Plug It In!

This project offers a novel, flexible, and customizable approach to market design by providing a robust framework for individual intervention. Inspired by Archigram and the incredible sensory experience of the collage-like Camden Market in London, this project embraces multiplicity, heterogeneity and differentiation between individual market sellers to create a market that is vibrant, differentiated, and brimming with activity. Rather than provide a top-down architectural solution in which to fit inhabit ants, this project provides a framework for the insertion of highly-customizable “plug-in stalls” that can be built and stylized according to the seller’s whim. This enables endless customization of not only aesthetic design but also of functional elements, enabling architectural elements that open to the street, fold to become furniture, or act as armatures for the display of products.

Thus this building, both in its appearance and in its programmatic arrangement, is a physical indication of a dynamic, evolving communal market. It is a perpetually unfinished architecture, not content with completeness but rather with novelty. It has the opportunity to constantly produce a vibrant, heterogeneous experience - an experience whose constant newness will keep people coming back again and again.