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We Designed A Human-Powered Bakery

London based designers Studio MICAT have designed an outdoor gym that makes bread, using human power to process the grain, knead dough, and fuel a wood-fired oven.

Their competition-winning vision was realised in August 2018 at Beam Camp in New Hampshire, USA by a group of 80 11-17 year olds. Over the course of three weeks, and facilitated by a dedicated team of staff, they learned how to lay bricks, cast concrete, char timber planks using the Japanese technique of shou sugi ban, weld, use power tools and make sourdough bread.

We take our daily bread for granted. We – especially in the West – have become increasingly distanced from the physical effort required to get food on the table. Eating is all too easy and our sedentary society is therefore encouraged to ‘compensate’ by expending energy on highly specialised exercise equipment in expensive gyms. The project, titled Brawn & Bread, gently highlights the irony of this energy disconnect. It relinks effort and reward, requiring a whole body workout of its users and in so doing provides the sustenance to refuel afterwards.

The structure was built primarily from brickwork, cast concrete, charred timber boards and steel. The pared-back palette of materials reflects the simplicity of ingredients used in bread – flour, water and salt.

The structure is designed to make a performance of the processes that go into producing a loaf of bread. A cable winch is used to haul a wheeled carriage loaded with grain sacks to the top of a steel frame. The grain is loaded by hand into a hopper which feeds two pedal powered grain mills. The resulting flour is then fed, by way of custom 3D printed parts, to glass jars where it is collected and added to a sourdough starter. The dough is prepared, kneaded, proved, shaped and finally baked in an oven fuelled with hand-split wood. A retractable canopy shelters the young bakers from the vagaries of the weather.

Brawn & Bread will remain a permanent installation at Beam Camp and will provide daily bread for up to 150 campers and staff members. The bread gym is a small but salutary reminder of the effort required to produce this daily essential, and will hopefully inspire a more respectful attitude towards the humble loaf.

More info: micat.org