Binding Space

Caroline Flynn

Thesis

Proposal: Culinary School and Food Market
Location:Sheriff Street Upper

Permeability is vital to create an integrated, consolidated and dynamic city. This thesis began with the goal of providing access to sustainable use of food and to isolated parts of the city. It takes on the existing infrastructure and fabric of the city and views it not as a problem, but as an opportunity to create spaces that cultivate community cohesion. 

Physical and psychological barriers currently seperate residents from the East Wall and Docklands area. This scheme synthesises the height difference between these zones and embraces the ad hoc nature people often inhabit a space. Key design elements such as extending the Sheriff Street bridge into the podium of the scheme, external staircases linking the landscape level to the bridge level and unlocking the chambers below the bridge, establishes this project as a possible solution to access through design.

Sharing food is a communal and binding activity that is universal to everyone and has no language. The culinary school and market unlocks, enables and creates activity at all times of the day, week and year. This humanises the project and balances the solid external expression.

The concept at the landscape level is to allow the programme and materiality to spread out into the landscape and under the bridge like a carpet for people to congregate and socialise on, linking and consolidating the adjacent communities. This building is an urban gesture and its delicate and bright interior and monolithic, robust outer envelope presents itself to the adjacent areas as a piece of civic and social infrastracture.