U of A Community Design Center's Hawaii Project Shortlisted for 2019 World Architecture Festival

Rendering courtesy of U of A Community Design Center

The Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center in Wahiawa, Hawaii, has been shortlisted in the 2019 World Architecture Festival awards program.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A project of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and its partners has been shortlisted in the 2019 World Architecture Festival awards program.

The Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center in Wahiawa, Hawaii, is one of 16 projects listed for consideration in the Future Projects-Education category. The Community Design Center created the project with the U of A Resiliency Center and Urban Works Inc., an architectural firm in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The Community Design Center and the Resiliency Center are outreach programs of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the U of A.

The shortlisted project repurposes an existing metal warehouse in downtown Wahiawa as a value-added product development center or food maker space for the state community college system.

"Value-added" is a business term referring to any process that enhances the services or features delivered by a raw material. Examples from the USDA include turning fruit into jam, processing food organically or shipping food in a way that enhances its value for producers.

The development center will support postsecondary education in the incubation, marketing and commercialization of value-added food products from the creative reuse of local agricultural waste streams. Production processes will include baking, juicing, fermentation/pickling, distillation for alcoholic beverages, development of food-grade cosmetics and packaging.

"This new maker space for students entails parallel development of a curriculum that combines food science and design," said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. "The goal is to commercialize production processes and knowledge transfers in the creation of new markets through applied learning and design."

Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies in the Fay Jones School.

The center is part of an island-wide portfolio of cooperative food hubs and facilities being developed by the Hawaii Department of Agriculture to support the development of local food supply chains. Hawaii imports more than 93 percent of its food despite being the most remote occupied landmass on Earth, Luoni said.

The development center repurposes a windowless warehouse space into a vertically integrated food maker space that highlights the role of production. There is also gallery space for public exhibition and tasting of final products on Wahiawa's main street.

Designers carved courtyards into the big box, introducing natural light and landscape spaces. The design also re-clads the downtown building with new public frontages and roof monitors.

The development center is a joint venture of the Hawaii Department of Agriculture/Agribusiness Development Corporation and the University of Hawaii Community Colleges system.

The project will be presented before an international jury at the World Architecture Festival in Amsterdam in December. Some 534 shortlisted projects from 70 countries will be featured in 33 design categories.

The World Architecture Festival is a leading global design awards program in architecture, urban design and landscape architecture. Previous Community Design Center projects shortlisted at the annual festival include the Whitmore Community Food Hub Complex, Greers Ferry Water Garden, the Little Rock Creative Corridor and Fayetteville 2030: Transit City Scenario Plan.