Archinect - News

Play With Your Food: Hunting for the link between architecture and food

2014-07-22T17:34:00-04:00

For the last few weeks, the AA Visiting School has been chopping and stirring and slicing in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for their "Play With Your Food" workshop. Participants are put through the rigorous paces that chefs face when designing new foods, and compare the methodology of cooking to architecture. At this intersection of food and architecture, cultures and personal histories collide for a (hopefully) mutually beneficial study of design methodology.

"Play With Your Food" has since ended, and we were in touch with the organizers and a few students to get a read on how the experimental workshop played out.

From the organizers, Jorge Mendez-Caceres, Drew Merkle and Miguel Miranda:

"Play With Your Food" draws parallels between architecture and cuisine, two seemingly very distant disciplines. What headway did the visiting school make in connecting these two worlds?

Architecture and Cuisine/Gastronomy/Mixology do seem to have no relation when they are first mentioned in the same forum. Bu...

One way to "Play with Your Food": create a Food Machine from the Swedish forest

2014-06-27T19:57:00-04:00

For some meals, it's not the food that makes it special, but how it was prepared. A cake made by a dear friend can taste better than the one bought from the bakery; instant oatmeal becomes transcendent made over a campfire in the woods. The traditions of cooking that we abide by are part economical, part chemical science, part sorcery — what comes out the other end is an alchemy.

"Play with Your Food", the AA Visiting School being held this summer in San Juan, Puerto Rico, wants to investigate that alchemical process from an architectural perspective. What can the design process of architecture learn from the designed process of cooking and mixology? One experimental approach to this way of thinking comes by way of the "Food Machine", an automated kitchen device cooked up by a group of Swedish designers. Petter Johansson, Christian Isberg, Lasse Korsgaard and Carl Berglöf created an open-source cooking device, that can be accessed by multiple people at once from anywhere in the worl...

"Rum being the medium of choice", and other thoughts from "Play With Your Food", the upcoming AA Visiting School in Puerto Rico

2014-05-30T14:30:00-04:00

What do cooking and mixology have to do with architecture? Can food and drink, as prototyped and iterative objects, help us better understand architectural design? The AA Visiting School is traveling to San Juan, Puerto Rico this summer for “Play With Your Food”, to tackle these questions and, in the process, try to find the secret link between gastronomy and architecture.

Program directors Drew Merkle, Jorge Mendez-Caceres and Miguel Miranda (all recent alumni of AA’s DRL program) laid out "Play With Your Food" for us over email, touching on their own histories with culinary experimentation and why they decided to host the school in the alleged “rum capital of the world”.

What inspired AA to create a visiting school on the relationship between food and architecture?

It was really us that brought the idea to Chris Pierce and Brett Steele who are the directors of the Visiting School, and the AA respectively. The relationship between food and architecture, is something which has been aro...