Why
Alternatives in producing, distributing, preparing, and consuming food have become a hot area for design and innovation. This has been triggered by trends in public health, small business strategy, regional awareness, sustainability, and transportation. Architecture is just a visitor in this field, although the architecture of food service has been important to an earlier generation of waterfront redevelopment known as “festival marketplaces.” But now the interest shifts from tourists to everyday life.
How
Project-based education has become much more prominent in universities, and architecture is the field that has been at it longest. Our process involves very time-intensive creative work, with mainly solo projects done in parallel with some team projects. This approach teaches our students how to get up in front of people with a proposal that takes many big-picture patterns into account. Most other fields teach how to hide behjnd the hardest possible numbers, no matter what measurements have been omitted to allow such certainty.
Not
This study has not been commissioned by anyone, nor is it undertaken with any particular vested interest in mind, nor is it at all constrained by realities of politics and finance.
STUDIO AGENDA
When
This project involved 11 out of the 15 weeks in the fall semester of 2006. We visited Traverse City as a group in September, and many of us went back on our own later own.
This web compilation was delayed from January 2007 due to the college centennial and was completedby the instructor in May 2007 .
???
“All brainstorming fails when it becomes reasonable.” At first glance, the work from this studio, as from most student projects, may appear unfeasible or even impossible. We have been quick to suspend disbelief about all sorts of things. And yet that is our role. Project-based learning has become a preferred format throughout much of the university. Objects of work become props for the kinds of interdisciplinary inquiry and reflection that are necessary when problems must be addressed with strategic propositions rather than reductive analysis. Design is not just about solving known problems, but also about discovering them. Other disciplines can reduce and analyze a situation as it is; our role is to propose what does not exist. To change an existing situation into a preferred one is to court not only discovery but also reorganization. The architect hopes to translate cultural observations into spatial configurations.
What
For educational purposes, it is important to design a simple building while considering complex dynamic factors in urban landscape, material resource flows, social experience, etc. The Market Hall building type is a very good vehicle for these. Of course architecture students will be anything but straightforward in their proposals. Their job is to learn design, and learning involves playful exaggeration.
Who
This is 1 of 7 concurrent graduate studios in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, all devoted to architecture outside the usual metropolitan core cities. This is the first studio in out 2-year graduate program for people with previous experience in the field and the 4th semester in our 3+ year program for people new to the field. Malcolm McCullough, the instructor, is a design educator and media scholar with nearly 20 years’ experience across UM, Carnegie Mellon, and Harvard.
Where
We chose Traverse City for this project because among Michigan cities it best represents relationships between tourist economy, ex-urban second home development, traditional food growers’ businesses, and issues in civic waterfront redevelopment. On the latter it has an especially rich set of prospects at an attractively small scale. Furthermore there is a fresh set of data from UM studies in landscape architecture this year. This project is one way of putting that to further use.
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