​Taylor Returns for Lecture Series Talk

Event description courtesy Essex Library

"Provisional Architecture: Designing Just Food Systems" With Caitlin Taylor
Friday, March 1 at 7 p.m. in The Cube at Centerbrook Architects

Our collective human need to produce, process, transport, prepare, and eat food has a powerful transformative effect on our world - ecologically, economically, culturally, epidemiologically, historically, food shapes the world we live in. Food is inextricably linked to housing, to education, to health, to environmental change, to local economies, to global industry, and to racial and social injustice, and today we operate within a food system that is designed to exclude and oppress. Food access is spatial and temporal, and agricultural production colonizes vast swaths of our landscape.

As an architect with a background in organic agriculture, Caitlin Taylor brings to MASS Design Group an interdisciplinary focus on food justice, agriculture, and food systems. She is currently directing projects that focus on rural infrastructures of regenerative food production, equitable food access, and cultivation of food culture in disinvested cities.

She will discuss the history of MASS' work, and the conceptual framework for her focus on food system design as a form of radical hope. Through that lens, she will present some of the ongoing food and farming projects on the boards at MASS including the Good Shepherd Conservancy in Kansas, a new national network for school kitchen design, a community-run food hall as catalyst for urban redevelopment in Poughkeepsie, New York, and an industrial scale grain mill in Senegal.

Prior to joining MASS, Caitlin worked at Centerbrook and directed an independent practice focused on water infrastructure. Caitlin lives with her family in East Haddam, Connecticut, where they own and operate an organic vegetable and cut flower farm. She has taught advanced architecture studios at the Yale School of Architecture and Columbia Graduate School for Architecture, Planning & Preservation.