Prix de Rome 2018 | En Plein Public

Met de inzending ‘En Plein Public’ raakte Werkstatt bij de laatste 10 finalisten voor de Prix de Rome 2018.
Werkstatt maakt een radicaal statement met het idee voor een publiek slachthuis in de open lucht, in het hart van het dorpje Hongerige Wolf in noord Groningen. Lees hieronder onze inzending (engels).

STATEMENT (01)

Eating animals is part of the system. Agriculture in Oost-Groningen depends on the manure and revenue of livestock. Traditionally we have grown up with the romantic idea of the farmstead with a couple of cows, a batch of pigs to clean up leftovers and some chickens roaming around. 
A romanticism which is virtually extinct. Agriculture is a large-scale industry, where quantity is the norm. Animals are being kept at an unimaginable scale. Slaughtering them is one of the best-kept public secrets nobody really wants to know about. Few things symbolise the gap between the city and the rural better than eating animals: the city dweller thinks he is a critical consumer, but lives far away from reality. The farmer is becoming more anonymous, being pushed by regulations, subsidies and globalisation into ever-larger methods of producing, leaving a ditto landscape.

Large scale production is not a new phenomenon in Oost-Groningen. The old ‘Graanrepubliek’ already saw big, wealthy and powerful farmers. They lived next door to the poor farmer boys, day labourers and peasant girls, in a separated society. Socialism came in as a wave in order to suppress this unequal distribution of wealth. Now, many decades later, there is an eerie parallel. There are only a handful of large-scale farmers left who manage to produce the massive bulk needed to make a living. They work in an increasingly empty landscape between shrinking villages and weakening social structures.

The Swiss architect Gion Caminada saw a similar thing happening in his village Vrin in the Alps. Farmers left the inaccessible grasslands on the mountain slopes behind, taking the local community to the brink of extinction. He took up the task to reverse this process and introduced several pre-conditions in order to strengthen peripheral regions. In essence it boils downs to two aspects:

- Move production from quantity to quality. 
It is a special and almost unnatural situation that in our densely populated country we try to produce and compete on volume. The origin makes sense (little land, so high revenue per acre), but in a global economy, it makes ever less sense. The agricultural techniques we have developed in order to stimulate high volumes are actually very well suited to produce high quality products. They can help in the reduction of micro-particles (dust), CO2 and nitrogen pollution, as well as increase animal welfare. It’s up to us how we choose to use the available techniques. 

- Search for a new, recognisable in-between-scale of production. 
A position between the large-scale anonymous and unrecognisable mass-production as we know it, and the small-scale artisan production, which is often financially not viable. In his case Caminada helped developing a range of more efficient stables that replaced the old artisanal stables, but still fitted inside the community and the village’s morphology. The architecture matches the character and available building techniques from the village, but is also wayward enough to visually carry the new found position: the stables as such are highly recognisable as a new typology.

As an outsider it’s vital to get a grip on the landscape when working on these social, economic and aesthetic problems, as it represents the culture of the place. By recreating the landscape through the architectural maquette, a more abstract version of the landscape emerges. This abstraction comes into existence by the choices that need to be made when making the model: what to show in which way? The model then forms the canvas in which ideas can be tried and tested. It makes the architectural process more about gut feeling: you make something in the model, become an observer, and then decide whether it is good or not. It’s a very practical method of working, which complements the nature of the question. We have added both our graduation research reports with our 3D-statement. Our research shows how large, hard to grasp themes in remote regions can become manageable through this approach. This research forms the foundation for the proposed intervention.

INTERVENTION (02)

We imagine a slaughterhouse at the location of the already existing communal building, adjacent to the dike in Hongerige Wolf. It is nothing more than a roof with a kitchen underneath, open, the wind blowing through, and the sun shining in. No neatly tiled white walled bastion in which the majority of animals is being slaughtered, but a communal place. Here the animals that are kept by the local villagers can be slaughtered, in-between the large-scale production of corn and sugar beets and the ornamental garden at the dike. A pig, some chickens, maybe a rabbit. 

It is a place where the enormous scale of our food production is being confronted with her own existence, at the same time acknowledging it won’t change very soon. It highlights slaughter as the final link in our food chain. The confronting transparancy in a public setting forces a small-scale, dignified slaughter. We enact Michael Pollan’s open slaughterhouse, disinfected by the UV-radiation from the sun and the fresh wind blowing through the construction of the roof. At regular intervals during the month, villagers can slaughter and clean small animals together in this public slaughterhouse, either with the purpose of selling them, or eating them themselves. The visitor from the city will be able, in the same way we stand in awe at markets in foreign places, to see it all. But through the sobriety and efficiency needed for a small village to take care of itself, it won’t be a tourist attraction. The public setting will bring a renewed understanding of one’s own choices and responsibilities. One becomes a participant of an intimate process; one might even feel a sense of voyeurism. 

The development of a rural setting is inherently connected to agricultural production. We can have thoughts and insights looking from outside, when thinking about a new program for shrinking villages, as long as the proposed program tries to tie into the existing structures of economic reality. In this context it is essential, just as in the village of Vrin, that the city dweller knows about what’s going on in Oost Groningen. He is the financial actor, the one that consumes and as such brings money to the region. The slaughter of animals in a humane and public way could (hypothetically) grow into a recognisable ritual. This recognisability has the capacity of binding people to a place and product. The urbanite is willing to pay for products with a sincere origin. The proposed building is thus merely an expression of the chosen path. It’s the starting point for discussions, and as a concept viable to changing insights. The intervention as such needs to be financially and programmatically sober and pragmatic.   

Gion Caminada designed a phone booth in his village in order to show that even they are part of a larger whole, a bigger international community. Making a phone call or writing an email takes the same amount of time irrespective of whether it’s destination is the house next door, or a far flung corner of the world. In reverse the opposite question can be asked: now that agricultural production has become globalized, and our landscape monocultural, how do we still form a local sense of being? When our stables communicate through glass fibre cables with one another, how do we then communicate through a community? What are the exceptional moments within a community which make getting together necessary and pleasant?

“As an architect one is necessarily also engaged in research; one wouldn’t otherwise be able to solve current problems. It is a phenomenom of our time that the general public does not accept architecture, by and large. The reason being that architecture is all to often simply an end in itself and rarely used as a means of addressing the problems at hand. I believe that the social, economic, and aesthetic aspects must be much more closely interwoven. Only then would architecture give rise to benefits that people can appreciate. When an architect simply pushes a certain aesthetic, people don’t see the point of his work. The farmers for example say; “If a barn functions well, it may look good , too”.”

Gion Caminada