MACK JOURNELL
This one-story building on Water Street in downtown Northfield, MN is occupied by Just Food Co-op Grocery Store. Its exterior walls consist of painted bricks with a large span of windows at the main entrance and a plastic façade in the front that almost doubles the height of the building. Behind the façade is a flat roof that is home to an assortment of air/ventilation equipment.
Entering through the automatic doors of the main entrance leads to a glass-encased vestibule which opens up into the main shopping area. Steel trusses span the length of the building while I-Beams run across the width. There are two separate ventilation networks in the main room that are suspended just below the trusses. Towards the back of the main space, the room is cut off by thin, interior walls to separate rooms for storage and management from the public. These rooms have a lower ceiling height than the rest of the store to hide the ductwork.
The diagram above describes the building as a set of its parts including: glass windows, exterior bricks, steel trusses, a segment of the ventilation duct, a slice of the plastic façade, door handles, ceiling panels, rubber trim, and an I-Beam.
Exploring the life-cycle of home stuff and exercise stuff was the primary focus of this ANT Map. Each category examines the cost of manufacturing, distributing, and disposing, while contrasting the benefits of use. Home-Gyms have become much more popular with the onset of the COVID Pandemic and I wanted to rethink the usage of Home/Exercise materials and encourage them to intersect more frequently with the idea of encouraging a healthy lifestyle and making it more accessible.
I altered the space to include Home and Exercise stuff assembled in a scattered plan through stacking. The building had three main areas of use, the outside, the vestibule, and the large inner space (which I opened up by removing all of the interior walls). To break up the concrete floor, rubber exercise mats were put in place and raised off the ground at varying heights from one to three feet. Then, small pods were scattered around the interior and exterior of the building and stacked on top of the exercise blocks. These pods are intended to function as a Home-Gym away from home and are comprised of donated home and exercise goods to extend the products longevity and prevent premature waste.
This plan animation walks through the building as someone would during a workout and stops to annotate different items. The scattered nature of the plan makes for a disorienting path as they travel through, around, up, over, and down to get to the next destination. The makeup of each pod is different in order to play to the strengths of its positioning. One with half of its floor being taken up by an exercise box would be more open than one that is on level ground to encourage people to perform box jumps and use the environment creatively.
These two parallaxes examine the space with two different intentions. The first is more private. Each curved wall of a pod consists of slanted vertical slats, enabling vision to penetrate the interior of the space from some angles but restricting it from others. This constant changing of privacy was intended to balance the want to work out in the privacy of one’s home but still have the positive and energizing environment of a group setting. Leaving the ceilings open along with these slats allows for noise to carry throughout the entire space which is why the sounds of a busy gym accompany this video. The second half cuts through three pods and exposes the home-exercise stuff on the inside while also giving the perspective of a pod user looking out into the space.
These interior snapshots are intended to illustrate the scattered chaos of the floor plan and the restrictiveness that the space enforces on your vision. They attempt to capture viewing the space from each angle: outside an apartment looking down a “hallway” or looking inside an apartment and inside an apartment looking out through the slats or looking at the various pieces of equipment.