A feast for the senses: everything in its place

Where you eat matters almost as much as what you eat, with the environment changing the way we feel about our food, write architects PETER CARROLLand CAOMHÁN MURPHY

WHETHER WE ARE having supper at home, grabbing a snack at a service station or dining in a restaurant, the shape of the spaces in which we eat changes how we feel about food. The food in each of these places may be different, of course, but something else is going on – the difference that architecture and environment make in terms of the experience of eating.

Anyone who has enjoyed a particular wine on holidays, perhaps on the beach or outdoors on a sunny afternoon, then returned to find that the contents of the bottles they painstakingly transported home with them just don’t taste the same will understand what Felipe Fernández-Armesto is talking about in his recent history of dining, Near a Thousand Tables, when he describes how no activity connects people to their environment more than taking a meal: “Our most intimate contact with nature occurs when we eat it.”

The weather obviously makes a difference – there’s nothing like cold to make you suddenly think of stew – but architecture also has its effects on and connections to how we experience food. In fact, architecture and food have a great deal in common.

Each has evolved from the basics of necessity to become, at certain levels, an art form. There are similar sensorial delights to be found eating and experiencing a magnificent space: the textures, the smell, the aesthetic, the sound. Perhaps this is what it means to consume a work of art. Food and architecture can also evoke feelings of memory, loss, identity, belonging, sharing.

Both architecture and food have evolved directly out of local circumstances, and as a result the ways in which they are similar can shed light on the strong ties between culture, place and how we live. Put simply, culture is the elevation of basic human needs. Architecture is to shelter what cuisine is to food, and pleasure takes over from necessity as a simple shed transforms into a glorious cathedral, and eggs into a soufflé.

European eating habits were quite coarse until the late 18th century, when the modern field of gastronomy began to emerge. It was in this period that the word “taste”, which originally referred only to sensations of the palate, took on broader significance as an aesthetic standard and came to describe a new culture where what you claimed to enjoy spoke volumes about you.

The Enlightenment brought refinements in every discipline, and new attitudes about food inevitably influenced architectural theory, which was seeking similar recipes for good taste. The conversion of raw ingredients into haute cuisine was deemed similar to the transformation of raw building materials into high architecture.

There’s something similar going on with the word “cultivation”, which now stands for the heights our societies aspire to, but which comes from the basic endeavour of tilling, developing the land. Just as society began with providing a place in the earth for growing things, and the development of permanent shelter coincided with the invention of agriculture, our common need for food and shelter banded people together in communities, which continue to centre on and celebrate these things. So architecture and food are inextricably linked: traditional, vernacular houses are commonly shaped around eating habits and related social customs, and the traditions of both building and cooking around the world evolve around local ingredients.

These are often the same things: the olive tree was the centre of the economy and diet of the ancient Greeks, who built with its wood and ate and traded its fruit and oil. Untold generations of North American Plains Indians hunted the bison for meals, clothing, jewellery and shelter, so the trappings of an entire culture stemmed from one animal. The interior of the buffalo, its meat, provided nourishment, while the exterior, its hide, provided lodging.

The Irish artist John Gerrard has explored these ideas and connections too. In one example, his Bone Cutlery pieces, the artist took the bones of a goat, casting and sliver-plating them, then used them for a feast at which the animal was eaten – demonstrating in the process the sense of disquiet we get when we are reminded how close are to our actual food.

So how do we experience food and how do we experience architecture? What exactly is the role of architecture in relation to food, eating, and consumption – and what is the role of food, eating and consumption in the making of architecture?

To further explore these questions, we have been working on a project, Jellytown, for Kinsale Arts Festival, which takes place this weekend. Jellytown looks at how we plan, build, eat and experience a sense of place, through events, talks and workshops. In one of these we chose a series of film clips in which people are connected to place through food. So the next time you sit down to eat spare a thought for the space around you — seasoning every mouthful with the culture of taste.

Peter Carroll and Caomhan Murphy are at Dublin's A2 Architects. a2.ie

Jellytown, curated by A2 Architects, is at the Kinsale Arts Festival this weekend. The Festival runs July 7th-15th. kinsaleartsfestival.com

The joy of alfresco cuisine

Take-away food and premises are often seen as having a negative impact on our enjoyment of space, the city and its architecture. In Ireland their presence tends to be controlled by the planning process and zoned to appropriate areas. In recent years, however, with the growth of festivals, markets and other curated cultural experiences, the importance of food and how it is enjoyed plays an important role in our experience and perception of spaces.

The typical German imbiss – or snack bar – for example, is often loosely placed in important formal urban settings or within major infrastructure in cities like Berlin. Their presence and influence as a small building that one never actually enters has a remarkably positive effect on street life, night and day. They act like beacons to the senses, drawing all classes of people with their nectar of staple delicious food and basic human interaction.

Citizens gather for a short while, usually standing, to enjoy a currywurst or the like. In a famous scene from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, set at an imbiss in the no-man’s-land of post-cold-war Berlin, the actor Peter Falk, having once been an angel himself, tries to explain the joys of being human to an invisible angel he senses in his presence. The tactile and tangible reality of touch, coffee and smell . . . “how good it is to be here”. The act of enjoying food outside gives life meaning.

Taste on film: where celluloid connects people through food

Waitress (Adrienne Shelly, 2007)

This lovely film stars Keri Russell as a waitress at a local eatery who makes the best darn pies you’re ever going to taste. Pregnant and in a loveless marriage, she hopes that her pies will get her out of her small southern town, and her marriage. The pies she bakes are based on her hopes and dreams, as well as the desperation of her life: such as the “I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby” pie.

Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987)A Danish movie about a French woman in Denmark who is taken in by a pastor. She lives in a repressed world where earthly pleasures are not permitted, but when she wins the lottery she spends all the money on a feast in memory of the man who took her in during her time of need. The shopping and preparation of the dinner is lavish, and the story is heartwarming.

Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007)This is an utterly charming gem. An Oscar winner for best animated film, it follows the adventures of an aspiring chef and the gastronomic genius rat who helps him cook. The film has a strong relationship with Paris, showing a lot of famous buildings, views from on high, the sewers and the River Seine. It is remarkable how many true food principles are on display in this film, but the central message is that anybody can cook.

Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985)A funny and poignant Japanese story, this film interweaves several stories, all based around food. The central storyline involves a chef who wants to learn how to make the best noodles in the land, and the Clint Eastwood-like trucker/drifter who helps on the journey. Kind of like Zen and the art of noodles, this movie shows a true love of food and the people who make and enjoy it.

Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)This is one of cinema's loveliest city symphonies. Damiel is an angel over Berlin who can hear the thoughts of all the people living below. He chooses to become human so that he can experience the human sensory pleasures, ranging from enjoying food to touching a loved one. The film is also a meditation on Berlin's past, present, and future. Made not long before the fall of the Berlin wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images is movie poetry.

eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)The film is pervaded with a visceral quality, as Cronenberg mixes clearly organic elements with mechanical ones: the game pod is a fleshy lump that whimpers, feels pain and becomes diseased. There is a fish farm cultivating mutated animals in order to make game pods, a gun made from bones that shoots human teeth instead of bullets . . . The borders between reality and game are blurred for both the characters and the audience.

Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)In a split-screen scene that illustrates two diverse worlds, dinner in Alvy's New York Jewish family is compared to dinner in Annie's family. On the left of the screen, the brightly lit, affluent, polite, aloof and sober Hall family discuss subjects such as the Christmas play and the 4-H Club. On the right of the screen the darkly lit, sloppy, informal, noisy, babbling, neurotic Singer family talk about illness and unemployment.