The relationship between how we eat and how new public spaces are designed is a topic worth exploring.
Food, its production, and the way we consume it are intrinsically linked to architecture, which, in its contemporary conception, aims to give meaning to the spaces we inhabit and where we build experiences. One of the most sociable experiences is eating in both public and private spaces, with all the physical implications this entails.
Let us consider, for example, how spaces dedicated to eating have evolved over time. The way private and public spaces were designed, even within a house, reveals much about how society lived and its relationship with food. In Ancient Greece, for instance, the design of a house’s spaces maintained social order. Thus, there were the symposium, the andron, and the gynaeceum. The symposium was the moment after a banquet dedicated to discussing ideas about the philosophers of the era, somewhat like our after-dinner conversations, which eventually became a physical space within the home for this purpose. The andron and gynaeceum, meanwhile, were spaces reserved exclusively for men and women, respectively.
Conceptions that seem obvious to us today were not always so. For example, in the Middle Ages, the dining room was generally far from the kitchen. In contrast, in some Mexican homes in the eighteenth century, and even today, the dining room is located in the same physical space as the kitchen. Contemporary lifestyles have led to the design of these places being adjusted to the experience of eating and sociability.
With this idea in mind, a Danish interdisciplinary group designed the NoRa space, which brings together activities related to the eating experience to generate a food experience within the urban space, whether for production, purchase, or consumption of food. Through research and design, this project was conceived as a point to develop sociability and conviviality in large cities.
The architects leading the project agree in highlighting the importance of the eating experience as one of the most significant axes of social life, which, in a way, would determine many uses of public space. The intercultural variants in the conception of space, regarding food, have been one of the fields where collaboration between architects and food experts has borne fruit.
Today, for example, chefs work very closely with kitchen space designers to adapt them to their techniques and culinary processes. Proxemics, or the study of intercultural variants of space, has helped explain the behavior of diners in restaurants and their preferences regarding sitting at a round table, a square table, in a booth, or at a bar seat, which has been very useful in designing contemporary restaurants. Food marketing interventions at major world fairs are designed based on architectural studies where sound, color, and visuals affect how a food to be tasted is perceived by a person.
When we open ourselves to the possibility of applications and dialogue between disciplines, we discover, as the French philosopher Edgar Morin points out: “Disciplines are fully justified provided they maintain a field of vision that recognizes and conceives the existence of links and solidarities.” The more we recognize these solidarities, the more new questions and approaches arise that require the connection between disciplines, which in real life translates into designing better spaces for eating and taking advantage of the social and biological dimensions of our food.
Originally published in El Economista
#food #architecture #spaces #proxemics #experiences
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.