This proposal for a hybrid train station + framers market + neighborhood canteen + housing cooperative in Fresno, California, extends and dramatizes the logic of perishability governing California’s agricultural systems to the scale of architecture. It is conceived as a node in a larger network of produce distribution which takes advantage of California’s new high-speed rail system, imagining a space in which not only commuters, pedestrians and tourists but trains, buses, farmers, produce, unaffiliated bystanders and various other ecological forces come into intimate entanglement around the logistics of food movement and climatological specificities of the Central Valley’s (warming) seasonal temperatures.
The project borrows from California’s nimble agricultural vocabulary of lightweight and reconfigurable materials such as netting and plastic curtains to speculate on an architecture more attune with the unique indoor-outdoor opportunities for Californian life. At once present yet transient, the station becomes a space of movement and labor, an atmosphere of intentional visibility which meaningfully foregrounds the otherwise unseen expenditure of human and more-than-human energy alike necessary to sustain food distribution and access.
