ARCH 432 - FALL 2025
Aquamart
The studio explored design propositions for the rich community provision, production and consumption of food along Chicago waterfront engaging the tangle of thresholds between the public sreet and community space. Re-siting a food market hall to the waters’ edge(s), the studio projects explored these thresholds at a range of urban, community and personal scales.
The studio began with the design a small fleet of floating ‘food carts/boats’ and their associated docking points along the Chicago River. Design focused on the community and cultural sources of food and the ergonomics of small scale food. producton,marketing and consumption and the detail development of points of interface between water and land, stove and plate, food and hand.
The studio continued with the design of a home for the food fleet on a site along the Chicago River, part of the design a large Market Hall, Community Kitchens and a Small Food Business Incubation Center to support entrepreneurship between two thriving ethnic communities: the Mexican American Pilsen neighborhood and Chicago's "Chinatown".
Hybrid communities lead to hybrid foods to hybrid activities, prompting considertion of hybrid program, space, structure and materials.
Students were prompted to determine what aspects of spatial, structural, material and environmental permanence is appropriate as programmatic elements continue to shift, relocate, adapt, grow and change in response to the peculiar riverfront urbanism in a city which is anything but permanent.