On June 18th and 19th, The Stop Community Food Centre will be hosting their second annual Stop Night Market in the Honest Ed’s alleyway in Toronto, inviting over 50 Toronto chefs as well as showcasing the food cart designs of Waterloo Architecture students and alumni.
A call for proposals back in February got the juices flowing, and local designers submitted one-panel proposals for this year’s food carts. 36 designs were chosen, 16 of which belonged to teams made up of at least one UWSA student/alumni.
Designers pay for all expenses associated with the design and production of their cart and are required to transport it to the site and remove it after the event is over; this is their contribution to the charitable event.
The Lift Office
The past few weeks have been super exciting for UWSA’s Rich D’Alessandro and his team The Lift Office, who are designing a cart in this year’s Stop Night Market. Rich, along with Borys Chylinkski, Susan Varickanickal, Kathleen Mussolum, Heather Modesto, and John Jardine, has been hosting regular design charrettes and team meetings over Skype. The group gathered in Cambridge last weekend to test the Cousteau Cart, which just happens to be a 30ft-tall propane-powered hot air balloon.
Every part of the cart is custom designed and assembled by The Lift Office. The team was able to take advantage of the numerous resources available in Cambridge’s industrial community for the assembly of the propane engine and table top, but the balloon—the only pre-fabricated piece—had to be ordered in from Texas.
The cart will serve local and delicious food prepared by The Stop Community Food Centre. Rather than creating something that will “hold up”, The Lift Office designed and created a cart that requires some “holding down”; sandbags will attach to the table top to keep it from flying away.
The cart really lives up to the group’s name; it will be lifting off (but not flying away) tonight at the Stop’s Night Market!
Design Proposal (by Lift Office)
The Cousteau Cart is inspired by none other than the celebrated explorer and innovator himself. He was a certain master of spectacle that combined the mysteriousness of the wild with the wonders of cutting edge technology. This design for an outdoor food cart imagines a summer’s evening spectacle of the very same kind – one combining the grace of wilderness’ bounty with the intensity of food preparation; using basic sustenance and amazing apparatuses to create a social feast to satiate all five senses. We think the spirit of the man is bespoke the same pioneering spirit of The Stop and their great Night Market event. Introducing the hot-air-food-balloon: essentially, a propane-powered, levitating food cart!
The design is comprised of a hot-air balloon, sized and constructed appropriately to carry the weight of a 3’ by 6’ worktop, food, and serving-wares. The balloon will be stitched from ‘second quality’ (recycled/reclaimed) silicone fabric. The worktop will be a rigid, reclaimed wood or wicker surface or another equivalent material. The balloon will have a small propane burner that can be regulated as required or fired manually for a blast of light and sound. The whole assembly will be held together and anchored with ropes and metal rigging as needed to provide a structure that’s stable and in constant tension. Signage will be placed, as a surface treatment on the balloon, at ‘canopy height’ (just above six feet high) and backlit by the propane burner. Signage may also be placed on other areas of the balloon. Despite its size when erected, the entire assembly is collapsible down to a few small components (bundled rigging, compact balloon bag and worktop) that make it easy to transport and store.
We are optimistic about our plans but, as always, we have designed contingencies to provide some flexibility in the unlikely event that we encounter insurmountable obstacles or restrictions. Some examples of these contingencies are as follows. The hot-air balloon can be substituted for a helium balloon, in the event that a propane burner is either ineffective or not permitted. The ropes that secure the assembly to the ground can be treated with glue and hardened to support the weight of the worktop, food, and serving-wares independently, in the event that the balloon cannot provide enough lift. Alternatively, these can be substituted for a more conventional cart structure and worktop, aesthetically resembling a traditional hot-air balloon basket or similar.
Project Description
Instead of holding all of the food up, the structure of our food cart is preventing it from flying away! What a fantastic inversion – a trick on the principles of basic necessity.
We had in fact, for reasons I won’t labor over, set out from the very start to design and build a food cart that was cheap and easy, themes that were supposed to underline the development of the project however else it should evolve. As you may suspect, that is not what happened. While thumbing around with ideas – all practicality, sensibility and recyclability – we were inspired by an unapologetic exhibition of the opposite kind. Watching and re-watching the escapades of Jacques Cousteau, whose images are both gratuitous and beautiful, we were struck by a brilliant notion. First slated as an expedition in the name of science, Jacque Cousteau’s work would ultimately come to be received and celebrated as a fantastic underwater fiction. How great would it be if we could do the same?
In the end, whether it is successful or not, the moral of this project is a lesson in the discovery of things, passions and impulses that trump reason and dwarf ideas in the mind and imagination. We have awakened in ourselves an endearing sensibility for architecture and the things we make, where the stuff of dreams erupts from the hearts and hands of designers, shattering well-laid plans and the bottom line, and sometimes, even common sense.
The mystique of the hot air balloon trumps the physical feat of the aerostat. Despite the breadth of our civilization’s collective common knowledge, and the fact that the physics of the aerostat are well known, the weightlifting power of the hot air balloon still remains an amazing thing to see. The rational mind can handle the fundamental principle but, beholding it, the imagination still gets taken up and carried away.
It’s a bit like when you’re driving near an airport and you see a commercial airliner coming in to land or in the midst of taking off. You know from physics lessons that the only thing keeping thousands of pounds of aircraft and people in the air is basically speed, and little else. But to see first hand how truly slow those hulks seem to ascend and descend, to and from the sky, is an absolute spectacle – the rational mind gives up and what you have then is a feast for the imagination.
But this project isn’t all as pointless and unfounded as that sounds. Imagination is important; it seeds every human will and aspiration, and thus preempts every human action as well. It is the only thing between us and utter boredom, fear, and emotional, social and spiritual poverty. Imagination propels us into fantasies that give us levity, excitement, joy, happiness, peace, and relief from anything that isn’t. This project is about wonder, and the effect on people when they are incited to wonder. People will queue under the loom of a massive balloon and the boom of a one million BTU burner, but will they really realize what’s happening? What thoughts will spark when, at the front of the line, they are suddenly faced with the sight of floating food?
A critic of the project might say that what we have done, at great effort and expense, is simply a stunt. They wouldn’t be wrong in one sense, but to implicate it negatively is impossible. Stunts are the stuff of dreams too, and fantasy made real; they are amazing and they launch people into new and exciting worlds. Is it any mystery that the one and only dream factory – Hollywood – employs so many thrills and gimmicks? We believe that this project supports a cause as good as any other; after all, the world needs stunts and stuntmen. A person’s life may be as heavy as the next, but they will feel as light as ever if their fantasies are buoyant enough to deliver them from the depths. To see a fantasy play out in front of you, or to see something so incredible that it makes anything seem possible is, for us, a very worthwhile pursuit.
Leave a Reply