Aardkt

This contribution is part of Supermarket, a collective project on the spatial implications of the food industry in the Netherlands and beyond, redesigning the now considered essential architecture of a supermarket.

Aardkt is a wholesale market that reintroduces the face-to-face interaction within the trading process, catalyzing a paradigm shift in the Dutch potato production mode quantitatively and qualitatively. Dispersing risk in market oligopoly and compensate the economic power of more minor market applicants against more significant ones, a pricing mechanism taking the physical form of the open-outcry descending-price auction enables supply and demand to influence each other. An irregular matrix of partitions reflective of the increasingly dynamic potato supply divides the showroom on the ground floor, displaying sample potatoes in anticipation. Above, with the presence of commodities brought up by hydraulic elevators, five auction pits eliminate the possibility of speculation and secure the immediacy of fresh produce trading. Besides items, information flow produced during the trading process is published in real-time on the quotation boards to build trust among buyers and sellers.