Situated in the Uptown Neighborhood of Pittsburgh the site of this proposed urban agricultural center is located in an area characterized as a food desert, or location which does not have sustained access to fresh produce. Surrounded by major roadways and inlets into the area, this proposal seeks to fill the food gap in this region and feed into the existing food distribution system of the area while also providing a visual staple for the surrounding town.

 

This project takes a variety of concepts and practices associated with the planning process of community gardens and the cycle of a typical yearly growing season and translates them into a series of design drivers to create spaces which foster a communal growing site. Beginning with the common practice of using grids to divide land in community gardens, a generative grid was projected onto the rugged terrain of the site in an orientation dictated by the major pedestrian access points already surrounding the property. The grid was then extruded and depressed based on the function of each spatial sector. The program is organized in relation to the cycle of a typical growing season in both plan and elevation; in plan, the greenhouse feeds into the community garden spaces which in turn supply the market and in elevation the fabrication space provides material to the community gardens which support the market to reflect the supply, growing, and harvesting stages of the growing cycle. People experience the marketplace as the most important space of the proposal which has multiple access points from the ground plane, the second most important level of the project.