CnB Sustainable Market: A Timber Frame That Turns Shopping into Reducing, Reusing and Recycling

Most markets are built around a single transaction: goods arrive, money changes hands, packaging goes in the bin. CnB Sustainable Market starts from a different question. What if the market were a place where you learned to need less, fixed what you already own and handed on what you no longer use? The answer here is architectural as much as social: a loose, open scaffold of timber modules where bicycles get repaired on one floor, old clothes find new owners on another, and climbing plants grow up the cores that hold it all together.

CnB Sustainable Market is designed by muhammad ali bakshi of Oxford Brookes University. CnB stands for "change n build", an idea to change both everyday lifestyle and the future of public market space. The concept pairs a physical, workshop-oriented market with a digital app, and both rest on the same three principles: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The aim, in the project's own framing, is to connect a sustainable lifestyle to the spaces where people already gather, as a way to address climate change in our environment.

A Scaffold Strung Along the Railway Edge

From above, the market reads less like a building than like a framework still waiting to be completed. A chain of timber-framed blocks sits on a long strip between a railway line and a tree-lined road, facing a row of Victorian brick houses. The blocks step and interlock, leaving gaps that become courtyards, and their skeletal upper levels keep the mass light against the solid domestic fabric across the street. It is a sensible move: a market that wants to look provisional and adaptable should look like it could grow or shrink.

At ground level the effect is closer to a timber village than a shed. Exposed posts and beams rise three and four storeys, stairs thread up through the frame, and the roofline is left as open grid rather than closed off. Planters of pink flowers and a single yellow-leaved tree soften the paved paths, and the open structure means you can see people working on upper floors from the courtyard. The market puts its activity on display, and that visibility is part of the argument.

Courtyards Organised Around a Single Tree

The clusters are arranged so that their gaps do as much work as their rooms. Seen from overhead, a ring of bamboo-toned frames with mesh screens and timber decks wraps a courtyard whose centre is given over to one large yellow-green tree, with people gathering in its shade. The tree acts as a landmark and a meeting point, the kind of informal civic anchor a market depends on, and it sets the scale of the open space more clearly than any paving pattern could.

Along the street edge, the frame pulls back behind a line of mature trees and low hedging. Grass-jointed paving runs under a timber colonnade, raised planters sit between the posts, and the upper walkways overhang the ground floor to make a covered arcade. The threshold between public pavement and market is blurred on purpose: you drift in under the trees before you realise you have entered.

Grated Walkways and Ivy-Wrapped Cores

The most atmospheric spaces in the scheme are the in-between ones. Circulation runs along grated corridors, perforated so that daylight filters down into the centre of the modules. Walking these decks, you look through the floor as well as across it, and the central core beside you is wrapped in a trellis of climbing vines strung on cables. The result is a walkway that feels half like a greenhouse and half like a bridge, with timber posts and mesh layering the view in every direction.

The external elevation shows how this green layer folds into the rooms themselves. Planted walls sit behind glazing, people tend raised beds at the edge of the frame, and a narrow passage cuts through the block between two heavy timber posts. Greenery is not applied as decoration on the facade; it is woven into the structure and given its own vertical route.

Composite Columns, SIPs Walls and a Kit of Parts

The construction logic underpins the whole idea of changeability. The module structure drawings break the frame into repeatable parts: composite columns, metal plate connections, structure joint details, steel base plates at the column foot, and timber beams and columns that assemble into a single frame module. These modules stack into towers and then into clusters, so the market grows by addition rather than by redesign.

The materiality diagram fills that frame in. Walls are 172 mm structural insulated panels, with a rigid urethane insulation core sandwiched between two layers of oriented strand board. Post-and-beam timber framing carries the modules, cross-laminated timber is proposed as cladding for its strength and its potential for carbon-neutral building, and the trellis core rises with green vines from top to ground around the stairs. The exploded axonometric is the clearest drawing in the set: it shows a market built from a limited vocabulary, which is exactly what a building about reuse should be.

One Timber Room, Many Ways to Reuse

Inside, the project makes a bold choice: every workshop shares the same shell. A timber-lined room with a slatted ceiling, a deep window framing trees at the far end, and an ivy screen on one side recurs from programme to programme. What changes is the fit-out. In the bike workshop, wheels are mounted on the wall and people work on frames in the middle of the floor. In the reuse shop, clothes hang from rails, shelves hold books and accessories, and shoppers browse near autumn-lit windows. In the food workshop, produce spills out of crates and barrels around timber counters, with bunting strung across the room.

This sameness is the project's quiet strength. Because the room is generic, the programme can shift: a repair space can become a swap shop, a food stall can become a classroom. The architecture refuses to fix the market's identity, leaving the community to define it by what they bring in and carry out.

Plants and Laptops Under the Same Ceiling

The same timber room also hosts slower, more social uses. In the community development workshop, people work at laptops under black pendant lamps, some at a table, others on the floor or perched on the window ledge, with potted plants gathered by the door. In the green environment workshop, pots cover the floor, glass terrariums hang from the wall and visitors carry plants out by hand. These rooms suggest the market is not only a place to exchange things but a place to share knowledge and spend time, which may matter more for changing habits than any single product on a shelf.

Why This Project Matters

Sustainability in architecture is often discussed as a matter of materials and energy. CnB Sustainable Market treats it as a matter of behaviour, and then asks what kind of space would make sustainable behaviour ordinary. Its answer is a public market organised around Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, where repairing a bike, swapping a coat or potting a plant sits alongside buying food, and where a companion app extends those habits beyond the building.

The architecture backs up the ambition. A modular timber frame, panelised walls and a repeatable workshop room make the building itself an example of the adaptability it promotes, while the grated walkways, trellised cores and tree-anchored courtyards keep it generous at street level. The renderings leave open questions about how the clusters perform over time, but the proposition is clear and worth taking seriously: the market of the future may be judged less by what it sells than by what it helps us keep.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: muhammad ali bakshiUniversity: oxford brookes university

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