An Urban Agricultural Guild. From Cultivation to Culture A Criticism of Our Relationship to Food Production The idea of the project was to interrogate the relationship between food and media, or rather the concept of the image of food and the inextricable link between food production and our consumption of media. Taking cues from tropes of media production such as the perfection of the white cube gallery set within the warehouse, the production and set design of the cyclorama, and billboard advertising, the design took on the role of set production to inform the spatial relationships between display and conceal. The question was how to situate architecture akin to that of the production of media in its role in spatial awareness. Rather than simply set program on stage, these tropes of media production gave architecture and its infrastructure a direct, yet manipulated experience to create the normalcy we’ve become accustomed to as experiencing media overwhelmingly through all aspects of our lives. With a studio brief that looked to have shared community spaces and open air markets, all green-washed in a “sustainable” building in the heart of Chicago, this project set out to challenge the notion of approaching our relationship to food as less pragmatic and more problematically realistic while critiquing a studio brief that seemed to simply check off the boxes. The program consisted of a Hell’s Kitchen style kitchen design where an audience could view live recorded television series while a dining space, bound by a cyclorama and studio lighting, coexisted below. The white cube gallery and recording studio design became the inspiration for rentable space housing the resources needed to produced higher quality productions in the rise of amateur food shows through media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok. Given the climate of Chicago, the building took on the image of an unassuming industrial warehouse, wrought with tropes of billboard advertising meant to sit within the site.
