TABOO + EXPOSURE CHALLENGING THE ROLE OF ARCHITECTURE AND CONCEALMENT
Humanity is experiencing a prevalent disconnection with the food we eat, and this project aims architecturally to address this cultural fracture. It is fundamental that people understand where our food comes from, and the processes involved before it reaches our plate. Only with an understanding of such can people be re-engaged and empowered to make educated dietary decisions. Arguably the greatest disconnection between us and our food is in the meat we consume. Whilst just taking the plastic wrapped and boxed steaks, chicken wings or pork chops off the
shelf, how many of us really understand what we are purchasing? The more and more choice people are being given to avoid considering the origins and processes of meat, the more the disconnection grows, fuelling a culture of recognising pre packed, wrapped and boxed food products as the norm.
How would our attitude, as a collective culture, differ if the slaughter process, which preludes all of our meat based foods, was not concealed in warehouses out of sight, but in direct eye of the urban realm?
The architecture of the project is materialised through an obligation to reconnect humanity with the flesh and structure of what we eat, engaging the user into the process of which any consumer is already a part of, in a much more personal and eye opening way.
EXHIBITING ATROCITY ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND CONCEPT MODEL
In proposing that the slaughter process, an unspoken, bloody and perhaps barbaric act, becomes available to the public eye, I started researching how the grotesque and the shocking have been displayed, or exhibited in the domain of art. Perhaps the most famous of such artists is Damien Hirst, in particular his pieces involved dissected animals exhibited within glass boxes. One can immediately see a strong parallel with his work and the idea of displaying acts of slaughter, perhaps also within glass ‘boxes’ or rooms, scaling Hirst’s work from exhibitions within a room to the room itself. Another example of utilising the shocking and the bloody, juxtaposed with an articulate glass framing, can be found with Marc Quinn’s ‘Bloodhead’. Drawing his own blood over a period of year, Quinn froze and when he had a sufficient volume he defrosted his own blood, poured into a cast of his head and refroze. Kept within a glass case with in built freezer system, his ‘bloody selfportrait’ is visually captivating yet unsettling. Perhaps another more profound correlation with the slaughter process could be read when considering the idea of one’s own ‘bloody portrait’, in the case of slaughter the blood which has been shed in order to feed oneself.
A MECHANICAL MONSTRO[CITY] A CONCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT OF CONTEMPORARY SLAUGHTER INTO ARCHITECTURE
The role of sacrifice, slaughter and consumption has historically played a central part in a cultures values, and development. The premise of hunting, killing, cooking and eating was a personal, human scale experience conducted by the individual or the family, facilitating not only an intrinsic understanding of how to prepare food from fresh, but a fundamental knowledge of what we ate. Even with butcheries and local stores, meat was fresh and accountable and local. However in more contemporary times the meat production industry has exploded into a globalised industrial network whereby produce
DOCKYARD CRANES ANIMATED STRUCTURES
Through a progressive series of conceptual and structural modelling the idea surrounding the features of suspension became more prevalent. A traditional construction style crane was not considered suitable as the idea is for ‘mechanical arm’ like structures to be commencing the slaughter process, representative of the detached ‘plucking’ of food processing from an abstract position. Therefore old ship yard dock cranes were explored, featuring more of an arm like hoist system. Furthermore, the precedent above from Bristol harbour-side features a strong correlation with the other precedents explored in terms of the relationship of mass and structural elements. Furthermore the industrial steel clad gives the entire piece an aesthetic of which I seek to emulate and scale up to that of an entire slaughterhouse.
undergoes varied processing at different locations across the map. This massively complex and convoluted journey from where the meat originated, then processed, and finally made available for consumption has made it all but invisible and subsequently untraceable.
the machined process is taken away from the locality, the people, and concealed behind wall usually in rural settings, facilitating a ‘out of sight out of mind’ philosophy, pushing slaughter out of our collective cultural consciousness and into an unspoken taboo.
Furthermore the personable, cultural significance of the process has been obliterated through the emergence of an overly mechanical, industrial and ultimately unhuman process driven by more machine than man. To further shatter this connection between us and the cultural significance of the acts around consumption,
What if an architecture was to marry these two conditions, the industrial and mechanical, but instead of hiding away out of sight, was thrust into the populated urban realm? Could we still ignore it?
DESIGN RESEARCH EXPLORING ARCHITECTURE THROUGH THE ANATOMICAL METAPHOR
The building materials are a metaphor for the idea of the carcass itself; a raw, ‘skeletal’ architecture that embodies the notions of the subject matter within the building, expressed through its construction. The skeleton is expressed through areas of open steel framing, muscle and tendons through tension cables, with an emphasis on exhibition and reveal, through expanses of glazing drawing precedent from the artistic domain of showcases and exhibition. The
exposed building services too, ducts and pipes resembling the tissue, veins and matter of a partially ripped apart animal. These initial studies and references to anatomical subjects provoked a substantial amount of thought to the frame and mass of the building, areas read as an open structure, and then opposing areas of enclosure.
A significant amount of time was invested into researching a host of architectural/structure. The prevailing theme explored is the duality of mass against frame, as introduced from the anatomy studies previously. The precedents begin to create an architectural language that is to be used in the project.
SPECULATION THROUGH MODELLING EXPLORING ARCHITECTURAL FORM THROUGH ITERATIVE PHYSICAL MODELLING
INITIAL DECONSTRUCTIVIST FACADE EXPLORATION - CULTURAL FRACTURE
ELEVATION + SUSPENSION EXPLORATION, CRANE STRUCTURE STUDIES
3 PART STRUCTURAL MODEL, ADMIN > SLAUGHTERHOUSE > CONSUMER
THE DICHOTOMY OF ‘THE SITE’ PRESENCE ON THE SITE + THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HEIGHT
The urban context for the project poses an interesting consideration for a number of reasons. The building is manifesting the disconnect from humanity that the slaughter process embodies; and as such is embodying the ‘contextless’ that the contemporary slaughter industry has become by architecturally disregarding any sense of conformity. However, this operation of depersonalised, decontextualized slaughter is to be broadcasted, and thus projecting this abstraction in the public’s eye is the primary objective of the project. Therefore,a dichotomy exists in the project
manifesting the contextless, through exposure within a busy urban context. The building is situated within the city centre region of St Philips Marsh, which has a long industrial history including a past steelworks, offering a historic nod towards the nature of the slaughterhouse and the site typology. The location also places itself in an optimal situation for exposure, with the adjacent network existing with Temple Meads, the major hub of public transport in Bristol, and surrounding by housing to the south and the rest of the city centre to the north. Furthermore the new Bristol Arena
is proposed on a site directly opposite the site along with new footbridges, heightening even further the presence around the site. The real physical ‘site’ for the act of slaughter however is arguably the skyline itself, the boundless expanse residing over the city of Bristol whereby any existence is in stark contrast to the nothingness surrounding. Furthermore the context for the project is cultural, even political, questioning and challenging the site of our consciousness in which we collectively chose to ignore and yet depend upon.
THE JOURNEY OF BLOOD THE EXPERIENTIAL STORY OF SLAUGHTER
The story begins with the cattle being led to the pasture on the ground, under the slaughterhouse. When required cattle are herded towards where they will be stunned. Following the stunning, they are hoisted up the exterior of the building, theatricalising the traditional hoisting onto the suspended rails. The large, mechanical crane arms plucks the cows from the ground, and eventually lowers them into the building through a loading bay through the roof. Once inside they are transferred to the internal rail system. The first destination here is to the bleeding atrium. Here, whilst still unconscious the
throat is slit and the rail then moves the bleeding bodies over an open atrium, creating a horrific yet spectacular fall of blood, the height of the entire building. At the bottom, the blood gathers and drains down into external blood collection tanks, visible from the ground outside, allowing people to read when slaughter is occurring. Once drained of the blood, the rail moves the cows round into the primary slaughterhouse block itself‌
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The idea that the bleeding of the cattle would be dramatised and made into a feature was developed very early in the project, initially as a central area that perhaps visitors could circulate around, observing the violence in the middle, as shown above.
This idea evolved into the bleeding atrium as documented earlier, maintaining the notion of the bleeding being expressed boldy, and to make it even more observable by featuring the process within glass instead of a central room.
SKYLINE ORCHESTRATION THE HORROR, THE TRUTH, ABOVE
The wrenching of the building from the ground serves multiple functions. Conceptually, it symbolises the cultural disjunction between the acts of slaughter from our everyday grounded experience, its distinct separation from our urban realm. This therefore offers the ground level as free, open (mostly) space. This space is then occupied for the pasture, keeping the cattle before their inevitable ascension into the building. From an urban consideration
this greatly improves the urban density of the scheme, in stark contrast to the traditional single story sprawl of slaughterhouses. The effect as experienced from the ground is a space of large, penetrating steels shooting up into the sky, creating a space reminiscent of a prehistoric bone yard, drawing precedent back to the original anatomical studies.
THE CONSUMER + CONSUMPTION THE EXPERIENTIAL STORY OF SLAUGHTER
Following the aforementioned stages of the slaughter process, the carcasses travel down through the glass transition rail, penetrating to the exterior of the building, heading down to the refrigerated storage block below. Here, the meat is moved along to a series of storage rails, where the meat will undergo the ‘aging’ process, where the meat matures its flavour. This process typically involves the meat being kept at a low temperature and steady internal conditions for 11-30 days.
C A R C A S S
Once the meat is suitably aged, the meat finally begins to travel up the building, this time through the consumer block above. The first stop is the butchery. Here the carcass is butchered into the respective cuts of meat by traditionally trained butchers. Above the butchery is the kitchen, housing the necessary equipment to cater for the top floor and final destination for the meat, the steakhouse. The full cycle of pasture to plate is complete, through the slaughterhouse in the sky.
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C O O K
The contemporary slaughter and meat production industry has an exponentially large gap between the act of slaughter and the consumer purchase and consumption, and thus the transition point in the building needs to embody this disjunction. Therefore, the transition point is not simply a door or corridor, but takes the form of a sky bridge. The break from internal to external magnifies the real-world divide within the process, readjusting the visitors view from close up acts of slaughter to a view over the approaching restaurant.
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AN IMPOSING PRESENCE A VIEW LOOKING EAST UPON THE APPROACH