OMA-designed West Louisville FoodPort: Where Architecture Meets Agriculture

During my lifetime, the only notable new construction in my hometown has been a basketball arena, the KFC Yum! Center. Sure, we have the late Michael Graves’s Humana Building, but since its debut in 1985, Louisville’s architectural legacy has barely moved past postmodernism. The new millennium bore the promise of the REX-designed Museum Plaza, a 62-story, Jenga-like skyscraper planned for downtown, but the cancellation of the project in August 2011 is the last time I remember any major architecture news surrounding the River City. Growing up, I was inspired by the 19th century cast-iron façades that sat along Main Street’s Whiskey Row, but in order to study contemporary architecture, I had to leave Kentucky and look elsewhere.

Naturally, as soon as I packed my bags, Rem Koolhaas’ Office of Metropolitan Architecture unveiled its plans for the nation’s largest agriculture hub, slated to break ground in West Louisville in September. Shohei Shigematsu and his team at OMA New York are partnering with Seed Capital KY, a nonprofit organization that advocates for a healthy food economy, to plant a 24-acre agricultural center into the middle of the city where the National Tobacco Works Co. warehouse used to sit.

The West Louisville Food Port is scheduled to break ground with the $30 million phase one construction in September. The red drop pin shown above will serve as the site’s focal point and will hold recaptured storm water. All images via OMA

Sited between Muhammad Ali Boulevard and Market Street at 30th Street, the West Louisville FoodPort combines a zigzag of functions including an urban farm, processing center, coffee roastery, and juicery. The $50m brownfield master plan will also feature a recycling facility, edible garden, food-truck plaza, community kitchen, market, and educational center, as well as ample public space, including an amphitheater. A Southern-Indiana-based company also plans to open a biodiesel facility where in-house food waste will be turned into methane gas.

If the programmatic checklist reads like the table of contents of a foodie travel guide, the premise is simple. At its most basic level, the West Louisville FoodPort will grow, sell, and distribute fresh produce in a section of the city classified by the USDA as a food desert: an area without sufficient access to fresh food.

OMA is also using the project concept to teach a studio at Harvard University where students explore the urban relationship between architecture and food.

Eighteen percent of Louisvillians live below the poverty level and go hungry every day. The Great Flood of 1937 devastated the entire city, but it was the west side of the city that fell to neglect, compounded over the decades, in contrast to the east. Most impoverished neighborhoods are located in West Louisville, where golden arches and fast-food castles dominate each street corner.

Meanwhile, Kentucky is home to a patchwork of independent small family farms, but at an average of 163 acres, these local producers come in at 271 acres less than the national average farm size. While larger corporate farms often historically had a major advantage in terms of connecting with restaurants and consumers, the FoodPort will serve the family farmers as a hub to exchange goods and sustain the state’s commitment to growing natural foods.

The West Louisville FoodPort will provide a link between farmer and consumer and reduce the number of steps it take to bring fresh food to the city.

Caroline Heine, director at Seed Capital KY, sees the FoodPort as a link, creating over 250 jobs and educational opportunities between these two communities and others outside the city. “We imagine that once the FoodPort is up and running, folks from all over (not just Louisville) will come to the site to check it out,” she said, “as it will be a one of a kind project in the country, with world class architecture and an opportunity to interact with every aspect of the food chain, from seed to energy.”

Can architecture unite a city? Can a new, multifaceted yet cohesive typology such as this agricultural business park bring greater awareness to a largely invisible issue?

Louisville needs help promoting a healthy food economy and great architecture just might provide a solution. We’re best known for dabbling in horse racing, shooting hoops, and drinking bourbon, but with this futuristic urban farm, my hometown can also be a crucible for a new model of architecture-meets-agriculture. Thanks to OMA, Seed Capital, and efforts from the city’s Mayor Greg Fischer, the West Louisville area has a brighter future not only in terms of access to healthy food and awe-inspiring architecture, but in terms of the city as a unified whole.

Who knows? Maybe it will be so successful that it achieves “effect” status — as in Bilbao, or the High Line — and, as anyone who has grown their own food knows, the fact that it will take a lot of hard work makes it all the more rewarding.