The Cenacle

 

The Cenacle (from Latin cēnāculum “dining room”, later spelt coenaculum and semantically drifting towards “upper room”), also known as the “Upper Room”, is a room in the David’s Tomb Compound in Jerusalem, traditionally held to be the site of the Last Supper. The word is a derivative of the Latin word cēnō, which means “I dine”.

 

Industrialized garden kitchen

 

A place where curiosities could be satisfied. Rejecting the obvious and embracing the unknown, allowing the visitors to indulge themselves in a multi-sensual space, pushing the boundaries of design and food. Communal culinary experience bringing people together around the table over food and its preparation.

No creation without tradition. No tradition without creation.

 

Table Rules

 

The avatar of experiential exclusivity is re-inventing itself as a “pop-up” concept, but this time the user is not a spectator but an active performer. A city-within-a-city where location is not any more specific and fixed.  A different supper club, where an old storage container is transformed into a nomad kitchen where the 8 users are gathered around the ‘monastic’ table and are introduced to the full production cycle: from growing food, to picking it, storing it, cooking it and eventually eating it.

 

Hortus Conclusus

 

Hortus conclusus depicted by Meister des Frankfurter Paradiesgärtleins. Hortus conclusus is a Latin term, meaning literally “enclosed garden”. It  is derived from the Vulgate Bible’s Canticle of Canticles (also called the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon) 4:12, in Latin: “Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus” (“A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up.”

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ISTANBUL: CITY OF SENSES

PREFACE

mem·o·ry : remembrance – recollection – mind – reminiscence.

The power or process of reproducing or recalling what has been learned and retained especially through associative mechanisms.

Aldo Rossi says that a city is a collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is locus of collective memory. For Rossi essential is the meaning of time continuity. “Memory is what resists time”.

“Through senses memory is created, and through memory comes experience”. According to Aristotle’s view, memory is nothing but the process of revocation of the past, using as a medium the senses. It is recorded, as the ability of empirical perception through the senses of a stimulus. More broadly, one could argue, that memory is the experiential relationship of a person with his environment.

Adolf Loos writes for his childhood: “Here is the table, a piece of furniture completely crazy and dirty, a table that used to close using an astonishing mechanism. And yet it was our table, our table! And there is also the office desk with a stain that my sister Ermina made, when she was very young, by spilling the inkwell. These are the portraits of my parents! Such terrible frames! However, they were marriage gifts by the employees of my father. And an embroidered slipper where you could hang your watch, childhood work of my sister Irma. Every piece of furniture, every thing, every object tells a story, the story of the family. The apartment was never finished, it was growing with us and we were growing with it.”

The city resident collects in his house traces of memories and experiences, giving the residential character of an alternating accumulation. His needs have created and gave shape to the shell (the building, the settlement, the city), but in a dynamic and not in a static and rigid way. Even if people are lost, seasons and years pass, the shell stays there to remind the people that once “lived” in it.

A person, trying to catch the time that is ahead of him, always returns to the beginning and through repetition seeks to retain for himself the luxury of youth. The gap between past and present, between memory and the present, between the one and the multiple iterations, is filled by the memory that lives constantly in the present. The memory is nothing else but a measurement system of that gap. Thus the time that has passed can be measured through that memory. The memory can be used to compare, to associate, to restore or even to use instances of the past in order to create new situations and feelings.

The only way to return to the past is through memory. The oldest and perhaps the best-known definition of memory is given by Plato, who links and relates memory, to the footprint of a signet on the sand.

The starting point of this paper is Inspired by Juhani Palasmaa’s ‘Eyes of the Skin’ and the presentation of an ocular-centric paradigm and the role of the other senses in authentic architectural experiences, towards a multi-sensory architecture which facilitates a sense of belonging and integration.

In this paper I will use a phenomenological approach for my research to understand and analyze the importance of memory in Architecture and the traces that memory leave behind, either visible and physical or invisible and immaterial. And the question that arises is how does this element of the past that we call ‘memory’; contribute into the making and cultivation of a new ‘memory’ for the future? Even though it may seem paradoxical, what you choose to remember is a parameter of what you have chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to forget.

The theme of memory is closely related to the city of Istanbul, which is an example of extreme globalization and urban development and will be used as the case study for our studio of Public Building. A city with many layers and a rich urban fabric entails and can be seen as a storage ‘device’ of memories and images of the past. In dependence to phenomenology, the paradigm of Semiology will be a point of reference for the position of this paper. The methodological approach used to conduct this research will then be eventually used and translated into observations, interpretations, mapping, and visualization techniques, and as a design tool for the studio Project in Istanbul.

One of the main proposals of this thesis is that memory—autobiographical and collective, each integral to the other—exists as the foundation upon which meaning is built. Memory affords our connection to the world. Every aspect of experience becomes enveloped in the process of memory. It forms our identity as individuals, and it coheres individuals together to form the identity of social groups. Memory is also the thread that links the lived-in now with the past and the future: what I remember of my past contributes to who I am now (at this very moment) and in many ways affects what I will do in the future.

These traces of memory found in the city are divided into physical traces expressed through the use of archetypes and immaterial expressed through the sensorial world. Archetypes and senses act as vehicles, or the medium that or the memory but also ‘carry’ it and store in throughout time.

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TAKE A LOOK AT THE PROJECT HERE :

EATING ARCHITECTURE: TYPOLOGIES OF FOOD & SPACE

PREFACE

The purpose of this essay is to investigate food and eating as a spiritual act and consider the spatial and performative aspects of eating in relation to architecture. In the first part of this essay we will be dealing with the idea of designing a space in relation to a preparation of a meal. We will discuss the ways in which shared meals are among the most perishable and preserved cultural artifacts. Ideas of memory, identity, ideology, conviviality and loss will be related to culture and setting, giving examples of how they bring architecture and food together. In the second part of the essay we will be using four typologies of buildings (household, restaurant, monastery, market) and looking to each one separately in order to see how does the space affect the performance of cooking and eating and what meaning does food have in each of these spaces.

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TAKE A LOOK AT THE PROJECT HERE :

BATH CULINARY MARKET SCHOOL

PREFACE

Religion, society, nature; these are the three struggles of man. These three conflicts are at the same time, his three needs: It is necessary to believe, hence the temple; it is necessary for him to live, hence the plow and the ship. But these three solutions contain three conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of life stems from all three. Man has to deal with obstacles under the form of superstition, under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple ananke (necessity) weighs upon us: the ananke of dogmas, the ananke of laws, the ananke of things.

To consider cookery through an architectural lens summons up a host of images at the same time culinary and art historical. First to come to some minds will be the romantic creations by the founder of modern French grande cuisine, Antonin Careme, following his dictum: “Most noble of all the arts is architecture, and its greatest manifestation is the art of the pastry chef.” Others, more resolutely post modern, will admire or decry current obsession on the part of certain chefs with “plated” constructions that owe more to inspirations from Frank Gehry’s imaginative craft of novel materials and visual delights than to gustatory pleasure.

From the fanciful art of shifting scales to the logic of measurement promised by a teaspoon or an inch arises the secret architecture of food, or perhaps the secret food of architecture. This quiet apposition of form and substance, found in a plate of tomatoes more Pompeian red than any wall fragment, enunciates the central questions of this collection. What can be learned by examining the intersections of the preparation of meals and the production of space? What can be made from the conflation of aesthetic and sensory tastes in architectural design and what is disclosed by their dissociation? Such questions guide this work toward an architecture found in the gestures, artifacts, and recipes that belie any distinction between art and life.

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