The Meat Market: A Vertical Cultured Meat Factory Fused With a Public Market Hall for Detroit

Most proposals for the future of food hide production behind closed doors. The Meat Market does the opposite: it puts the bioreactor on display and sets the public market directly beside it. Cultured meat production, vertical algae farms and a civic market hall share one building. The factory stops being a back-of-house facility and becomes the main attraction, and the city gets a public room organised around how its food is made.

Designed by Barbara Schickermueller, the project was named a Winner of UnIATA '19. Its pilot site is Detroit's historic Highland Park Ford Plant, a place defined by industrial production. Schickermueller treats that legacy as a starting point. Her vertical assembly line answers two problems at once: the environmental cost of conventional meat, and the economic and food-access gaps in a city still working through its revival.

A Market Hall Staged Between Steel Tanks

The opening render sums up the project's argument. A stepped circular amphitheatre sits in the foreground of a tiled hall. Polished steel tanks and piping rise on either side, and daylight falls in from far above. This is the public square the brief calls for, built at the foot of the production machinery rather than set apart from it. People sit, gather and trade within sight of the bioreactors that grow the meat sold around them.

The spatial choice matters because the thesis is about the gap between production and consumption. A market at street level could have delivered fresh food. Placing the amphitheatre inside the plant also delivers understanding. The white tiles read as hygienic and familiar, almost like a butcher's counter or an old market arcade. That familiarity helps make an unfamiliar technology feel approachable.

Towers as Machines, Streets as Pipework

The physical model, shown in black, white and chrome under violet light, presents the scheme as a dense cluster of towers on a thin-legged table. In the model, the building reads less as one object than as a small industrial skyline. The detail shots point to an intricacy that hints at the tank-and-pipe interiors. The companion render then puts us inside, on a narrow tiled street running between steel tanks and curved pipes. Small figures move along railed walkways overhead.

This interior street is the project's most persuasive moment. Schickermueller does not separate visitors from the process with glass partitions. Circulation threads directly through the infrastructure, so the pipes become the architecture of the street and the walkways become balconies onto production. The design draws on both industrial and organic geometries, and here the curving pipework softens the rigid order of the tanks.

Learning From the Water Tower

The precedent panel pairs black and white photographs of concrete water towers with a vertical tower elevation and a labelled diagram of stacked programme levels. The water tower is a sharp reference: a purely functional vertical vessel that became a recognisable piece of the landscape. Schickermueller adopts that type and loads it with a full production chain. Vertical farms for algae, bioreactors for cultured meat and the market halls are stacked into a single section.

This stacking is the vertical assembly line at the core of the thesis. Conventional meat production depends on vast areas of land, water and energy. The project folds the process upward instead, which saves space, cuts waste and keeps production inside the city. The diagram makes clear that the vertical move is not formal ambition for its own sake. The building's height is the production logic itself.

Engineering for the Weight of the Tanks

Two rows of axonometric diagrams trace gravity, horizontal, snow, tank and wind loads in pink and red lines on grey. Conceptual competition entries rarely go this far, and its presence here is telling. The tank load gets its own study, an acknowledgement that a vertical bioreactor plant carries heavy, liquid-filled vessels at height. Snow load is a reminder that the scheme is designed for Detroit's winters, not for an abstract site.

By showing how forces move through the frame, the diagrams turn a speculative food hub into a plausible structure. They also explain the clarity of the column grid, which has to carry both the tanks and the public spaces beneath them without disrupting either.

A Repeatable Bay for a City-Wide Network

The longitudinal section at 1:500 shows seven repeated tower bays rising above a stepped base, set out on red column grid lines. The repetition is deliberate. The masterplan calls for a modular system that starts at Highland Park and then spreads across Detroit, targeting food deserts and supporting economic recovery. Each bay is a unit that could be added, removed or rebuilt elsewhere, and the section reads almost like a catalogue entry for that future network.

The cross section of the twin towers adds the logistical layer. Red service lines run vertically through the structure, floors step down toward the public base, and a basement level holds trucks parked below ground. Distribution is buried beneath the city while the market and squares stay at grade. That separation keeps the public realm free of loading docks while the working plant keeps moving overhead and underneath.

Why This Project Matters

Many proposals about food and climate stay at the level of diagrams and statistics. The Meat Market converts a technical argument into civic architecture. Schickermueller frames her project as part of a fourth agricultural revolution that rejects high yield at any cost. She gives that idea a physical form people can walk through, sit inside and buy from. Production stops being an abstraction and becomes something residents encounter every day.

Just as important is the choice of site. Placing the pilot at the Highland Park Ford Plant, and designing it as a modular system ready to replicate across the city's food deserts, positions architecture as economic infrastructure rather than isolated spectacle. The scheme proposes that the next chapter of Detroit's industrial story could grow from the sites where the last one began.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Barbara Schickermueller

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Project credits: The Meat Market by Barbara Schickermueller UnIATA '19 (uni.xyz).