DMA

The Cambridge Food Hub is an exciting endeavour to increase the accessibility of locally produced, sustainable food, reducing wastage, food miles and costs whilst supporting local farms and small businesses. The Food Hub will feature low cost, rentable, incubator kitchens to encourage the production of local produce, collaboration, enterprise and employment with a café and shop to act as a focal point for the community. A key aspiration for the business, and our design concept, is that this provides a template pilot design that can be easily rolled out across the country in terms of both flexibility of design and construction method.

In response to the Cambridge Food Hub’s ethos of local sustainability, we are helping them develop a prototype facility using a universal construction method that can be easily replicated and assembled to respond to varying site specific constraints such as planning and labour supply. Our proposal is a digital kit of parts using standard sheets of plywood. The parts are cut out on site using a CNC machine, allowing locally sourced labour and materials to be used to fabricate the core building structure, reducing waste and energy use in the construction and delivery process. The industrial form of the building celebrates the plywood and the process. It is flexible and adaptable with open spans that can be adapted by adding or reconfiguring the standard components, allowing