Studio Overview

Our world tilts precariously between abundance and scarcity. Even as industrial agricultural production rises, food insecurity persists across the United States, exacerbated by brittle global supply chains. In the world of food systems work, food policy, farming practices, the health benefits of fresh food, and the climate impact of our food system are common topics of planning and action. Yet, as the structure of the system is stressed by the pressure of an economy gone mad, we almost never talk about the buildings, spaces, and systems – the actual physical infrastructure – that move nourishing food from farms to plates.

In the northeast, much of the food we consume travels thousands of miles before reaching us, grown in monocultures dependent on fossil fuels and synthetic fertilizers, and changing hands many times across the murky middle of the supply chain before arriving in the grocery store. This globalized food system is now increasingly fragile, rocked by climate volatility, geopolitical instability, and economic turbulence. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of our food infrastructure, with empty shelves, disrupted supply chains, and local farms forced to dump harvests due to a lack of processing capacity.

Rather than investing in solutions that decentralize food production, the federal government is dismantling agencies designed to support regional food economies. Meanwhile, massive corporations dominate the food landscape, consolidating control over what we eat and how it’s produced, leaving the food system more centralized, opaque, and vulnerable than ever. Yet food remains our most powerful connection to our planet and ourselves. What we eat every day brings meaning and nourishment to our lives; it sustains our bodies, shapes our landscapes, roots us in tradition, and connects us to each other. It is so obvious that we often forget that what we eat shapes who we are and the world we live in. But the food system is failing before our eyes. And even with a clear picture of the cost of Staple Studio Brief YSOA Fall 2025 1 maintaining the status quo, we do not have a convincing collective vision for how we should, or even can, feed ourselves in the future.

Historical Context

It hasn’t always been this way. Before the rise of industrial agriculture and corporate consolidation, every region had its own food system. The precolonial history of the northeast was defined by bioregional, seasonal cuisine, and indigenous people lived in a carefully choreographed balance with their ecosystems. Within the last century, dairies, vegetable farms, and cooperatives served local markets, while city life was anchored by bakeries, butcher shops, and wholesale terminals. As people settled in larger cities, infrastructure was not just functional but a source of civic identity and pride, visible in everyday life.

In a matter of decades, we traded that distributed, diverse, place-based system for something relentlessly optimized for scale, efficiency, and uniformity. Cheap fossil fuels and centralized logistics made it possible and profitable to grow and ship food at massive volumes. Regional food infrastructure was dismantled, building by building, as corporations built national brands and distribution networks, and we replaced deeply-rooted bioregional food networks with an industrialized food system that was lean, fast, and global. Predicated on a profound disconnect between growing methods and ecological limits, environmental degradation accelerated apace.

The civic infrastructure of our food system faded into anonymous warehouses on the edge of town. Most of us no longer know where our food is processed, packed, or distributed, let alone see or participate in that process. Most communities have little say in what food enters or leaves. Most people shop in grocery stores that conceal sourcing and ingredients behind smart branding. The infrastructure that once supported regional sovereignty – produce aggregation hubs, public markets, malting houses, mills, slaughterhouses – is long gone, leaving a fragmented, invisible system largely out of our control.

Provocation

Though we often hear the food system described as an abstract, immaterial, unknowable set of forces, it is, in fact, a material reality; the industrial food system is made possible by billions of cubic feet of physical, three-dimensional space constructed from building materials sourced from global supply chains. The food system has a distinct architectural language, and that architecture is performing exactly the way it was designed to perform. In other words, the food system is anonymous, placeless, and invisible because it was designed to be that way.

As this system buckles under the pressure of accelerating polycrisis, we believe that architects have a pivotal role to play in designing what comes next. This studio imagines a near-future in which our food infrastructure is regional, rightsized, legible, and specific to place, and takes seriously our urgent responsibility as architects to bring that future to life.