Schulze Baking Co.

Reclaiming Schulze Baking Co.

M.Arch Advanced Studio VI
Columbia University, GSAPP
New York
Spring 2021

Section Critic
Ife Vanable + Amanda Williams

A historic bread factory built in 1914 Southside of Chicago, The Schulze Baking Company Factory is currently destined to be renovated and retrofitted with a data center that houses countless server racks which serves a commercial tenant. As a response to this condition, the project is an architectural negotiation of ownership and access to the building, which confronts the exploitative nature of the development. With a counter-exploitative approach to capital development, the project’s goal is to trouble and disassemble the established condition and restore the community rather than the objective architecture.

Negotiation Through Envelope Thickness

The clay tile block and face brick envelope is a historically specific material with cavities that allows the design to play with the porosity of the facade. A parametrically generated pattern was designed to suggest a non-uniform texture and opacity of a new envelope built by the community.

Using this language, I propose a phased negotiation between the community and the data center to reconstruct and reclaim the building’s envelope. Varying in scale, the negotiation ranges from one corner to a half section of the building. The reclamation can also thicken inward to the data center and outward to the surrounding of the building.

Architectural State As Reflection of Neighborhood State

As a mixed-use data center and community learning center, the building needs to serve the immediate surroundings as much as the far away entities detached from the site. Who this building serves will determine and reflect the state of the community. As of now, the state of the building is reflecting the empty lots scattered throughout the Washington Park neighborhood.

If we look at how a typical low occupancy data center would occupy the building, what does it say about the neighborhood’s future?