DAVIED CORDERO
This single-story building is located in North River Street in Ypsilanti, MI and is a coffee shop and tap house. The walls are concrete blocks that are painted on the outside and with a brick facade covering the North-Eastern corner. With double two garage doors and a flat roof with wooden and metal beams in the interior, this building used to be an auto-repair shop.
The interior is divided into two sections: the garage side which is used as the dining room and community space and the “office” side which is where the bars are and the customer service happens. The open ceiling interior allows for a bigger sense of space with exposed metal and wooden beams and HVAC ducts.
This diagram is a knolled kit-of-parts of the materials in the building including: aluminum HVAC ducts, lighting fixtures, glass blocks and panes, wooden doors, cement blocks, garage doors, wooden beams, and metal I-beams.
The Actor-Network map shown combines the food stuff category and the outdoor category into a single item, coffee. The relationship is explored through the study of a farm-to-table approach. Things like land use, labor, and fair trade encompass the outdorr section, while things like consumer experience and electricty and water usage are tackled in the table side.
Although, coffee has a very long history dating all the way back to the 15th century with a plethora of socio-cultural, political, environmental, and power dynamics to take into consideration, this study focuses on a more tangible life-cycle assessment process. However, the history should not be forgotten and it’s origin should be appreciated.
The project includes food and outdoor stuff assembled in a shelved manner and planned out in a nested organization. There are a variety of nested locations: coffee sacks nesting sections of equipment and shelves nesting areas of interest and information. Outdoor stuff is located in the exterior and presented as display inside with food stuff being shown throughout the interior.
Arranged as an experience, the building takes you from a makeshift coffee farm to a display section detailing the anatomy of a Coffea plant. With two ways of processing, natural and washed, the pulping machine initiates the washed method and is transported to a fermentaion tank. From there, the beans are laid out in blue tarps to dry before being separated in a mill and shipped as green beans in burlap sacks. Once received, the beans go through a roasting machine where they can be set to different roasts profiles and bagged. Finally, the coffee bags are sent to consumers and coffee shops for roasting and brewing in different methods.
With a small coffee farm in the exterior that leads inside, the layout is immediately present and forthright. Used as a studio gallery and display, the building shares with the viewer an experience that takes coffee from farm to table. Inside, coffee processing equipment is arranged to show the labor behind a single cup of coffee.
Walking through the installation, one begins walking through a coffee farm, overwhelmed by the size and amount of Coffea plants needed to run a single coffee shop. A small display of the important aspects of a coffee plant is immediately followed by industrial equipment used to process coffee from it’s cherry to its raw seed, with placement of equipment allowing for a pathway. Following shipping, the processed seeds, also considered green beans, are delivered to a roasting plant to be roasted and bagged. Afterwards, a coffee bean is brewed in one of multiple ways and is enjoyed by the consumer. Finally, the exit shows a presentation on the impacts (electricity consumption, water usage, and greenhouse gas emissions) of taking a single cup of coffee from farm to table.