MEET YOUR MEAT: PROCESS DRIVEN SUPER MARKET
South Santa Fe Street, El Paso, TX 79901
Design Team: Lauren Kirk, T. Craig Sinclair, Eric Salitsky
Design Critic: Alex Barker | Structural Consultant: Sarrah Khan | Mechanical Consultant: Robert Kearns | Facade Consultant: Sameer Kumar | Sustainability Consultant: Meta Bruzema
Pratt GAUD
This group project was a grocery store on the border between the USA and Mexico, in El Paso. Interested in the slow food movement, this grocery complex explored slow food through the relationship between line and field. Line has implied directionality, so line-based areas of the building track a raw ingredient through its processing. These segments show the evolution that each food product takes from most raw to most processed, ultimately educating the consumer on how their food gets from farm to table. A green roof garden and anaerobic digester heighten this metaphor by showing the entirety of the food process, including grown food and disposed food, all in a sustainable manner.
When the products combine to make something new, outside of the established line, the building dissolves into a field condition. The field condition is less directional and more atmospheric. The entire perception of the building changes as these moments, as this is where raw ingredients truly begin to become food
Individual strands begin to move in the “Z” direction, stacking and diving into the ground. The interiorsection also changes, as thick, interior hanging gardens alter not only the interior envelope, but the atmospheric conditions within the space. Shoppers will know that the field condition is a special point in food processing because the architectural condition becomes experience-based, instead of diagram-based, in these areas.