architectural research
architectural research
The New Market
Ingredients: innocent tourists and experienced gluttons, pale potatoes and fresh coriander, tame pigeons and live squid, raunchy market stalls and exclusive restaurants.
Maurice Nio is an architect, hyperresearcher and author. He is currently working on the most beautiful shopping mall in the world as well as the most derelict houseboat. Nio describes his way of working as a mix of mythological and pragmatic thinking processes, and as a cryptic but at the same time superbly clear design strategy.
With the architect Joan Almekinders, Nio published the book Eat This! in 2006. It was a response to European rules issued in 1995 stating that sanitary conditions at outdoor markets had to improve significantly within ten years. Nio and Almekinders were concerned that this would mean the end of classic food markets and deterioration in food culture. “Food moves people,” they explain in the introduction to their book; “nothing other than food can generate such delicious public experiences.” Such experiences lead to an enrichment of public territory and create exchanges without which any civilization would become extinct.
Therefore Nio architecten came up with the Fire Emperor, a new holding of markets that has taken the shape of a building. The pivot of public life, no-one can escape from this voracious building that day and night devours anything that comes near: innocent tourists and experienced gluttons, pale potatoes and fresh coriander, tame pigeons and live squid, raunchy market stalls and exclusive restaurants, worn-out musicians and erotic services, the rotten smell of durians and the faded perfumes of waitresses. This is where the city boils and where people travel along on the vapours of exotic dishes.
It is the new non-stop market hall that houses in the Fire Emperor. No transparent airy hall on the inside, but one big, inimitable devouring machine, a hedonic tangle of spaces inspired on intestines.
The dazzling diversity of the food on offer is reflected in the festive spirit of the interior design. It is as if the market hall itself has been fattened with interiors that have all nationalities and styles.
Every big city deserves a Fire Emperor and every big outside market should go together with a Fire Emperor. The 'covered market' and the 'outside market' are not opposites fighting for the same bone, instead they are a couple that feeds itself upon flows of food and consumers – making its surroundings brew again.
