Newcastle Abattoir + Beef Market
Conceived as a way to rejuvenate the slaughterhouse as a conscious, ritualistic social intervention, the Newcastle Abattoir and Beef Market aims to realign the processes of slaughter with notions of sacrifice and ceremony.
Up until the late Nineteenth-Century, sacrifice and consumption were inseparable. Today, as society continues to obsess over hygiene and censorship, this connection has been lost.
In response to this cultural ignorance, the configuration of the abattoir was dismantled then assembled, reintroducing the abattoir to the urban fabric, creating the possibility for society to experience the full scale of human emotion. Not merely experiencing the beautiful but embracing the abrasion of the ugly.
Jury Comment
The jury admires this project for its provocative intervention into the social and built fabric of a city. Deliberately abstract in content, and located somewhere between the excesses of the slaughter, and the overwhelming despair in the architecture for dying, the abattoir design forces the city to face the by-products of its consumerism. The communication of the project is reminiscent of the work of Italian Rationalists who used typology as social commentary, and French Enlightenment architects such as Boullee and Ledoux, who used monumentality to induce awe towards social change. While it was a little difficult to follow the functional planning and circulation, the use of traditional hand rendering, seductive diagramming and a sublime timber model elicited in the jury a convincing affectual or emotional response, leading to productive debates on the politics of human-animal-land(scape) relationships.
