Bringing the Farm to the Table: Reinventing the Slaughterhouse for Seattle

Abstract

This thesis posits a new prototype for the slaughterhouse, a model that houses the utilitarian functions of slaughtering and processing and reveals those functions to the community by providing informal and formal education. At the city scale, a distributed network of small facilities creates a new model for local meat production. Three neighborhoods are proposed as test cases for this prototype: Maple Leaf, Wallingford, and Central Seattle. These facilities are integrated into their communities through a relationship to the street and by altering the program and massing to suit the character of the neighborhood. While all of the processes of the facility are transparent to the community, framing, screening and thresholds help to make the processes understandable to an observer. Anchoring the building in the community presents a new model for the slaughterhouse: not a remote meat producing machine, but a community asset and node for local meat.