The aim of this project is to design a permanent covered Food Market to support a specific established district community in Glasgow. It is therefore not conceived as a city distribution market but is designed to serve the local community of Partick with a population of 10,000 people.
Our proposal for the Mansfield Park Market is guided by several general principles:
– A tectonic response to the site and an approach which emphasises the fact that by the physical act of building, we are taking away or engaging in the destruction of an existing landscape/topography and should ‘return’ it to the users in a manner sensitive to the existing activites and axes on the site;
– By elevating the landscape to canopy level, the building distills itself both programmatically and aesthetically into three layers:
The Concrete Landscape
A homogenous piece of concrete seemingly casted into one piece, where geometrical undulations define programme (manifested in urban furniture, walls, mezzanine roof etc.);
The Timber Landscape
A dynamically undulating timber gridshell acting as the new topography for the site in which trees can poke through;
The Natural Landscape
Trees that poke through the timber canopy letting users achieve a greater proximity to nature. Programmes on the concrete landscape naturally cluster around these nodes and start to form more complex relationships.
