EMERGING LEADERS IN ARCHITECTURE
Corner Store Initiative
As part of the 2016 class of AIAVA’s Emerging Leaders of Architecture (ELA), the class chose a public interest design project around reducing food inequity in Richmond, VA. Early on in the project we had heavily debated conversations regarding appropriate solutions for the problem. The end result of those conversations landed us on three distinctly scaled solutions that touched on both availability and education: bringing healthy food choices into the city limits with the addition of an 11-acre organic farm, a teaching kitchen to demonstrate how to prepare healthy food choices attached to a healthy food cafe that would employ and educate at-risk youth, and a series of small insertions into convenience stores that is visibly associated with healthy food choices.
The latter project is part of the ongoing initiative with the Richmond City Health District that provides a refrigerator, produce stocking, and education of the store owner regarding ways to maintain, sell, and use the foods provided. I proposed a series of additive conversions to existing standard store shelving that would create a visual identity associated with the healthy food choices program with a material reference to barn aesthetic. The shelving solution incorporated the program provided refrigerator and had areas for recipe cards as well as storage for the store.
Early concepts responded to barn aesthetic and produce crates crafted by local at-risk youth, but the cost implications of a completely fabricated solution led to reusing and adapting to existing store shelving.
