Provenance at Cleveland Museum of Art

Bergmeyer leads an all-star consultant team through a BIM-powered process to create a fresh, new café for the Cleveland Museum of Art that captivates the senses.

Housed in a new wing designed by Rafael Vinoly Architects, the new 13,000-sf foodservice facility at Cleveland Museum of Art includes two banquet spaces, a fine dining restaurant called Provenance, the adjacent Provenance Café, and a state-of-the-art kitchen linking them all.

Bergmeyer collaborated with the project’s design team to develop an elegant and operationally efficient facility with flexibility far beyond the Museum’s expectations. In addition to serving their core purpose, spaces can be divided or combined in a number of other service scenarios. The café seating area, for example, does double duty as a pre-function space, while one of the banquet rooms allows the restaurant to nearly double in size if needed. This flexibility, resulting from smart planning and close teamwork, enables the Museum to expand on the types of events it can accommodate, contributing to the bottom line.

Responsible for the realization of the project, Bergmeyer was under tight budget constraints and even tighter floor-to-floor dimension. In order to deliver on both, we insisted on two critical tools for the team-- an experienced cost estimator and BIM (building information modeling). Ongoing budget feedback from the earliest stages of programming enabled strategic decision making and encouraged the most effective and efficient design strategies. Using BIM to fully model and coordinate structural, architectural, mechanical, lighting, and fire protection systems during the development of the project’s construction documents, the team realized reductions in both the construction duration and the change orders typically associated with limited above-ceiling spaces.