Mon-Marché, Paris - "A Machine for Living"

Sydney based, Global design studio Landini Associates collaborated with Mon-Marché.fr (Prosol) to reinvent the “Local Street Market” for a digital age; a "Physical Place for a Virtual World."

Landini’s solution is a modern evolution of what providores once were; an efficient, animated, theatre of food.

How do you reinvent the local street market in the 21st century? How do you connect urban communities to the freshest, most diversified, best value and best tasting product in the heart of a city, where time and safety are becoming increasingly drivers of choice? How do you personalise this, add to convenience, community and speedy customised delivery? How do you reinvent the Street Market?

Born from the Prosol stable of brands, Mon-Marché is locally placed and focused on personalised delivery of the freshest goods at the very best prices. At 4AM each day, limited fresh produce is delivered direct from farms to the store - selling out replenished daily to ensure only the very best, freshest product is sold to customers. Electric bikes deliver orders to customers all over Paris, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.

But this is no “dark box delivery channel” nestled in the shadows. Instead, its two floors are proudly open to the streets of Paris, displaying full transparency. Nothing is hidden, everything is on show for all to admire. A celebration of the dance between man, machine and produce on full view to the public. Chaos, cacophony, magic.

Customers are invited into Mon-Marché’s beating heart to observe the living, breathing machine via a floating glass bridge that straddles the street and basement. This floating glass box is their viewing platform from which they can engage with the event, with views to robots and humans harmoniously packing orders both in the basement below and the heart of the machine on street level.

Inside the store, customers can order via the app and personalise their choice and orders. Tastings, displays, cooking demonstrations and events promoting seasonal produce are held from this viewing platform so customers who opt to collect in person can wait with a coffee in true Parisian style.

The design is recessive, celebrating product, people and process. Decoration is not required. Instead, it's a modern, simplified expression of what markets were, and have forgotten to be. An efficient yet animated “Machine for Living”, providing the necessities of life, no more.

Outside is a public garden, a quiet buffer to this new metropolitan event; inside a bustling machine.

The actors are the food, the robotics and the people who serve and deliver. No frills, no thematic design, no superficialities, just great food, great choice and great theatre driven by the mechanics of true process; not the thematic pantomime of design its competition embrace.

Mon-Marché.fr is designed to entertain customers with the theatre of production, promote the brand’s passion for food and celebrate the people who make it all possible.