Food Futures

The project considers a radical systematic change to the food systems within cities, as a reaction to the event of the Covid-19 pandemic. With ever growing concerns around food security as an effect of critical global anxieties, the project contemplates an alternative narrative in which disused office towers are converted to urban food factories.

The program consumes redundancy within the city, inhabiting the recently superfluous Collins Place complex by I M Pei.

The project reflects on the previous architectural speculations around food, undertaken by people like Peter Cook, CJ Lim, and Rem Koolhaas, extending on this body of knowledge within contextual specificity withing Melbourne.

The project pursues a redefinition of the functional, spatial, and aesthetic relationships within the complex. 36 floors of primary food production occupy the smaller tower, providing produce to the 150 restaurant kitchens.

A market occupies the southern portion of the ground floor, where left over produce is sold to the public.

Food is distributed through a vehicle delivery system on the lower levels and through drone landing pads directly accessible to each kitchen.