Franky Larousselle

RE:MEAT . "Cattle site factory" . Sint-Truiden

Franky Larousselle

Belgium, Sint Truiden: 'Cattle site', a cultural peripheric terrain, where vegetable gardens from habitants in 1960 took place for a livestock fair which closed in 2010. The cattle site is an empty void that acts as an in-between for the compact city and Haspengouw's idyllic landscape.

Moral distance between man and food is growing.
Meat production companies are meaninglessly kept from society in industrial patchworks. Once inside these companies there is a mini-universe of local workers taking care of craft processes. On a small scale, without being pretentious.
There’s a big risk in over-dimensioning. In Asia, our consumption based society is starting to feel its own limits. Anti-social and anti-sensorial working conditions are shaping the future of a capitalistic mania. Think about the illustrations of Edward Burtynsky. Trying to integrate these activities back in an urban environment, means merging architecture and social issues in a contemporary society The site ‘cattle’, on the periphery in Sint-Truiden, once a place of vegetable gardens and livestock fair, is characterized by a garden wall. A human intervention, which serves as a physical boundary. A duplication of the garden wall creates a mini-universe as an inbetween. An occasional break in these walls allows spaces to communicate. A meat processing company lies in this mini-universe, enclosed by public facilities, including corporate eating facilities and a research center. The autonomous character fades as wallopenings appears. The reorganization of the production is grafted onto six paternosterlifts that are used for meat maturing in refrigerators. A minor intervention that reduces land use and avoids sisyphean tasks for local workers. It physically links meat trough condensed windows.Eleven caps, by analogy ‘smoked’ to shou-sugi-ban, form an archetypal image above the garden wall.
A new sobriety.
Scaling is the first form of contemplation. Architecture needs a new sobriety. Distillation of beauty and emotion of what has already been given. The basic drawings are therefore the starting point of a spatial and sensorial quest. Materiality, patina and formal typology linked to memories.