussion on future prospective of functional changes anddesign trends of dining halls.