The Baxter Street Community Pantry is the front door to our office; the first thing a passerby sees when approaching our practice. It is for this reason we chose to create a community pantry; a desire for our front door to express our practice values of ‘We listen, We care, We share’. In the current social and economic climate, anyone listening to their community would know that people are struggling. Our community is not exempt. Located in Fortitude Valley, we have seen the impact of the housing crisis on our unhoused friends. The pantry is a small gesture of care for our community. At initiation, we identified a few simple parameters; it must be small enough to avoid regulatory processes, large enough to catch the eye, sustainable, accessible, functional, and beautiful. All these aspirations led us to our concept of doing more with less. We only needed 4 elements to create a functional pantry:
- A pest proof vessel
- Something to lift the vessel off the ground
- A frame to shelter the vessel
- A façade to shade and weatherproof the vessel, and communicate its use
We committed to using recycled materials where possible, starting with an old metal cabinet headed for landfill: the vessel. The architectural language quickly developed, an angled roof to shed water and shade the vessel during hot summers, supported by a frame that we knew could be easily built from common salvaged timber members. We chose to raise the vessel using 4 extruded concrete blocks. This allowed us to retain as much of the surrounding garden as possible (no need to clear a space for a slab to be poured) and maintain a totally permeable ground plane. The cladding was gifted from our friends at Five Mile Radius. While each element has been thought out in detail, together, the built outcome is reminiscent of a simple shed or rural letterbox. This is not unintentional. The pantry’s function is to serve our community and do so in the most welcoming and accessible way possible, using familiar forms and materials with warm, hand-painted signage, and an almost ‘cute’ scale.
Since its construction, the pantry has supplied approximately 350kg of food and hygiene products to our community. Over the summer of 2024, we conducted an industry-wide campaign to ensure the pantry was stocked over the holiday season. We were blown away by over 250kg of donations from fellow architecture practices. It is this development of community care and collaboration that we believe separates this project from others. From design to construction and operation, the pantry has been driven by community collaboration. This project was built for $260 and continues to supply groceries each week because we developed relationships with the generous people at Five Mile Radius, because our staff volunteered their time to construct it, and our family, friends, neighbours and anonymous community members continue to donate. The Baxter Street Community Pantry is fuelled by community, for community.
- Location
Fortitude Valley
- Year
2025
