Paistage
Growing Food Infrastructure from the Ground Up
A foodscaping pavilion designed for Middletown, Ohio that turns a former school site into a foundation for community food resilience.
Sustainability
Paistage is a foodscaping pavilion designed for Middletown, Ohio, a city documented as a food desert with limited access to fresh produce and no established infrastructure for local food production. The proposed site is the former Vail Middle School, already identified by the city as a location for community health and wellness programming. The pavilion provides physical scaffolding for food processing and distribution, with integrated trellises supporting vine-bearing vegetables, a materials palette sourced from Building Value, a Cincinnati-based salvage and reuse supplier, and a spatial program designed to serve both practical food production and community education.
Middletown, Ohio presented a specific and urgent opportunity: a city with a documented food desert, a vacant school site, and a community actively seeking solutions. The design challenge was to address not just the immediate need for food access, but the longer-term need for food literacy and community self-sufficiency.
The design deliberately avoids the cost and waste of new construction materials by specifying salvaged materials from Building Value throughout. The program combines a processing and distribution area with an education space, so the pavilion teaches the community how to use what it grows.
The Paistage proposal was presented to Middletown City Council and to the Urban Farming Initiative team working to bring sustainable food systems to the area. The response was enthusiastic, with council members noting the proposal felt not only thought-provoking but genuinely implementable within the planned health and wellness center at the Vail site.
Read the full lookbook.
