Conversations: Caitlin Taylor and Amy Mielke
Constructs Could you tell me a little about the current venture of Midcourse Design? How does it work, and how are you working together on this new project?
Caitlin Taylor Midcourse is an interdisciplinary design and development studio that we have founded to confront the generational challenge of rebuilding regional food infrastructure in the Northeast. We bring design and construction, real estate, creative, financial, and operational expertise to construct the amount of regional-scale food infrastructure that will be needed in the Northeast to meaningfully re-regionalize our food system.
We work with partners, mostly food business operators and farmers, to bring that kind of interdisciplinary thinking to the task of building momentum behind capital projects that wouldn’t otherwise happen. We do that through design-led development projects where we treat food infrastructure as investable real estate, which is a relatively untested idea.
C What does the gap that you have identified look like? Why is it an issue, and why is it something that architects are suited to tackle?
CT The food system is often talked about as this abstract, immaterial, or unknowable set of invisible forces that magically move food from places far away, where the food is grown, to our grocery store shelves, where we buy it. But the industrial, global food system that we have today is a material reality made possible by billions of square feet of physical, three-dimensional space. That food system has a distinct architectural language, and that architecture is performing exactly the way it was designed to perform. We often hear that the food system is “broken,” and I always try to correct this because it’s actually not; it’s performing exactly the way it was designed to perform by the multinational corporations that profit from the externalized costs of how food is grown. In other words, the industrial food system is anonymous, placeless, and invisible because it was designed to be that way.
Between the scale of globalized industry, on one end of the spectrum, and the scale of a farmer’s market, on the other, there is virtually no purpose-built infrastructure. At my farm, for example, we sell our produce at farmers’ markets to sustain our business. This is labor intensive and weather-dependent, making it difficult to scale for regional systems and creating a huge gap between local farms and the industrial system that supplies our grocery stores. We have to rebuild what was once a functional regional food system. It’s not enough to build more small-scale, prefabricated metal shed buildings on the outskirts of cities. To truly re-regionalize the food system, we have to recenter food infrastructure as an essential, lively, and vibrant civic space. We need to redesign and rebuild infrastructure that can operate at a truly regional scale, centering it as an integral part of civic life.
Amy Mielke That’s right, we’re trying to bring it out of the shadows and into the cultural and social consciousness, to reintegrate it back into our cities and the way we live. All infrastructure has a way of disappearing from our minds when it is not visible in our day-to-day lives, and we lose stewardship of that infrastructure along with the support and love around it. To actively participate in a productive urban condition and civic life, architects can layer in the invitation of the place, making things feel part of a value system in a way that doesn’t happen when food buildings are short-term utility products.
It needs to become something in and of itself, as a participant. The legibility of infrastructure has been paramount for us. We want to respect the agency of people to understand what they see and uncover what they typically cannot see. There is an honesty, a generosity, and love in being more transparent with everything.
CT The experience of going to the grocery store and buying food, which is the way that most people get their food every day, is designed to dissociate and disconnect you from its source. As Amy was saying, there is an incredibly transformative power behind the idea that the infrastructure is legible, accessible, human-scale, and specific to a place. The real systems-change idea from an architectural perspective is when people can see it and understand what it is, where it is, how it operates, and where the food is coming from.
AM The other unique component of this proposition is that we are working with operators, as Caitlin said, from an early stage. Typically you haven’t seen designers and architects involved at the stage when you’re trying to figure out where to position your facility in or outside of a city or how it will operate. To be involved in the search process and help make decisions about the built environment over ten, twenty, or thirty years is a new way for producers and distributors to think. The other component is to introduce the spatial power that farmers have in the same way that other development projects already function.
CT Because of the polarity of the system and the fact that there is very little between the scale of farmers’ market and the scale of global industry, weas eaters often put an undue burden on farmers to diagnose and solve the issues involved in these infrastructural gaps themselves. Farmers are incredibly talented at growing food, but they are not trained in what it takes to go from an idea to realizing a building. Yet there are amazing farmers and other food business operators—brilliant, visionary people who see and understand these infrastructural gaps—who are trying to fill them through scrappy, resourceful strength of will, with $15,000 and a loading dock. Our hypothesis is that by bringing a relatively small amount of upstream creative design and building industry expertise to these organizations and supporting them in addressing the infrastructural gap, we can adequately capitalize these projects. And that’s when we get true regional scale transformation.
C The discipline of urban planning hasn’t really operated at the regional scale since the 1970s, not just in food systems but also in transportation, infrastructure, and electricity. All of it has been pulling toward the global and intensely local, and the regional scale has fallen out of spatial practice in general. It’s very interesting that, as architects, you identify and address the spatial gap in regional planning through spatial expertise.
In terms of recentering, I think about, for example, Émile Zola’s The Belly of Paris — very graphic and explicit, with the smell of chicken fat rendering and the carts of turnips coming into the city at night—within this sort of giant architecture of metabolism, and it’s very sensual. As architects designing regional food systems for communities, what are the challenges in convincing people that some of the maybe unsightly or difficult aspects of food production need to be apparent front and center, as in the past?
CT You should hear me try to convince all the city planners in Hartford that we should put a slaughterhouse at the Hartford Regional Market! They would have some opinions about the answer to that question. It’s a great question that we are excited to address through creative design solutions. How do you pull all the pieces of the system into a more visible form and help people locate themselves within it? That’s an architectural question. It doesn’t always have to be curated and beautiful; sometimes it can be smelly, given the right context and framing.
AM I think we can forget that many people already live with smells— they live near meat processing plants, industrial pollution, or just uncomfortable conditions that are more intense than necessary. It’s happening somewhere. If it comes closer to us so that we see it, then maybe we participate more in the way that it happens and we take some ownership of that process.
C You brought up the idea that many globalized food systems have externalities that are out of sight, and maybe making the consequences of food choices more apparent will motivate consumers to choose differently.
CT Yes. Amy, your point about people who already live near sites of industrial pollution is such an important one. The scale at which the industrial food system operates is so irrational— so incomprehensibly large and consolidated—that sites of slaughter, for example, are epicenters of vast injustice, from workforce conditions to environmental degradation.
Scaling down and redesigning the infrastructure to a regional scale addresses questions such as: How many farms are we sourcing from? What is our annual throughput? How much space do we need to process this and that? When you’re talking about regional-scale production and processing, the forces at work and the impacts of those systems are fundamentally different. Slaughterhouses are always going to be icky to people in a certain way. But Amy is exactly right—seeing, understanding, and knowing how it operates starts to change that reaction.
C Aside from slaughter houses, corn and soybean production are strangling the Gulf of Mexico. There are unforeseen—or maybe foreseen—consequences that we are not taking into account. One word you keep bringing up in connection with these systems of production is infrastructure. This can serve as a time machine to take us back to 2013, when you were both in the advanced studio about Las Vegas, taught by Keller Easterling. Are the lessons of infrastructure explored in that studio class coming into play now? Could you also speak about your path from Yale to Midcourse Design?
CT Amy and I met in Keller’s studio, and we got to know each other and fell in love as collaborators and friends when we were designing infrastructure under her amazing visionary guidance. So now, when we have tactical meetings about cost estimates or are trying to dissect various parts of a complex project, I have to pinch myself because I can’t believe how lucky I am to be here doing this work together.
AM Working with Caitlin is adream. Finding each other in the context of Keller’s pedagogy means that our baseline assumptions about design are grounded in similar principles. We are focused on the systemic contribution of our efforts through nimble maneuvering. It is all movement, and the project is in the making. Keller’s approach to “active form” can feel a bit outside of traditional practice. She gave us space to think about architecture differently and let us shape its boundaries, and we feel that the ethical imperative to address the food system has a home in architecture.
I’ve been working at Ennead Architects for the last decade on traditional building projects as well as leading Ennead Lab, a research group dedicated to more nontraditional projects. In the latter, we’ve done a lot of upstream efforts, like working with communities that have suffered environmental injustice and trying to shape development projects that can improve these conditions. I’ve been balancing those two perspectives of practice for a while. Midcourse is in line with that pairing of practical application with radical action.
CT Amy has described how formative our studio with Keller was in our last semester at Yale. We were able to work on our studio project for a couple of years after we graduated, thanks to an award from the Holcim Foundation and a few industry connections that helped us explore it. So we had an amazing opportunity to take our crazy idea for flood control in Las Vegas out into the world. That was a formative experience because it was both fun and an early chance to test how this can go.
And then we had kids. We were both pregnant during our Las Vegas civil-engineering meetings. I got my license and taught for a few semesters at Yale and Columbia. As part of my teaching I met some folks from the leadership team at MASS Design Group. At that point my husband and I had our farm business up and running with our two best friends, and we were on the path to being farmers. I had a strong intuition that the food system was a really necessary and relatively untested place for architecture to work.
Relatively early in the life of MASS as a growing international architecture firm, I had the opportunity to start the Food Systems Design Lab within a larger practice. MASS is a nonprofit organization, which means that it approaches projects in a mission- and impact-driven way; it also means that the firm can raise and utilize philanthropic funding to catalyze projects in creative ways. One of those ways is investing in design labs where teams dedicate research, philanthropy, and project work to defining the role of architecture in industries and spaces that market-driven architecture doesn’t often go. I founded the Food Lab, where I worked with brilliant people across the organization to build that into a portfolio of projects as designers and architects for visionaries in the food system. We were doing campus master plans, building design, and installations—testing at a range of scales. I learned an incredible amount from the MASS team and Food Lab partners, and I’m eternally grateful.
Yet, in all of that work, we identified regional food infrastructure as a gap. And I realized that if I waited for the perfect client who saw and understood and wanted to fund this infrastructure, I might wait forever. I needed to take a step upstream from my role as an architect and embrace the fact that we already knew enough to connect these dots. We created Midcourse to bring this interdisciplinary expertise to infrastructure projects and to raise significant investment to fund and build them.
C Having completed the trajectory from architecture school to this new type of practice, how do you envision bringing that back to architecture school? Similarly, how do you translate your hands-on experience with agriculture to teaching architecture? How do you guide a new generation in investigating design for the food industry?
CT For one thing, we throw really, really good student picnics here on the farm. I love teaching students about the architecture of the food system because it is a direct path to a real expansion in their understanding of what architecture can do. I aspire to do tiny bits of what Keller did for us by helping students understand the impacts of design decisions and how far they reverberate beyond the scale of a building. That’s the “active form” that Keller taught us. The food system is a ripe and juicy place (no pun intended) to dig into those issues.
We’re really excited about the studio this semester because it’s an acceleration moment in our expansion of Midcourse. We’re working with lots of amazing food-systems people in the Northeast, and we will be able to bring their expertise into the studio. We’ve written a brief for a studio that will focus on diagnosing and designing for specific infrastructural gaps related to key staple crops in the Northeast—chestnuts, flax, grapes, rice, oysters, kelp, beans, and wheat. We’re going to ask student teams to become experts on the past and present of each of those staple crops to design specific buildings and processing infrastructure for them, thus defining their industrial future in the region.
C That sounds extremely interesting, and I think there’s also a lot of hunger for this type of work right now.
CT We’re excited! To apply these ideas to the studio, we will explore a couple of these staple crops as resources that are used not only for food but also in the production of fiber and other materials. In the studio, we will look at how to design at the building scale using circular material supply chains and waste streams. We’re going to do that by asking interesting and, in some cases, totally new questions about what waste is produced in the production of a crop and finding creative ways to use that waste. That’s one of the ways that the studio will be an exciting site of cutting-edge experimentation—while working with our Midcourse partners during the semester. These projects will have real value in shifting our collective imagination about what infrastructure we need to build in the Northeast.
