AIA Oculus recently featured City Harvest's Cohen Community Food Center in an article about how the 150,000-square-foot headquarters reinvents the historic building as a daylight-flooded and sustainably minded workplace and brings together City Harvest’s operations under one roof.
"The new building has significantly more storage than the old facility, points out City Harvest CEO Jilly Stephens. Its 64,000 square feet of warehouse on the ground floor includes dry-goods storage, a dedicated freezer, and three flex areas that can convert from cold rooms to freezers as needed. The spaces are raw—with poured concrete floors and exposed structure and mechanicals—and are animated by workers moving pallets stacked high with onions, oranges, and other produce. The second-floor offices occupy one of the cathedral-like interiors. Here, to give everyone access to daylight, Ennead pulled enclosed offices away from the perimeter, housing them in two bars with ribbed glass that run along-side the nave-like central area with its open workstations. An adjacent soaring space serves volunteers who repackage food for distribution. Throughout, the team employed low- or no-VOC finishes. Bold graphics and a rich collection of works by local artists provide bursts of drama against the rough interiors."
Read the full article here.