This market for the sale, production, and research of fermented goods interrogates a dull, regressive, or decayed notion of the aging process via manipulations of context, composition, program, and materiality.
Locally sourced urban artifacts drive the formal massing, and are ordered according to their inherent geometric qualities rather than an overarching orthogonal system, allowing a more deliberate and varied promenade and spatial sequence that muddles the binary of object and frame.
Fermentation is one of the oldest and most widespread methods of food preservation and production, and cultivates some of the most compelling avenues for innovation in the culinary industry today. New research provides a ground for developing unseen flavor profiles, and allows for human hybridizations of microorganisms and climate, complicating previous definitions of authenticity and nativeness.
Overgrowth is used as a material translation of this fermentation process to the scale of a building, as biotic factors affecting the way in which a substance ages. Vegetation embodies sensory qualities parallel to various fermentation techniques, and is further estranged through color and growth pattern to oscillate between natural and synthetic, within and outside of human intervention.
Through these mechanisms of defamiliarization the market asks for an inversion to a perception of aging, as an agent responsible for the most valued delicacies we know today, that crosses cultural boundaries and exemplifies the growth, progress, and complexity accumulated over time.