5. A Market Hall + Greenhouse:
Barnes’ Barnes In the Grid of Des Moines
WP / 2023From A Market Hall + Greenhouse: Barnes’ Barns in the Grid of Des Moines
Cheese, meats, fresh produce, fish markets & more. The Des Moines, Iowa Market Hall shelters a cornucopia of delights. Neon signs illuminate the vibrant space, casting a lively glow on displays of fresh vegetables and the bustling fisherman’s counter. The concrete floors bear the history of countless seafood shipments, adding to the dynamic atmosphere. Aromatic scents of freshly baked bread waft through the air, complemented by subtle notes of coffee. The market’s architecture becomes an integral part of this enthralling drama, contributing to the overall allure of this bustling hub.
The adjacent greenhouse, seamlessly integrated into the market hall experience, nurtures the growth and production of fruits, vegetables, and herbs that find their way into the stalls, breathing life into the vibrant ingredients of the market hall. It’s a celebration of freshness, agriculture, and sustainability, adding another layer of enchantment to this unique culinary experience.
This 80,000-square-foot unique market hall and greenhouse offers a farm-to-table experience against the backdrop of a sawtooth roof design. Equipped with aluminum sheds for paneling, glass, and temperature controls, the design allows ample natural light and ventilation, ensuring a community-oriented and multicultural environment.
1/16“ = 1’-0” Model. A Market Hall is a cornucopia of delights.
The expansive views of the surrounding landscape envelop The Des Moines Market Hall and greenhouse, nestled within the sweeping prairie grass plains, adding cultural significance to Iowa. On the east side of the building, Prairie Park captures the undulating sea of grass these prairies impart, creating a distinctive aesthetic beauty and offering a serene and picturesque landscape. Architectural collages, influenced by Mies van der Rohe, choreograph the transformation of these vistas, subtly referencing the interplay between the view, the windows, and the natural landscape.
The collaboration of this industrious market hall and greenhouse functions to support a hollistic approach of food production, distribution, and community engagement. At the same time of encouraging sustainability, freshness and an enhanced atmosphere.
Locally grown and sourced food contribute to environmental conservation efforts. While the presence of greenery from the greenhouse to the prarie grasses enhances the overall ambience to the market hall.
Gone are the barriers that once separated the observation of labor and consumption; making a shift towards greater respect and acknowledgement of the entire process. The project in its entirety is a combination of architecture, landscape, and a harmonious integration of nature and commerce— a testament to the interconnectedness of sustainable living and community well-being.
From Farm-to-Table.
Market Hall Interior. 
This studio will explore the typology of the industrial shed – a 60,000 square foot building – d eveloped from a kit-of-parts assembly to accommodate adaptable agricultural uses combined with multifunctional community spaces. Individual buildings will collectively form a mixed-use urban farming precinct in Des Moines Iowa, a small city in the heartland of America. Situated between the scales and uses of regional industrial agriculture and the bottom-up urbanism of local farmers markets, the building will unite educational spaces with small-scale farming operations. Following the tradition of visionary planning in Des Moines, the projects will frame a functional new urban region within the city, while cultivating an expanded civic realm in buildings and open spaces that contribute to the city’s ongoing evolution.
In 1990, Mario Gandelsonas presented the Des Moines Vision Plan. This elastic and evolving plan for the transformation of Des Moines continues to guide urban decisions more than thirty years later. The Vision Plan includes some projects that have been executed and others that have not yet been realized. One of these projects was The Farming Corridor, which took shape in 2015 as an extension of the Downtown Farmer’s Market. Our studio will explore the foundational tenets of this plan programmatically and urbanistically, as a prelude to the dev
elopment of individual studio projects that together will form a collective precinct: a mixed-use agricultural corridor integrating farming as an extension of informal local markets in combination with educational spaces, all connected by shared green pathways and open space along a rail corridor on the south side of the urban core.
Each building will encompass a range of climatic environments, diverse envelope conditions, and temporal use scenarios, in relation to program criteria. Students will develop their project at three scales: from the urban, to the architectural, to the detail. We will develop a considered framework and evaluative metrics, including social utilization, embodied carbon, architectural quality, etc., which will form the basis of collective planning strategies to be implemented by each student in their individual project.
Structural Systems + Construction Methods
