The pumphouseTM was a brewery-restaurant concept I and a few very talented design professionals created a few years ago, to develop the 100-year-old masonry building known as the Pumping Station. A "virtual reality" computer rendering of the building's exterior (east facade) is pictured below.
Located in Albany, NY., the Pumping Station building is visible just off to the right, off the Clinton Avenue (Downtown) Exit of the Interstate 787 expressway, which connects Troy to the north down through suburbs and the Downtown area of Albany, finally joining into the New York State Thruway.
| The Pumping Station was the former turn-of-the-century home of the City of Albany Water Department. Here, beginning in the late-1800s, huge pumping equipment installed deep below the Hudson River water level drew in supplies for redistribution throughout the city water network. Operations ceased before WWII, but the facility was kept to provide an emergency supply during the war period. In the early 1970s the entire pumping apparatus was entombed with concrete. Until the end of the 20th Century, the city officials used the empty building for storage. |
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I was taken aback by this enormously cavernous, dusty and dank masonry structure, with its open steel roof structure and gigantic windows ushering in streams of lambent sunlight through the dust. The vast brick walls and grimy interior foreshadowed a unique mercantile, "factory" atmosphere, particularly with its dramatic, boxy emptiness. The distance from the unfinished dirt-covered floor to the bottom of the steeply pitched roof was more than 90 feet, and there was another 30 feet distance to the roof welkin.
The opportunity to create an efficient and practical, but certainly also visible and dramatic, house brewery alongside a restaurant -- a "brewpub" -- was quite obvious. The real challenges were in assuring cozy and comfortable dining experience, along with building from scratch an food service operation that was both efficient and sensitive to the anticipated tastes of consumers of all practical day / week service periods -- through the intended economic life of the project.
Our development of the concept began in bringing together several contemporary food service production ideas with popular aesthetic concepts. It was this combination of style-based / function-based food service floor designs that made The pumphouseTM unique.
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The ergonomics and the "feeling" of The quicklunchTM provided a clear answer -- it combined a obvious concept name with a fast, efficient production model that offered enticing, patron-visible elements. The food -- salad and pasta bar, home-style hot bar, and the gourmet pizza and sandwich bar -- would be out front and open, steaming fresh. Pizza was created fast but very visible and aromatic with the The pizzastackTM , a tall wood burning brick oven made obvious and elaborate with its giant "smokestack" brick tower. |
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An elegant dessert bar, full-service bar / beverage center -- and of course, the visible house brewery (both pictured further below) -- would complement the fast, fresh, made-on-premise image and relaxed mercantile spirit. Oddly, despite the building's grand, open-air vertical dimensions, the extant footprint was not suitably large enough to meet economically the project's seating and service requirements. To solve that, an elegant "floating mezzanine" floor was designed, "suspended" via a large, load-bearing, beehive-shaped bent pipe structure. |
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Playing up the drama of the spectacular open space that existed was irresistible. We planned to suspend an authentic WWII fighter jet I had located"in dry storage" in the Arizona desert. The antique aircraft would be affixed to the apex where the four pipe ends joined at the top. A side building accessed at the northwest corner would provide for the perfect masonry-walled banquet hall. |
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The project also called for development of a side building, accessible at the northwest corner of the Pumping Station building complex, which would provide for the perfect masonry-walled banquet hall. Engineering drawings created in AutoCAD digital format, detailed and ready for city and state approvals, were uploaded into a spacial modeling program, along with "textures" created from photographs of existing surfaces, selected building materials and fixtures, and catalog photos of the intended dining and food service equipment and decor items. |
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The resulting "virtual reality" renderings created dramatic, scalar reference from real world assets: restored building elements, hardware, gas and electric lighting, windows, floor features, table settings, food and bar service equipment and decor. Even the actual budgeted wall hangings were integrated into the finished, dramatic, colorful renderings you see here, which were completed and presented to Albany's mayor and other city officials in early Summer 1996.
Several other technologies were used to build upon an ultimate project model that would be cohesive, comprehensive and convincing enough to assure success of The pumphouseTM.
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For example, menu development followed the marketing model of the brewpub concept which, in turn, led to development of ergonomic process and equipment needs. Equipment layouts could thus be accurately created -- along with "human" input from myself, our head chef and others -- using an architectural computer application translating precise equipment specifications into 2-D layouts leading to building virtual reality models. Following this, another application was used to translate a virtual "walk-through" of the spaces to be used by customers and employees. A virtual "pathway" could be drawn, from which dynamically generating realistic, light-shaded 3-D shapes, simulated views of internal spacial relationships along a line traced through the "digital floor plan" ... |
... Using this "walk-through" path, a seamless stream of computer rendered views simulated an actual "walking" tour of the finished brewpub interior spaces. The renderings in total were incorporated in one large computer file of ordered renderings which, in turn, was translated into video tape, combined with narration and music.
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The finished production gave an informative and dynamic promotional overview of the The pumphouseTM translating a sense of realism and excitement. With their minute-detail cost and spacial references, the virtual reality designs were unforgettable in both their drama and usefulness to key project stakeholders These designs and plans also helped the development of a comprehensive, real-time information system, which fully integrated service and production processes (seating, order processing, service throughput, etc.) with cash and employee time / cost controls and "back office" financial accounting and benchmark analyses. |
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Here was a project plan realism never before seen by city planners, politicians and historians; investors and lenders; builders, contractors and suppliers; and others. The "virtual-real" creation of this spectacular finished restaurant-retail concept would certainly become a landmark for this important, age-old capital city -- and, quite possibly, a leading-edge process for similarly defining future brewpub businesses elsewhere. |
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All of this -- the design and development and construction plans; projected investment in equipment and working capital; the marketing, sales, margin and profitability analysis models of the concept; and everything that went into the "look and feel" of the intended customer experience of The pumphouseTM -- was grounded in an in-depth Business Plan. This novel-length, carefully prepared business study contained hundreds of pages detailing the marketing, ergonomic and financial plans, supported by and integrated into the physical model of this remarkable project.
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At once this vision, with these drawings, trumped other eager would-be developers of this amazing historical structural vestige -- including the proprietor of the brewery-restaurant. Nevertheless, he was the winner of this remarkable place, and ultimately was able to finance and complete his version of a brewpub in this very building. Just four months after the renderings below were completed, my ex-partners' secretly planned bankruptcy litigation was launched. This effectively froze the seed capital from the sale of my earlier brewpub business corporate shares -- money I had committed to make The pumphouseTM a reality The project envisioned here never happened.
The owner of the current Pumping Station occupant -- a brewpub called C.H. Evans Brewing Company -- moved forward, and in 1999 finally opening his restaurant in the building. Though an apparent success, I've not visited and have left the restaurant business.
There are now eight brewpubs and several microbreweries in the Capital Region, certainly a market saturation exceeding anyone's earliest reasonable forecasts. After two decades of exciting growth, the North American "brewpub / micro bubble" -- along with the markets' excitement ushering in a New Millennium -- had ended.
-- Julie Moran, February 2003
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