Senior Staffer Ross Chapman is putting his ArtHum skills to use in the long-awaited review of Koronet’s renovation. Final verdict: no pizza place does it better.

As we prepare for our upcoming exams, many of us (seniors included) are boning up for our final in Art Hum. This staple of the Core usually asks us to identify and discuss the formal attributes of historic art and architecture. But what if, when you walked into Schermerhorn, your teacher asked you to apply your skills to the modern world? Koronet Pizza shut its doors this semester for remodeling, and it reopened with a completely different interior layout. If you happen to find yourself in this fantastical, nightmarish Art Hum exam, here are our tips for discussing the finer points of a pizza place.

The building’s exterior is most reminiscent to a cathedral, with its numerous portals and towers. In lieu of allegorical statues and carvings, Koronet elects to use poetic excerpts (e.g. “Open 7 Days” and “Free Delivery”) to draw the viewer in towards its doors. The numbers on the building’s awning is also clearly an allusion to biblical verses. Koronet Pizza’s logo, a shattered circle missing nearly a sixth of its mass, alludes to the abnormally large slices of pizza within. The asymmetry of the thee windows’ heights is an obvious reference to to the towers of the Amiens Cathedral.

The building becomes even more temple-like on the interior. What are the diagonal wooden dowels above the counter if not the establishment of a tympanum? A mesh pattern fills in the holes of the woodwork, sticking out like the great eastern pediment of the Acropolis. While that ancient Greek temple had a frieze depicting a march towards a religious event, Koronet’s ceiling decorations call the customer towards an equally religious experience – stuffing your face with a 32-inch slice of cheese and grease.

Like the tapestries of yore, Koronet proudly displays works of art on its gorgeous white brick walls. Some of them, such as the 1990’s work First Aid for Choking, sit delicately in glass frames. But the spotlight item of Koronet’s collection is Toppings, a dynamic and ever-changing menu board which uses a dot-filled font. I would argue that the number of dots placed in each word (click the image above to expand) are statements as to the quality of the toppings. Only the strongest toppings, such as pepperoni and broccoli, achieve the immaculate five-dot rating. However, the work shows signs of wear. While it was unceremoniously removed in 2017, the echo of a single word can still be spotted haunting the board – chicken.

Artistic photos via Ross Chapman