Taft School

Dining Halls at Taft School are spread across two main facilities on campus. The Horace D. Taft Hall dates from 1913 and houses the main dining hall, the headmaster’s office, admissions, college counseling, classrooms, and residences for the lower school boys. It is a campus hub. Strictly a dining facility, Armstrong Dining Hall, built in 1959, serves breakfast and lunch cafeteria style, along with twice-weekly “sit-down” dinners with faculty.

Kohler Ronan was approached to provide a complete MEP/FP engineering plan for proposed additions and renovations to the dining spaces within Horace D. Taft Hall. Included in the scope of the project were the relocation/expansion of the existing kitchen, along with modifications to the dining hall, private dining areas, and ancillary spaces.

Due to the stringent standards regarding required outside air per person, the project team was particularly interested in minimizing wasted energy resulting from conditioning the outside air. Our team’s selection of an air handling system incorporating a heat wheel to maximize energy recovery addressed the issue. The system extracts heat from exhaust air streams and “pre-conditions” the outdoor air before any mechanical heating or cooling is performed. The result is a significant reduction in the load of the HVAC system and a subsequent reduction in operating costs to building owners.

Photo credit: © Robert Benson