What If Your Food Hired an Architect to Redesign Your Kitchen? Part 2: The Harvest Table
By Nick Sowers @ GOOD
Unloading groceries sucks. First of all, I’ve usually already exhausted my limited stock of patience at the store. And the stuff in the bags is never organized. Running out of counter-space, putting food on the floor, tripping over the bags, having to reorganize the fridge in order to fit everything in—the list could go on and on. In short: There is little that is pleasurable about bringing food into the house.
In fact, the opposite should be true. Bringing food into the house should be a rewarding experience, like bringing in a harvest from the fields.
Granted, we have likely not toiled in the fields to achieve that feeling of “earning” the food. Finding a parking spot at the market or grocery store is often the most grueling task we face in the gathering of our food. But let us not think too selfishly. Food, not people, is the client in this series, so the question is, if food could redesign its own entrance into the home, what would it want?
Let’s start by thinking about what aspects of the current system might make food unhappy. There’s the fact that it’s crammed up in bags. Perhaps the food is briefly let out to breathe on the counter, and a few lucky items might get to hang out in a fruit bowl, but the majority will get crammed up again right away in the pantry or fridge. Sometimes the food is forgotten altogether, allowed to wither in a depressing corner behind Styrofoam boxes of leftovers.
To understand this process of bringing food into the domestic realm, I traced my movements as I washed vegetables and put food away after a trip to the store. The image at the top of this post is a plan view of my kitchen that documents this process—I dumped the bags on the floor and went back and forth between them and the refrigerator, cupboards, and counter-top.
Clearly, my kitchen is not designed to make post-shopping unloading particularly efficient, let alone celebratory.
Instead, what if when we set the food down, it was given prime, celebrity attention? We could lay it out on a long, generous surface. The food would be allowed to “socialize,” even—sophisticated cereal boxes greeting their relatives, the country bumpkin jars of persimmon jam from the farmer’s market. Frozen things and dairy should be put away immediately, of course, but other items might be left on display as a kind of temporary celebration of having the privilege of bringing all these tasty things into the house.
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Objectivism for Thinkers
Food for Thinkers: What if Your Food Hired an Architect to Redesign Your Kitchen?
By Nicola Twilley @ GOOD
The kitchen has been a favored site for architects to implement their theories for modern living for more than a century, as MoMA’s current“Counter Space” exhibition makes clear. In the hands of designers, changing ideas about the role of women, new space-age technologies, and the spread of consumer culture have all inspired new kitchen layouts, fittings, and even implements.
The results of these kitchen experiments have been fascinating, occasionally beautiful, and sometimes useful. They have also been widely adopted, shaping our vision of what the kitchen can and should be.
So, when I asked architect Nick Sowers (author of the blogSoundscrapers) to write about what was interesting about food from his point of view, perhaps it was not surprising that his mind went immediately to the kitchen and its potential to transform our relationship with the food we eat. Over the coming weeks, Sowers will be sharing his ideas for a twenty-first century kitchen redesign—this time conducted as if food itself was the client, rather than home-owners or public housing developers.
What If Your Food Hired an Architect to Redesign Your Kitchen?
by Nick Sowers
Why is it that the highest form of kitchen design relegates food behind smooth, generic, and glossy surfaces?
These kitchens as works-of-art are upstaging the main act: the food. It sounds like common sense, but it needs to be stated: food deserves its turn as the client in kitchen design.
So, in the spirit of this week’s Food for Thinkers blog-festival, this architect wishes to respond to the prompt by asking how we design for food today.
Design is a process of teasing out the relationships between things, and food and space exist in a networked relationship. The spatial history of, for example, a particular head of cabbage is a layered, interdependent experience: from eating and preparation to selection in the produce section at the grocery store, all the way back through its distribution, harvest, cultivation, and planting. As a culture, we are once again becoming conscious of these networked processes, paying attention to where food has come from as well as how it appears on our plate. But, it seems to me, there is a middle ground in between these two extremes of origin (field) and destination (stomach), which deserves its own spatial reconsideration: the kitchen.
Read the full article here.
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The New York Times. Business Day
Economix. Explaining the Science of Everyday Life
For all the bellyaching about wasted degrees and the many indebted grads stuck on their parents’ couches, recent college graduates are still doing a lot better than their less-educated counterparts. Unemployment for new graduates is around 8.9 percent; the rate for workers with only a high school diploma is nearly three times as high, at 22.9 percent.
That’s according to a new report [PDF] from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. The report also had some fascinating statistics on earnings and jobless rates by college major, something we’ve writtenabout before.
The chart below shows unemployment rates sorted by major, based on 2009-10 census data. You can also see jobless rates for graduates of a given undergraduate major who went on to receive further education (not necessarily related to their college major). In the chart, “recent college graduate” refers to workers who are 22 to 26 years old; “experienced college graduate” covers those 30 to 54; and “graduate degree holder” is limited to workers 30 to 54 years old.
Read the full article here.
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Algunos ven en los grises escalas para definir el pasaje del blanco al negro, a veces sin darse cuenta que el problema no es el blanco y tampoco el negro sino que el gris no existe, sin la sumatoria de los otros dos que son dejados de lado.
Los que no se dan cuenta que el gris es la mezcla del blanco y el negro, creen erróneamente que es “algo en el medio”, algo así como “la parte equidistante de los extremos de algo”
Pero sigamos adelante con el blanco y el negro. El blanco es blanco de un lado y el otro del meridiano, lo mismo sucede con el negro. No corre con la misma suerte el gris, que posee tantas definiciones como postulantes tenga.
¿No me entiende? por favor acompáñeme con este ejemplo:
En muchos casos lo blanco y negro son leyes establecidas por reglamentos, doctrinas o códigos. Por ejemplo, podemos establecer la siguiente analogía, blanco es cruzar un semáforo en verde, y negro es cruzarlo en rojo. Si bien es un ejemplo obvio, confíe en mi y verá que sirve. En este caso ¿el amarillo es una especie de gris?, o depende del postulante. La cercanía al verde o al rojo del cruce no varia su color, este sigue siendo amarillo aunque no este equidistantemente en el medio.
Cuando se le acusa a alguien de no poder pensar en grises, o sea en amarillo según el ejemplo que intente darle, se le acusa por cruzar en amarillo cerca del rojo, o amarillo cerca del verde? Me entiende ahora, el gris es por definición, un indefinido, por lo tanto, criticar lo que no tiene crítica, es sobrevalorar un propósito formado arbitrariamente.
Acompáñeme en este segundo ejemplo:
Si yo le pregunto cual es su escala de grises, su respuesta difícilmente pueda compararse con la mia, porque no sabemos los extremos. Mi blanco y negro pueden no existir para usted, y quizás su blanco sea muy blanco para mi y su negro muy cerca del blanco.
De allí la importancia de la limitación de la diferencia, o sea ¿Cual es la Diferencia, me entiende?
Las escales de grises no se comparan, son distintas entre cada postulante. Me arriesgo a repetirle, ¿Cual es la diferencia? Sepa eliminar el blanco y el negro, y considere que las personas son distintas unas a otras.
Sucede lo mismo con la importancia que cada uno le asigna a los momentos y cosas. ¿Como puede usted saber si para mi algo es o no es importante?
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Listen to young people
“Why won’t you answer me?”
Kids’ questions may be annoying — but they’re more crucial to learning than we’ve ever thought. An expert explains
BY THOMAS ROGERS
Children can ask a lot of very annoying questions. Starting at about 2 years of age, they begin barraging their parents with endless queries, from “Are we there yet?” to “Why is the moon round?” — questions that often seem more like desperate ploys for parental attention than anything else. And, to make things worse, cooperative parents are often treated to a relentless barrage of follow-up questions, many of which involve one word: “Why?” Is this process infuriating? Yes. But is it crucial to their development? Far more than most of us think. And furthermore, the frequency and form of those questions can tell us a lot, not only about how children learn but also about cultural and class differences in America.
In his new book, “Trusting What You’re Told,” Paul L. Harris, a Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education at Harvard, argues that much of what we’ve assumed about our kids’ early learning may be misguided. Although many parents and teachers think of children as primarily independent “scientific” learners who best absorb knowledge by physically interacting with the world — an idea that informs everything from Montessori education to museum planning — Harris believes it woefully underestimates the importance of dialogue in young kids’ lives. Conversation — and question asking — allows young children to grasp highly abstract concepts, from religion to history, at an earlier age. However, as Harris points out, the way young children learn can vary surprisingly between working-class and middle-class children, and people from different ethnic backgrounds.
Salon spoke to Harris over the phone about Montessori’s mistakes, Asian-American kids’ deference levels, and why working-class kids ask fewer questions.
Why is it so important to determine where young children actually get their information?
A lot of research on cognitive development has argued that children do best when they’re exploring the world for themselves in a scientific fashion. That idea has a long pedigree. If you read someone like Rousseau, that’s what he’s basically advocating — along with more recent researchers or educators like Paget or Montessori. Even in the last decade or so there have been a lot of titles within the popular science mode that have focused on the “scientist in the crib” or the “child as a scientist.” But I think it dramatically underestimates children.
Read the full article here
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Alberti (in 1452)
… “Architect’s drawings, unlike painter’s perspectival views, require consistent lines, true angles, and “real measurements, drawn to scale”.
… ”Architects should avoid perspective, as from foreshortened lines one cannot take precise measurements”.
Why Architects Draw?
The drawing is used to communicate or record ideas as they are brought up in the conversation.
Drawing both produces architectural knowledge and is a production of that knowledge; it both guides social practice and is guides by social practice. As a result architectural drawing must be understood from a variety of perspectives. Thus architectural drawing in this view must be understood as a human and therefore social practice first and an object second. It is as a practice that architectural drawing first impresses and produces consequences.
As a symbol, drawing has a dual and contradictory nature. Materially constituted, drawing is the phenomenal representation of a conceptual practice. It is a vision or idea on a surface, usually paper. Once constituted phenomenally, drawing can be and often seen as autonomous of its production.
If we are to argue that drawing is both a cultural and a social instrument, it is important to distinguish here what is meant by culture and society. Culture, as Raymond Williams points out, is “one of the two or three most complicates words in the English Language” For us the concept refers broadly to subjective intellectual, aesthetic, and artistic practices. In constrast, society denotes “ the body of institutions and relationships within which a relatively large group of people live”. Pp.7
At the same time, the subjective searching that architectural drawing is used to represent is constrained, to the extent that the conception is to become a built object, by the institutions, economies, and politics of production in which it is to be realized. When used to realize a subjective idea as a built object, drawing becomes as much a practical, objective and social instrument of the material production of building as it is a conceptual, subjective, and cultural representation of an architectural creation. Drawing’s power and its importance to architects emanates from its complex and dual nature.
Our concern with drawing as a representational form and the emphasis we place on issues of provenance, and on what the drawing means or represents, often blind us to the role drawing plays as an instrument of social practice. As Robin Evans has argued when dealing with the issue of drawing as architectural representation: “drawing in architecture is not done after nature but prior to construction; it is not so much produces by reflection on the reality outside drawing, as productive of a reality that will end up outside drawing.
Read more here
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Digital means
“Digital Neofeudalism:”* Notes on Mario Carpo’s The Alphabet and the Algorithm
The introduction of digital technologies in the mid-nineties was experienced in architecture in a rather peculiar way. While almost every architect adopted computers as the main platforms for their work, the term ‘digital architecture’ still refers almost exclusively to an architecture made of round, sinuous or continuous forms. But regardless of angularity or rotundity the introduction of digital technologies implied much deeper transformations in the modes of production of architecture, to an extent to break the consolidated categories which ruled architecture for the past five centuries. This is the thesis of Mario Carpo’s last book The Alphabet and the Algorithm(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011) which was discussed in a seminar titled ‘The Rise and Fall of the Albertian Paradigm,’ held at the Berlage Institute on January 27th, as part of the seminar program ‘The Historical Project. Whatever Happened to Operative Criticism?’ Regarding the general theme of the program, Mario Carpo’s impressively coherent research trajectory is particularly interesting because it declines a rigorous historical research as a punctual present-day critique. Tracing the genealogies of different modes of production in architecture, Carpo is able to locate the digital turn in a long-duration perspective encompassing not only the architectural problems of type, models and imitation, but also broader political issues concerning authorship, labour and the state.
It was Leon Battista Alberti who formalized architecture as we know it today—or, as we used to know it until today: an “allographic, notational and authorial art.” Alberti was addressing a social and economical crisis that was hitting Florence, which made the realization of large public works almost impossible. To face this problem, a new strategy for organization of the building site had to be elaborated. According to Alberti, a building should be composed in the mind first. Then, the idea of the building must be translated into a graphic, standardized code—plans, elevations and sections. The product of this operation is the design, which has to be transmitted to someone else to be mechanically executed, in strict conformity to the drawings. This procedure ensures that the architect is the only responsible for the design, its only author. To impose this new method, Renaissance architects had to struggle against a building industry that was dominated by social and technological conventions connected to a very different model of organization of the building site. In the Middle Ages guild system, a building was never designed beforehand. The moments of ideation and building were not separated, and the building process was a collective effort in which every workman applied the secret knowledge he literally possessed as a member of the guild.
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Architecture and Theory. 02
TROUBLES IN THEORY: PICTURESQUE POSTMODERNISM
20 December 2011 | By Anthony Vidler
The second essay in AR’s series: Troubles in Theory
INTRODUCTION
The first article in this series sketched a broad picture of the forms taken by architectural theory after the Second World War. This survey deliberately avoided using the term ‘Postmodern’, not because the word itself was bereft of a history of its own, but rather because, in retrospect, and viewed outside the lens of art-historical categorisation, the theoretical stances of the entire post-war period were all, already, ‘post-modern’.
Thus the AR’s revival of the principles of the Picturesque, through the lens of Townscape and the publication of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, with his historicist commentary, coupled with the shift to historical meta-analysis represented by Colin Rowe, all presaged the truly Postmodern theory of ‘Collage City’, published in 1975, the year in which Charles Jencks finally nailed down the term.
‘Let it therefore be boldly stated that the REVIEW has a “call”, a call of quite a low-class evangelical kind. (…) Underneath its more obvious aims, running through them and linking them together, is another less tangible one, which may be described by the words, visual re-education.’
The Editors, The Architectural Review, January 1947.
Introducing the January 1947 issue of the AR, the editors – JM Richards, Nikolaus Pevsner, Osbert Lancaster and Hubert de Cronin Hastings – celebrated the opening of the ‘second half century’ of the Architectural Review’s publication with a bold statement of policy. The ‘Modern movement in architecture’ was now finally accepted as ‘being made of very stern stuff indeed’, thus freeing the Review to widen its scope.
Side by side with the obligation to provide a ‘third programme’ for architecture, the editors affirmed, was the equally strong mission to educate the public in the art of architecture, to act ‘in the cause of visual culture’. What that meant was made clear by a reference to the ‘great visual educator’ Uvedale Price, a model for the understanding of the ‘visual experience’ bound to the ‘pursuit of the visual life’ presented in ‘landscape and townscape.
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Architecture and Theory. 01
TROUBLES IN THEORY PART ONE: THE STATE OF THE ART 1945-2000
21 September 2011 | By Anthony Vilder
Architectural theory has taken many forms since Vitruvius attempted to bring together in 10 scrolls ‘all the principles of the discipline’, with the conviction that ‘an architect should know writing [litteras]’ both to ‘secure a more lasting remembrance through his treatises’, and as a balance to the knowledge of mere manual skill. The rediscovery of Vitruvius in the 15th century led to several centuries of similar treatises, followed by a 19th century full of style handbooks and teaching manuals followed in the 20th century by a flurry of polemical manifestos, and more measured statements of purpose and strategy after the Second World War.
The generation that graduated from architecture schools in the decade following the Second World War was a generation in search of new principles for architecture itself. In the shadow of the modern masters, critical of the social and urban effects of International Style Modernism, yet reluctant to abandon a commitment to modern architecture, they looked in different ways for continuity through more or less radical revision.
In this search they were supported by the surprising catholicity of The Architectural Review’s editorial board. Despite the individual sensibilities of Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Gordon Cullen, Eric de Maré and Nikolaus Pevsner, the journal hosted debates over questions asdiverse as those posed by Colin Rowe’s Palladianising of Le Corbusier (‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa’, March 1947) and the Modern Movement in general (‘Mannerism and Modern Architecture’, May 1950); de Maré’s attempt to revitalise the ‘canon’ in his three-part survey of Scandinavian, British, American and Russian ideas in 1949; Banham’s ‘New Brutalism’ (1955); and Cullen’s ‘Outrage’ over the ‘Townscape’ environment.
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Mumford on Léger and Le Corbusier
Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930′s
Leger and the machine. p-172
…What remains? What remains in Léger’s painting is his honest architec- tural intention. He has sought to give a painting the strength and imper- sonality of a good communal expression like a building, and if in the end this gives little to the spectator directly, it serves an instrumental purpose— helping the eye of the architect and the ordinary spectator to look upon pure line, volume, and color as the essential ingredients of an architectural composition. For this purpose his geometrical symbols, which serve as the greatest common denominator of our machine culture, are adequate. If they express little that we did not already know, they at least fix our at- tention on the common elements in our background. Léger’s painting does not depend upon modern architecture, nor did that architecture grow in response to his painting; that supposition would be absurd. But they en- lighten each other, for they acknowledge a common source.
If Le Corbusier is more of a painter than Léger, it is equally true that the latter is a sounder architect than Le Corbusier. But the weakness of Léger’s art is its failure to incorporate the human element. Even in his fig- ure paintings he limits himself to the bare forms of architecture, but for- gets that the architect’s work is not finished until the living forms of men and women take possession of the building and reorganize it spatially and visually by their movements, their gestures, their life. And because Léger forgets life in the process of creating mechanical symbols, we, the living, have our revenge: when we look at these images, we feel a little bored.
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