The project site, located at Lock E17 in Little Falls, New York, encouraged students to explore the themes of water flow and containment, and the integration of non-human occupants. Given the Erie Canal’s historical role in transporting agricultural products such as wheat and corn, the studio brief called for the design of a granary hybridized with a bakery to facilitate a connection to the public. The non-human occupant for this studio was conceptualized as wheat and other commonly farmed crops.

Granaries, as ubiquitous agrarian typologies, were studied to examine dichotomies such as nature vs. architecture, the raw vs. the synthetic, and functionalism vs. inefficiency. Students investigated informal geometric relationships that referenced found granaries and how residual spaces emerge through stacking, peeling, shifting, leaning, and intersecting simple forms.