PEEL B: A Market That Peels the Ground Back to Tell the Story of Thu Thiem

Most markets describe the city they serve. Peel Back Market tries to describe how that city came to exist. Its central gesture is a single act of tearing: a large swath of Earth, vegetated and quiet, is pulled abruptly away from the ground, and beneath it a busy urban market takes its place. The building tells the history of its site as an event you can walk through.

PEEL B is the work of Katherine Herrera. The project is listed under Chicago, yet its subject sits on the other side of the world. It is built around the transformation of Thu Thiem from a vegetated, undeveloped area into a thriving urban city. That shift from calm to vivacity is the whole design brief, written into landform, stall and street.

A Swath of Earth Lifted Off the City Below

The concept rests on one idea, and that clarity is its strength. The peeled layer holds the past: vegetation and a calming atmosphere. Underneath, the city's present arrives with excitement and density. The project does not soften the change into a gradual transition. The Earth is abruptly pulled, so the visitor feels the rupture as a sudden change in mood, from a planted, slow edge to a crowded floor of trade.

The submission sets out these ideas in a written questionnaire as well as on its boards. That choice suits a project driven by narrative: the drawings show the peel, and the text explains what the peel means. The argument is only as strong as its legibility, and here the legibility comes from keeping the story to two states, before and after.

Stalls Shaped Like the Towers Rising Around Them

In the aerial render the peeled shell curls up behind the market like a rolled sheet of ground. Its curved surface reflects the skyline across the water. In front of it the stalls spread out as a low field of timber-framed boxes topped with greenery. They are not neutral kiosks. The stalls take a form similar to the buildings of Thu Thiem, and they sit along "streets" placed throughout the market. The market becomes a scaled-down model of the city it commemorates.

This is the project's most persuasive move. A shopper does not just pass the narrative; they move through it, walking stall-lined lanes that copy the grain of the new district. Planting on the stall roofs keeps a thread of the older, vegetated landscape running through the urban grid, as if the peeled Earth had left fragments behind on its way up.

Uneven Rooftops That Throw Shade onto the Lanes

At eye level the idea becomes something people can feel. The board describes the stalls as market "Skyscraper" Stalls, and their varying heights do practical work: the jagged roofline casts shade across the paths, and the open stall fronts encourage people to linger and talk. Timber-clad volumes cantilever over glazed frontages. Produce and goods sit right at the edge of the walkway, and the shadows fall across the lanes in strips that follow the skyline overhead.

A photographic reference of stacked, glazed units capped with warm timber shows the material character the stalls draw on: modular frames, generous glass, wood as the soft finish. The comparison suggests stalls that read as small buildings rather than temporary tents, which reinforces the market-as-city reading that runs through the whole proposal.

Why This Project Matters

Rapid urbanisation is usually told through numbers and skylines. PEEL B tells it through a public building that people use every day. By folding the story of Thu Thiem into a market, a place of ordinary exchange, the project makes a district's transformation something residents can walk across, shop inside and sit in the shade of, rather than a history recorded somewhere else.

Its broader lesson is about restraint in concept. One gesture, the peeling of the ground, organises the landform, the stall typology and the street pattern, and each element returns to the same contrast between calm green and lively city. Projects that try to carry heavy meaning often lose that coherence. This one holds it, and it turns a market into a monument without asking the market to stop working.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: Katherine Herrera

Location

Chicago

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