“Hope & Main began with one woman, Lisa Raiola. A cancer survivor, she found that nutrition was one of the key elements to her recovery and that our diets are full of a lot of unhealthy substances,” recalls Greg Spiess, principal at Greg Spiess AIA Architecture, Barrington, R.I. “She was really into nutrition and looking for a building to make into a nutrition center. What she came across was an old school the town had decommissioned. One thing led to another, and she was able to get a grant to convert it.”
Much of the project funding came from a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C.; to make the project feasible, the town had to basically sell the school property to the USDA. An action like this required the consent of the town’s citizens, so a referendum was called.
“Like a lot of towns, this one is split politically,” Spiess says. “The vote was during a huge rainstorm. The town can barely get enough people to show up to approve its budget each year but, for this vote, the polling place overflowed to a point where they had to relocate to a local middle school. It turned out to be a big community event, and the project received something like 94 percent approval. What that says is that local food crosses all kinds of socioeconomic and political lines. We found that people diametrically opposed to anything the other guy says all voted the same way on this.”
With the town’s consent and funding in place, the project could move forward. The school building needed some work, like being brought up to speed with modern ADA requirements, but it was well-suited to providing the community with a gathering place for nutritional education, as well as a place where local food-based businesses could develop and grow.
“It’s a three-level school with a daylit basement level and two classroom levels,” Spiess explains. “We wanted to have a public floor and kitchen floor. The historic-restoration people wanted us to keep one floor as much like the old schoolhouse as possible, so we made the first floor the public floor. It is focused on education and hosts cooking classes and other educational and community events. We put the kitchen on the second floor because a kitchen needs a lot of rooftop equipment, so it made sense to put it closer to the roof. The basement level is used for dry storage.”
The kitchen level is rented out to local farmers, startups and food entrepreneurs. Businesses who use the kitchen are required to develop business plans; part of the educational element of Hope & Main is training to help develop good business practices in aspiring local food producers. “It’s mostly startup businesses, like people making salsa, cupcakes, artisan breads and things like that. There are three kitchens,” Spiess says. “One is a big multipurpose kitchen that caterers and food trucks can use. One of the kitchens has more of a baker focus.”
The third kitchen is a gluten-free cooking space, which needs to operate a little differently than a standard kitchen. “It is positively pressurized,” Spiess explains. “Most kitchens are designed around exhaust with fumes and smoke being sucked out. The gluten-free kitchen still has exhaust but the overall pressure is positive, so when the door opens, it actually blows out whatever would come in. It won’t be sucking in gluten flour from the kitchen next door if the door was open.”
The success of Hope & Main is a reflection on the desire and need for local food resources, and the group’s focus on education is an homage to its building’s original use. “The logo has a plate with an open book on it,” Spiess says. “The idea was all about education and food and how to make food a business, as well as a healthy thing.”
Local Food Near You
All around the country, many innovative designers, business leaders and nonprofits are finding creative ways to remake and utilize space for food production. In Chicago, a project called The Plant has remade an old industrial meatpacking plant into a net-zero energy food business incubator with indoor demonstration farms and education facilities. Cities and towns all around the country are seeing similar programs come to life.
While exterior rooftops and walls may be most commonly thought of for building-integrated agriculture, there are even possibilities to be found in the basement. “A project our office is looking at may include mushroom farming in the lower basement of an office building in New York City,” says Claire Weisz, founding principal at WXY Architecture + Urban Design, New York. “Urban farming doesn’t necessarily have to be green and outdoors. There are also things that need darker spaces to live.”
As acceptance of and demand for integrating food production with population centers grows, possibilities abound. But designers and policymakers will need to find new ways to make it happen. “We need policies relative to the building to encourage productive use of leftover space with buildings,” Weisz says. “We should encourage productive landscapes coming back to cities.”
PHOTOS: Greg Spiess AIA Architecture