“Southern Roots + Global Reach”: this, the most recent mantra of the Clemson School of Architecture is born out of recognition of the influence wrought by students, faculty, and alumni of the program that have gone on to affect great change and progress worldwide within our chosen field and beyond, over the past hundred years of the architecture school’s existence. Today, in Charleston, that legacy continues.
With the Crop Stop project, our studio will be crafting a bridge (of sorts) between local farmers, bakers and similarly allied artisan food growers, and the greater community at large–allowing for a commercially viable means for their goods to reach the greater populace at large, supplying area school systems with fresh, nutritious foodstuffs from their very own community–healthily exemplifying the “buy local, eat local” ethos of greater sustainability ideals.
This initiative represents a font of potential: while a simple enough concept on its surface–an affordable community kitchen for cooking, storing, and processing locally grown food–a full wealth of research is set to be implemented into this idea by we, the studio, broken into several teams. As we dive deep, distilling the minutiae of our discoveries across design parameters, construction sensibilities, and the like, we will be putting together a body of work that will inform the core of this projects mission statement–a readily replicable community kitchen; intelligently designed, while easily erected; with plans cataloged and customizable, open-sourced and available for anyone and everyone to implement.
Today, we begin to till the earth, sowing information from the realm of academia that will be seeded and sown into a means of great change; and I for one, can’t wait to dig in.