The Bake and Build: Feeding the BeltLine and the Community Entrepreneurship

The “Bake & Build” Project is an employment and training center located in the English Avenue neighborhood on the Westside of Atlanta. Nestled within a historically Black neighborhood of Atlanta, the emerging Atlanta Beltline has stirred up much interest and attention from various developers and real estate professionals. As gentrification and changing city demographics will most likely change the westside’s future configuration, legacy residents who have nurtured that community for decades still have opportunities to nurture their roots and grow their legacy within the community. As a revenue source, the “Bake & Build” will feature a café adjacent to the beltline, but on the neighborhood side, an entire ecosystem will emerge. Apprentices within the bakery and fabrication will feed each other through food and energy. Their respective trades will bring in income that will be reinvested in their schools and businesses as well as the legacy residents.

THE CONTEXT: Within the triangular block of Echo ad . Within a two-block radius there are three churches, a dollar store, a convenience store, a strip club, and eleven bus stops. It will soon be adjacent to a multi-use complex called Echo Commons launched by a Dallas-based development company alongside the west section of the

in English Avenue

Atlanta Beltline. As gentrification is very plausible in that area, a site of “permanent culture” is appropriate to honor the legacy residents of the westside neighborhoods and their lasting and evolving contribution to their community.

THE PROGRAM: Rather than building a traditional community center, the vision of the space is to create a multi-faceted machine of employment, education, and political organizing. The original 1910 building in the 1920s had two side wings built on either side of the structure. The idea of “Bake and Build,” is to designate those two wings to two different, but interconnecting purposes. The north being a culinary school and small business bakery and the south end being a fabrication lab and training center on concrete and solar energy. Connecting these two wings is a grand hall. Reminiscent of a Kehinde Wiley painting, depicting heroic portraits in contemporary culture, this hall of renaissance will be the bud of the ballots, books, and bucks tenants of this program. Offices offering research, political, and financial literacy will unite the workers on either end of the building that create, knead, and nurture the existence of this collective space.