New York has seen an explosion in a new type of food experience: the marketplace. These are rather tamer versions of Spanish boqueria or bustling marketplaces the world over, with a very tightly controlled space and often high-end shops. Chelsea Market, Gotham West, Gansevoort Market, Berg’n, Brooklyn Night Bazaar, Hudson Eats, and an upcoming Anthony Bourdain joint are permanent manifestations of the ever-popular pop-up food bazaar, such as Smorgasburg or Madison Square Eats.
Images courtesy Yannis Halkiopoulos
But these venues, delicious though they may be, are pretty prosaic. While they do serve some communal purpose and offer a twist on the dining experience, they don’t exactly break the mold architecturally. A new proposal by Yannis Halkiopoulos of the University Of Westminster in London seeks to drive the marketplace beyond just a food mall with dining area.
Located at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (a target of urban renewal), “Brooklyn Co-Operative” is a slow-food-inspired marketplace that uses the site’s unique architectural history to propel it far out into the food-architecture stratosphere. Halkiopoulos transforms the former officers’ housing known as Admirals Row into a reinvented space for food production and consumption. This includes fields, a slaughterhouse, a fish market, and preservation facilities.
The structures are based on North American barns, with timber framing and pitched roofs, tied together with a network of scaffold-like “raised tunnels.” The houses are in different states of decay, reminding us of what has been in the past, and what takes its place. The structures simultaneously respect the history of the site, but update it into something functional and usable. We also love these exploded axons.