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Rock Salt, Gastronomic Society and Edible Garden. Edible Architecture, Future and Today.

Part 1 Project 2009
Manuel Eduardo Ginés Salazar
University of Huddersfield | UK
My friends and I use to meet once a week to enjoy the pleasure of cooking and eating. Every week at one of our houses each of us bring a dish, cooked by himself, and together we share food and friendship. This idea can be brought to a bigger scale, a neighbourhood, creating a place to share not only food but community sense.
This is reflected in a network of edible gardens integrated in the urban grid, all them interconnected through a green corridor ending, as focal point, in a gastronomic society.
A neighbour harvests some vegetables from the edible garden, walks around the vertical garden picking some strawberries, then he goes to the kitchen to cook some dishes to enjoy them with his neighbours along with a bottle of wine from the common cellar.
Food on itself has inspired an adaptable building in time. A building capable of eating itself.
Like food the building is not made to last, it grows, changes, ripens, it is mixed with other ingredients and everyone gives his personal touch, until it decays and dies.
A basic structure which evolves feeding itself from its users. A gantry crane that dynamizes and gets alive the building. A modular architecture to allow the building growing. Today it houses a gastronomic society, if it is a success new modules can be added; otherwise the building is devouring and reinventing itself, in accordance with new demands, as a student hall, offices…
This idea of change is reinforced with the vertical garden that protects from the weather the building depending on each season, cooling in Summer and allowing the sunlight to reach the building in Winter. The mediafacade helps users and building to communicate, for instance, displaying tomatoes the community knows that it is tomatoes season, or warm colours can indicate the amount of energy generated by the water mill.
The result is an edible building that grows and ripens with the neighbourhood. A district with less CO2 emissions, less transport and packaging needed, connecting river and town again.

Manuel Eduardo Ginés Salazar



Food in the city was used as a starting point to explore the notion of unity for the diverse range of cultures in the age of diminishing boundaries and to celebrate the fusion of cultural exchange.
With the Rock Salt Gastronomic Society and edible garden, set in the post industrial suburbs of Huddersfield which could be relevant to many of the towns and cities of UK and across the developed world The project has devised a fascinating polemic:
Evaluating the incremental evolution of a city landscape that is both responsive to being site specific and responding to the local cultural aspirations, a narrative that engages in time, memory and place making. The concept defines an evolving journey over a period of time allowing for change and the unexpected programme to shape and define the urban typology. The proposal for the Gastronomic centre utilises a highly non-contextual post industrial language, rooted in 1960’s radicalism of architecture devoid of style, composition or the romantic notion of a picturesque city where the process and the event defines the making of an incidental architecture.


Tutor(s)

Mr Carl Meddings
2009
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