Cultivated Carousel is a contemporary interpretation of how the exchange of food in Britain’s public market halls has long been the anchor of society in London. Quickly replacing open public markets in the late 18th century, the organized enclosed market halls embodied the mixture of the bucolic and the urban within a safe enclosure, thus engendering life and urban order.

Market halls provided an environment where the exchange of food and revelry could once again become central to the society. Cultivated Carousel translates this language of the market hall to a vertical form, creating a confluence of people, vegetables and algae, and crafting environments that result from various interactions of the three. Cultivated Carousel incorporates belts of vegetation that play out the stages of sowing to harvesting. These continuous, rotating bands form interstitial spaces that become the vertical marketplace. Void spaces within the tower allow sunlight to breech the building’s envelope, providing direct sunlight to the algae being harvested inside. The introduction of algae into the building’s hydroponic system provides nutrients and proteins for the vegetables and cleanses the water used, establishing a closed loop. Between these bands is the marketplace, an extrusion of the ground plain woven together to form a continuous public realm that encourages the interaction between humans, vegetation and algae. This interaction promotes awareness and a vehicle for education on the innovative possibilities of urban farming.

Nestled within the farm belts are residences. Residents may include urban farmers who tend to the revolving crops, researchers and scientists cultivating the algae, or simply locals or visitors to the city who wish to experience a connection between daily life and the production of food within the city.
The need to connect to an ancient sort of public life is crucial more so now than ever before, since so few of such opportunities exist in modern life. Cultivated Carousel does this by peeking back to 18th and 19th century London, and infusing the future of urban farming with a dash of the past, encouraging the praxis of interaction, innovation and ceremony.
Cultivated Carousel is a farm. A market. A festival.
A celebration of people, of food, and of social spaces that are shaped by food.