The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste

The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste

Petra Hagen Hodgson Rolf Toyka The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste On behalf of the Academy of the Hesse Chamber of Architects and Town Planners Birkhäuser Basel Boston Berlin

This book has been kindly supported by Gaggenau BSH Appliances Ltd. Concept and Copy Editing Petra Hagen Hodgson, Königstein (supervision) Rolf Toyka, Wiesbaden Translation Michael Robinson, London (other than the contributions of Peter Davey, Ian Ritchie and Claudio Silvestrin) Graphic Design Studio Joachim Mildner, Düsseldorf / Zürich Lithography farbo Print + Media, Cologne This book is also available in a German language edition: ISBN-13: 978-3-7643-7331-3 ISBN-10: 3-7643-7331-8 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at <http://dnb.ddb.de>. Library of Congress Control Number: 2007922265 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in data banks. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. 2007 Birkhäuser Verlag AG Basel Boston Berlin P.O. Box 133, CH-4010 Basel, Switzerland Part of Springer Science+Business Media Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF Printed in Germany ISBN-13: 978-3-7643-7621-5 ISBN-10: 3-7643-7621-X 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 www.birkhauser.ch

Contents 6 Foreword 94 The Eater and his Ancestors Barbara Ettinger-Brinckmann/Rolf Toyka Andreas Hartmann 8 Introduction 100 Hearth and Home Petra Hagen Hodgson Food Preparation Locations in Changing Times Peter Davey 14 Architecture and Food Composition Peter Kubelka 110 From Pot au Feu to Processed Food The Restaurant as a Modernist Location 22 Measurement and Number in Architecture Wilhelm Klauser Paul von Naredi-Rainer 120 The Globalisation of Taste 30 Measurements in Cooking Udo Pollmer Renate Breuß 124 Architectural Essentials 38 Materials and Colours Claudio Silvestrin Annette Gigon in Conversation with Petra Hagen Hodgson 128 The Order of Courses 50 The Homely Hearth A Theatrically Composed Structure Building and Living, Eating and Drinking, Considered in Onno Faller Terms of Architectural Theory Fritz Neumeyer 138 Slow Food Carlo Petrini 60 Rules of Fasting and Desire Derailed Notes on Architecture and Gastronomy 142 A Visit to Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir or Stanislaus von Moos A Culinary and Architectural Gesamtkunstwerk Petra Hagen Hodgson 72 The Reproducibility of Taste Ákos Moravánszky 146 The Cuisine of Making Shelter Ian Ritchie 82 Meaningful Architecture in a Globalised World Gion Caminada 152 Biographies 156 Illustration Credits

Foreword Barbara Ettinger-Brinckmann/Rolf Toyka Tradition means handing on the fire, not worshipping the ashes (Gustav Mahler) Just as the contents of our refrigerators are an image of globalisation, the architectural garb of the built environment all over the world is becoming increasingly uniform. But is product quality keeping up with this? One bad piece of cooking means one bad meal so long as there is no damage to health with devastating consequences. But buildings last longer, shaping the place we live in, our villages, towns and regions, over the centuries. So the quality of the built environment is all the more important, and not just functionally and structurally, but aesthetically as well. There have been many complaints about our inhospitable cities. It all starts with a single badly designed building. Architecture represents an important part of our culture. The Hesse Chamber of Architects and Town Planners and the academy attached to it have been campaigning for a greater awareness of quality for years, and constantly stress that the act of building must of course consider commercial and functional requirements, but above all it has to make a contribution to building culture. 6 Knowledge and sensitivity are needed if quality is to be insisted upon. We live in a highly specialised world. It calls for joinedup thinking and intellectual exchange between different disciplines to arrive at new viewpoints. So for ten years now the basic work of the Hesse Chamber of Architects and Town Planners has included addressing interfaces with other culture spheres intensively. Subjects included architecture and music, architecture and literature, architecture and film and architecture and theatre. So the idea for this book has its origins in an interdisciplinary symposium on architecture and culinary culture organised by the academy of the Hesse Chamber of Architects and Town Planners in cooperation with the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, under the direction of Petra Hagen Hodgson and Rolf Toyka. This revealed fundamental links and parallels between the two art forms. These first insights gained at the symposium have been condensed into this volume of texts, now with additional, more detailed lines of thought. Cooking lab Why is it that the subject of links between architecture and cooking should seem particularly worth studying? Both arts are essential staffs of life. If we start addressing the question of quality, then in the case of both cooking and building we see that quality does not have to be associated with high costs. On the contrary, it is about devising intelligent, creative solutions using basic ingredients or materials and these can be very simple. Some critics have asked in the context of the symposium whether there are not more urgent problems than pursuing ideas about building and cooking. There is no doubt that the current economic situation has to be seen as difficult. But this does not make cultural demands whether they are aesthetic or ethical any less significant. On the contrary, if efficiency is the only goal considered, along with cost and questions of short-term gain, there is a danger that we shall lose culture altogether. It is much more that it is a special challenge to aspire, committedly and creatively, to cultural achievements that pay in the long term, despite constraining circumstances. True art is not exclusive or elitist, one of its values includes moderation in the way we treat our resources, our space, our aesthetic means. Today things that are fashionable, shrill and exalted tend to be unduly highly rated in architecture, in order to stand out from the masses. Juhani Pallasmaa had some hard words to say about the general trend towards this ego-related architecture at the symposium on architecture and perception in Frankfurt am Main (2002): Most buildings that have been praised in the international press in recent years are characterized by narcissism and nihilism. It is time for this hegemony of

the visual to be broken at last in favour of re-sensualising, re-eroticising and re-enchanting the world. Here architecture has the role of restoring the inner world. Instead of experiencing the fact that we are here in the world through architectural space, architecture has deteriorated into the art of the printed image, and has lost its three-dimensional and material quality. Moderation does not mean hankering after publicity and fame, but suggests a carefully considered approach to a given task on the basis of the matter in hand; it means concentrating on essentials. This also includes being aware of tradition and history in particular. Innovative solutions as in cooking based on background knowledge are equally desirable for architecture and urban development, landscape architecture and interior design. It is also a matter of making the general public more profoundly able to understand questions about their built environment. One of the many activities that the Chamber has arranged in this context is the annual Architecture Day. Architecture today is far from most people s everyday thinking and experience, and it is for this reason that an approach to this broad topic is being promoted in schools in particular, under the heading Architektur macht Schule architecture goes to school or architecture becomes the accepted thing. So the Chamber does not simply mount isolated campaigns, but is also responsible for a variety of publications providing pupils and teachers with sound teaching materials. It is important for young children to enjoy looking at their built environment and to acquire criteria and standards for judging architectural quality because today s schoolchildren will be tomorrow s clients and decision-makers, making a considerable contribution (with us) to the shape of the world we live in. Once a sense of quality has been acquired it is possible to resist the above-mentioned architectural shift towards global uniformity, to work against architecture aiming solely at short-term gain and against the compulsion to be spectacular. The Slow Food movement is doing this sort of work in the field of cooking. It now has over 80,000 members world-wide, and is devoted above all to training the sense of taste, and it is also proving successful as a counter-movement to Fast Food, seen as a synonym for Junk Food. In architecture, the efforts being made by institutions including the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, the Architekturmuseum in Munich, the local architecture centres and the Baukultur Foundation. If this book can give further impetus to strengthening a relevant movement for promoting quality architecture with values, a great deal will have been achieved. What this book is not offering: magic solutions for cooking and building. It is much more about passing on the fire Gustav Mahler was talking about through a future-oriented recollection of tradition. 7 Architecture workshop