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Finding a Seed in the City

Part 1 Project 2022
Joseph Gabriel Murray
Mackintosh School of Architecture | UK
A centre for urban farming that incorporates a fermentation laboratory, residential cookery school, and community hall, the Glasgow Food Exchange grew from a triangular base unit found within the topology of the site at Maryhill.

On the banks of the canal’s turning lochs, this seed, like those of the crops that the project nurtures, grew, and now its identity exists throughout the project's proportions; creating a fundamentally harmonic structure with an intrinsic relationship to both its location and programme.

Incorporating ancient ideas of harmony and symbolism, each feature is linked to the whole through physical scales similar to musical notes and octaves. This moves away from Le Corbusier’s idea that such a system should be anthropocentric, and seeks to correct the growing atomisation of society. Removing the individual democratises the design, making it a truly equal space.

Influenced by the duality in the semiotics of hieroglyphs, the project inverts the message of a pyramid, the ultimate emblem of individualism. By raising the circular dormitory above the ground plane with a grand architectural gesture and exposing the energy embodied within the symbolism, the design elevates ideas of egality and emanates the cooperative ethos at the heart of the brief.


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2022
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