Size

Site: 10,000 sq. ft.

Year

2019

Status

Completed

Client

Exhibit Columbus

Services

Exhibit Design

Portrait of Caitlin Taylor, RA
Caitlin Taylor, RA
Design Director
Caitlin Taylor, RA

Caitlin Taylor, RA

Design Director

Caitlin joined MASS in 2018 as an architect with a background in food and farming; she brings to the firm an interdisciplinary focus on environmental, economic, and social justice in the food system. She directs the Food System Design Lab at MASS, and is leading projects around the country including the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, the Poughkeepsie Public Market, and the Pepper Place Pavilion.

Caitlin lives with her family in East Haddam, Connecticut, where they own and operate an organic vegetable and cut flower farm. She has taught advanced architecture studios at the Yale School of Architecture, Columbia GSAPP, and Cornell AAP, and previously worked at firms in New York City and Connecticut.

Her previous work on urban flood control in Las Vegas was awarded the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction Gold Prize. Caitlin studied biochemistry at Wesleyan University and received her Masters of Architecture from Yale School of Architecture, where she received the Henry Adams Medal. She is a registered architect with licenses in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Project Team

Project Manager: Caitlin Taylor, Justin Brown, Annie Wang, Nadyelli Quiroz

Collaborators

Lighting Design: ESL Spectrum;
Structural Engineering: Elizabeth Woolf;
Installation Consultant: Bartholomew County FFA Organizations;
Fabrication Consultant: Black Jewel Popcorn

Corn / Meal is designed to create a space for people to have a direct, proximate, and meaningful relationship to their food system, and to cultivate food literacy through the act of eating at a shared community table.

Children from Central Middle School working at a picnic table in our Corn / Meal installation

© Hadley Fruits

Almost one-quarter of the surface area of Indiana is taken up by corn production, but few people actually know why it’s grown, what it’s used for, and where it ends up. This installation brings the ubiquitous background landscape of corn into the foreground in order to call attention to the fact that only about 1% of all the corn grown in the country is eaten by people in a relatively unprocessed form.

Children from Central Middle School playing on the picnic tables in our Corn / Meal installation

© Hadley Fruits

The landscape of the installation is designed to be legible; zones of planting represent different proportional outputs of industrial corn production. For example, 46% of all corn grown in the country is used for animal feed, and 30% is used for ethanol production.

A view of Corn / Meal at night

© Hadley Fruits

The planted landscape is a teaching tool, and will be utilized for cross-disciplinary study at Central Middle School. Curricular integration will include pollination and germination studies with science classes, as well as art, literature and consumer science classes.

An aerial view of Corn / Meal

Exhibit Columbus Biennial: Corn/Meal. © Hadley Fruits

Seasonal change is an active component of the design itself; watching the plants grow through the summer and then age as the temperature falls will be a daily reminder of visitors’ connection to the planet.

An aerial view of Corn / Meal

© Hadley Fruits

The picnic table is a recognizable symbol of a shared meal, and has been modified in our installation to accommodate a range of uses from small informal gatherings of students, to classroom and instructional use, to informal play, to community meals. The design of the table is inclusive, accessible, and modular, and accepts a wide range of reconfigurable and programmed uses.

Read more about Corn/Meal in the Architectural Digest

Read more about Corn/Meal in The Republic