You are on page 1of 7

COOKING AN ARCHITECTURAL HAPPY COSMOSPOIESIS

Cooking an Architectural Happy Cosmospoiesis


MARCO FRASCARI By reading the implied perception posited by Fergusson, and amplified by Collins and Price, the notions of cooks and architects reciprocal influences, and the crossing over of dishes and buildings sources in an all signifying system, from table settings to site settings, becomes a way to identify a possible cosmospoiesis. Culinary and architectural works are not simply products of a single mentality, but of a mentality connecting buildings and dishes within the structure of the sensual homology existing between building and cooking. Any dish or building is constructed through a tectonic mosaic by which any dish or building results from the assimilation and transformation of other buildings and dishes. As creators of images architects and cooks can relate to their future buildings and dishes through a long series of intertextual, intermediary and intersensorial steps, a discipline that begins in the mastery of the reuse of leftovers.

The inter-sensory powers possessed by the great French chef Dunand enabled him to create a culinary masterpiece under very difcult circumstances. Because of his culinary imagination, he happily served a chicken dish to a starving Napoleon Bonaparte to celebrate the strategic victory of Marengo during the second Campaign in Italy, on 14 June 1800 (Castelot, 1972). Having nothing in the eld-pantry, Dunand created a dish from ingredients recovered by soldiers, who fortuitously found 4 tomatoes, 3 eggs, a head of garlic, 6 craysh from the Bormida river, 1 chicken, 1 bottle of olive oil and 1 jug of wine. After peeling the tomatoes, Dunand sauted the chicken in oil and garlic adding a little brandy from Bonapartes own ask. Then, he threw in the tomatoes and served the dish with 3 fried eggs and the craysh. After consuming such an unplanned masterpiece, Bonaparte instructed the great chef to serve such a chicken dish after each of his victories. From that historic moment, Dunands impromptu chicken dish was known as poulet
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 31 NO 1

la Marengo. The originality of the dish lay in the craysh, poulet la Provencal (chicken sauted in oil with garlic and tomatoes) was well known in Paris under the Directory (17951799). Sixty-two years after this historic episode, the Scottish architect and writer James Fergusson (18081886) explained in a lecture that to acquire the knowledge of the true principles of architecture it was necessary to study the work of the great chefs of cuisine rather than the work of Pugin and Vitruvius. He argued that the means by which a hut built to shelter an image is transformed into a temple or a meetinghouse becomes a cathedral is the same as that by which a boiled neck of mutton can evolve into cotolettes limperiale and a grilled fowl into poulet la Marengo. The story of this lecture is told by Peter Collins at the beginning of the chapter on the gastronomic analogy in Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture (Collins, 1965). Collins uses four analogies to talk about the nature of Functionalism.
31

CROSSING BOUNDARIES: ARCHITECTURE AND THE INFLUENCE OF OTHER DISCIPLINES

Collinss biological, mechanical, and linguistic analogies have been analysed and used in every possible way in the examination of architecture. Since then, the power of the gastronomic analogy had been neglected until Cedric Price (19342003) happily restated the importance of food to architecture in a lecture given at Sir John Soanes Museum (Price, 2003). To the perceptions posited by Fergusson, amplified by Collins and masterfully redirected by Price, should be added the reciprocal perceptions of poets, cooks and architects founded in a synesthetic poiesis as poignantly pointed out by Ben Jonson in his Masque Neptunes Triumph for the Return of Albion (1624).
Cook . . . For there is a palate of the understanding, as well as of the senses. The taste is taken with good relishes, the sight with fair objects, the hearing with delicate sounds, the smelling with pure scents, the feeling with soft and plump bodies, but the understanding with all these; for all which you must begin at the kitchen. There the art of poetry was learnd, and found out, or nowhere; and the same day with the art of Cookery.

What Rankes, what Files, to put his dishes in; The whole Art Military. Then he knowes, The influence of the Starres vpon his meats, And all their seasons, tempers, qualities, He has Nature in a pot, boue all the Chymists, Or airy brethren of the Rosie-crosse. He is an Architect, an Inginer, A Souldiour, a Physician, a Philosopher, A general Mathematician.

For Ben Jonson the art of cookery is the same as the art of poetry as he affirms that poets and cooks are brothers since eithers Arts is the wisdome of the mind. An idea that he also reinforces in The Staple of News (1626),
He draws all arts Out of the kitchen, but the art of poetry. Which he concludes the same with cookery. (III.i)

In Neptunes Triumph for the Return of Albion, Jonson also makes the direct connection between master-builders and master-cooks,
A Master-Cooke! Why, hes the man o men, For a Professor! he designes, he drawes, He paints, he carues, he builds, he fortifies, Makes Citadels of curious fowle and fish, Some he dri-dishes, some motes round with broths. Mounts marrowbones, cuts fifty angled custards, Reares bulwark pies, and for his outerworkes He raiseth Ramparts of immortall crust; And teacheth all the Tacticks, at one dinner:
32

Having grounded the relationship between the arts of cooking and building in synesthetic perception, the next step is to identify the cross over between the sources of dishes and buildings, from table settings to site settings, by identifying the cosmospoietic essence of the two arts. Culinary and architectural works are not simply products of a single mentality, but of one connecting buildings and dishes within an homologous structure. Dishes and buildings can be constructed through a tectonic mosaic by which any dish or building results from the assimilation and transformation of other buildings and dishes through a complex sensorial process. As creators of multi-sensorial images, when working towards their future products, do architects and cooks perceive something? The first answer that comes to mind is no, since what is designated or prepared does not exist, but the second answer is yes, since they can relate to their future buildings and dishes through a series of intermediary and intersensory steps, beginning with the reuse of leftover materials. From this point of view a Spanish paella and Saint Marks in Venice both belong to this cosmospoiesis. The sensorial culture of architects and chefs operates within a material cosmospoiesis that makes actual and possible worlds. Assimilation is a procedure of incorporation by which we ingest sinestheticly the outside world into ourselves and transform it by giving rise to a cosmospoiesis, i.e. an act of world-making (Mazzotta, 2001). Worldmaking always starts from worlds already in existence and the making is a remaking (Goodman, 1978). This speculative dealing between the virtues of architecture and cuisine is founded on the forgotten principle
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 31 NO 1

COOKING AN ARCHITECTURAL HAPPY COSMOSPOIESIS

of beatific life (vita beata). This principle governs the intellectual interface between architectural and culinary constructions and human constructs, since a harmonious intellectual merging of culinary and architectural pursuits makes life not only possible, but also happy. Happiness is a sensation that arises from a certain conscious state, namely when we are assimilated or captivated within some elating and enjoyable experience. Unhappy sensations arise when a situation becomes too complex for us to handle. Happiness quickly fades without the presence of the assimilated consciousness that has produced it. Commonly speaking, individuals seek ways to optimize their happiness. Not only does everybody agree that it is better to be happy than unhappy, but people prioritize happiness. Happiness outranks respected social aspirations such as peace and equality. A happy existence is even considered more important than social prestige or material affluence. This is not to say that happiness is considered the only and ultimate purpose. Most traditional writing on happiness gives advice on matters of living and is based on worldly wisdom and ideological conviction, but no one discusses the nature of the environment within which happiness should be promoted and nurtured. Happiness is not generally understood as a cosmospoiesis resulting from the merging of the art of living well and eating well with the art of thinking well. In this merging, the sense is that happiness implies intellectual activity and it should be a consequence but cannot be a condition in itself . When evaluating the happiness of their lives, people tend to use two more or less distinct sources of information: their situation and their thought; they rarely think about the world-making by which they live. If the pursuit of intellectual happiness is not a futile quest, by what means or steps should it be undertaken? The objective of both architectural and culinary edifices is to offer us vita beata, although one must recognize that many architects and cooks
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 31 NO 1

belonging to the present praxis deem this objective ill-fated. In order to hide the defects of their production, they tend to resist the objective of a beatific life. The ability of cooks and architects to deal with worlds beyond cultural perception becomes most evident when we consider the less obvious parts of what they put into practice. There are no dead ends in architectural and culinary imagination, but rather rings within other rings, horizons within other horizons. From the moment that a percept is conceived through different sensorial paths, we need an encyclopaedia to reveal the details of that percept and explain the interaction taking place between the materiality of things and the immateriality of thinking. The mixing of colours, sounds, flavours, social conventions, mores, liturgies, traditions and customs is the essence of a wisdom in which is not possible to distinguish between intelligible and imaginable. To understand better the power and the nature of this merging of intelligible and imaginable and the homology between architecture and cuisine we turn to Carlo Emilio Gadda (18931973) for help. There are two reasons for this. The first is very simple: one of Italys most daring experimental writers, Gadda is also an engineer with very particular views of architecture. He was an electrical engineer at the time when the Italian curricula for engineering schools included course requirements in architecture and civil engineering whatever the specialization. The second reason is that in Gaddas cosmological view, every element of a system contains within itself another system and each individual system in turn is linked to an infinite genealogy of systems. Gaddas writing style has been compared to that of Joyce, Proust and Musil. He has been labelled a modern Macaronic. Employing such devices as parodic and comic modes, learned references, dialects, deliberate misspellings and obscure constructions, he delighted in a fragmentary and incoherent language portraying a multiplicity of
33

CROSSING BOUNDARIES: ARCHITECTURE AND THE INFLUENCE OF OTHER DISCIPLINES

cosmospoiesis. With resources from a large encyclopaedia, Gadda made worlds out of other worlds. His belief in the intricacy of systems within systems, combined with an ability to link complex structures, led him to tackle the question of architectural technology by beginning to muse on how we cook rice. Italo Calvino (19231985) begins the fifth of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Multiplicity, by quoting extensively from Gaddas That Awful Mess on Via Merulana and then points out that Gadda represents the world as a knot, a tangled skein of yarn . . . without in the least diminishing the inextricable complexity (Calvino, 1988, pp. 106107). According to Calvino, Gaddas encyclopaedism operates by having a starting point, subsequently multiplying around this and encompassing horizon after horizon. Calvino quickly summarizes two short texts to formulate the point.
We should turn to shorter texts, as for example his [Gadda] recipe for Risotto alla Milanese, which is a masterpiece of Italian prose and practical advice in his description of grains of rice still partly in their husk (pericarps, as he calls them), the most appropriate casserole to use, the saffron, and the successive phase of cooking. Another text is devoted to building techniques where the use of pre-stressed concrete and hollow bricks no longer insulates houses either from heat or from noise. There follows a description both of his life in a modern building and his obsession with all the noises that assault his ears. (Calvino, 1988, p.107)

Calvinos comments about the combination of good risotto and bad buildings shows clearly how Gaddas thinking progresses within different technological worlds by mirroring technology in sensory perceptions. Gaddas goal is to unfold the system of relations between objects producing an encyclopaedia of infinite possible worlds and, by going back to genealogic and concomitant causes, his aim is to connect all the histories in one. His knowledge is not one great encyclopaedia but rather a collection of small overlapping encyclopaedias, didascalic descriptions of crafts, arts or pro34

fessions, a structure easily identifiable by reading the historical catalogue of Hoepli, a Milanese publisher of encyclopaedias. Gaddas combinatory procedure is based on solid layers of erudition drawn from the many encyclopaedic sources in his library: grammars of familiar and exotic languages, literary history, dictionaries of general botany, treatises of architecture, calligraphy, mulberry tree groves and silkworm breeding, and the famous Hoeplis Manuale dellIngeniere (Engineers Handbook) known by Italian engineers as the Colombo (1935), from the last name of its author. The resulting world corresponds to a network without a centre, a labyrinth from which there is no exit, an infinite, inferential model that is always open to new elements and tangled transformations as is a traditional dish of leftovers. Gadda wrote several pieces devoted to architecture. They range from discussion and analysis of structural and tectonic occurrences as in the case of the piece entitled On the cathedral of Como published in the Gazzetta del Popolo (17 July 1936), to the typological evolution of traditional farm settlements as in the case of the description of the morphology of the Lombardy farmhouse in an article published in Panorama (12 April 1940) entitled Terra Lombarda. Most of his writing on architecture is buried in his novels and philosophical works. His architectural fables are tangled assemblages of poetic images through which one might understand the mute and infraordinary basis for an articulate language of a happy architecture. The fable of Lady Tedium and Lord Bad Taste is told in an article entitled Pianta di Milano. Decoro dei Palazzi (Plan of Milan. Dignity of Palaces) published in the newspaper LAmbrosiano (7 January 1936). The fable begins with the identification of two allegorical figures, Lady Tedium and Lord Bad Taste, who are planning to build a city and begin by creating a school for prenatal instruction of the future builders using images of exotically monstrous animals to make sure that the yet-to-be-born builders
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 31 NO 1

COOKING AN ARCHITECTURAL HAPPY COSMOSPOIESIS

in their future careers will be able to erect architectural fiends and strangely crossbred buildings. The belief in the power of images shown to mothers during the gestation of their offspring is based on the idea of the efficaciousness of images (Freedberg, 1989). In setting up their urban and architectural misdeed, Gaddas two vicious characters are using for their nefarious purposes a classical Renaissance tenet of architectural theory: Leon Battista Albertis conjecture that every building is an animal, but instead of looking for a congruous composition of body parts their search was for disharmonious looking animals. The next step envisioned by the two dreadful sovereigns in their urban planning is an obvious identification of CIAMs (Congrs Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne) imposition of a Cartesian order, a breaking down of the complex whole of a city into suborders of manageable size which, because of their innate nature, cannot become the perfect city envisioned by Descartes in the metaphor stated at the beginning of Discourse on Method: geometric and regular as an architects plan. Lady Tedium (Mme Helene de Mandrot from La Sarraz) and Lord Bad Taste (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret better known as Le Corbusier) engender a six point battle plan, a mocking combination that Gadda had derived from the mixing of Le Corbusiers two promotions of architectural principles: the six questions proposed as plan de bataille at the 1928 Congress of La Sarraz and the 1926 Canonical Five Points of Architecture. Gaddas sarcastic description of Lady Tedium and Lord Bad Tastes rules functions by means of different tropes ranging from irony to metonymy. The architects chosen by the ruling duo did not receive any established classical education; instead they were trained to follow only the proportional oddities ruled by the absurdity of building code dimensioning combined with the requirements of market speculation. The architects gained professional awards
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 31 NO 1

and recognition for negative architectural outcomes, ranging from the negation of acoustic, thermal and visual considerations to the metaphorical and literal squaring of every shape.
They even produced some dromedaries with three humps, eternal glory of the industrious city. Everything was so tedious that the Queen suggested to the King to establish a knighthood order to be bestowed upon the most unimpressive and boring architects of the kingdom and the most asinine dunces of the buildership school, in order to set them up as an example to the others. That is how the order of the R.P.R. (Rational Pathetic Rectangle) came to be. It had five degrees or classes of distinctions, with at the top the Great Garter of the Bolli-Barbella (Hot-asHell-Bitter-Cold1) and at the bottom, the Knights Cross of the Two and Eighty-eight.2

The acronym RPR indicating the order of Rational Pathetic Rectangle has a strange resonance with the acronym BBPR used to identify a Milanese architectural firm. The firm of G.L. Banfi, L. Belgiojoso, E. Peressutti and E.N. Rogers was founded in 1932, and in 1935 they joined CIAM. The members of the firm began to study Architecture at the Milanese Politecnico in 1928 in a class of only eight students. Banfi, Belgjoioso and Rogers were also together as students at Liceo Parini, the most prestigious high school of Milan (19231928) and Gadda was their Professor of mathematics and physics. The BBPR firm went from being an enthusiast follower of CIAM to be the one which designed the Torre Velasca, a mixeduse skyscraper with a precise regional look that was presented at the 1955 Otterlo meeting. Torre Velasca was the igniting cause for the questioning of CIAMs principles and the beginning of Team Ten. Gaddas means of fighting the army of bad builders and ghastly architects is the use of olfactory memory by recognizing how higherlevel processing of olfactory information, which allows us to select proper food, will also get rid of the architecture imposed by Lady Tedium and Lord Bad Taste.
35

CROSSING BOUNDARIES: ARCHITECTURE AND THE INFLUENCE OF OTHER DISCIPLINES

Nevertheless, in spite of all the Queens doing, in few parts of the city a number of rebels still can be found; possibly in the most unlikely corners; they survive in the closest intelligence with the enemy, while the enemy, trusting them, sets up its siege. Who is the enemy? Who are its militias? I should say they are the truths of nature, the simple and continual necessities of humans: nevertheless, they give to the city of Lady Tedium the subtle charm of life. They promote into it the circulation of lifes own saps: that flow of good blood and good sense that still continues to run through the grayish citys quarters, in spite of every obstacle introduced by the builders.

hung snipes, then you feel the tedium dissipate as in a gust of wind. You find yourself in the forest and surrounded by beech trees, or maybe among the poplar trees of the Ticino River or in the rice pads veiled by thin fog. There you hear the rustle of the hare running wildly away, or you see the hunting dog pointing, lifting high its front paw, all muddy and quivering: or you see it sniffing and pointing: then you hear rubber boots splashing in the mud, and the morning shots of the hunt, barely a small puff of smoke, flying from the barrels of the guns.

A synaesthetic presence of perceptions fights the battle. Gadda, tried in the senses, ironically points out prosaically new solutions appealing to an ecumenical theatre of the perception that allows enjoyable vision and hearing, gratifying tact and smell from the natural to the artificial, in a crossfire of sensual perception triggering memories able to eradicate tastelessness and dreariness. The network of synaesthetic perceptions brewing in the urban pot poetically wins over the sovereigns, Bad Taste and Tedium.
Colors, shapes, configurations of nature and industry have been able to penetrate the walledin citadel. Provisions and textiles, cabbages and horses. Poultry and steam turbines, tomatoes and corkscrews. Good old fashioned beds, good spring boxes, old fashioned brick walls, and, alas, the old whip cracking on the horses rumps. That is the enemy. And wherever the enemy has arrayed bluefish and flounders, carps and trout, where sea bass, lobsters and eels still alive gasp for water, where calamari and squids lay together in their inky slush, right there the delight of the oceans, of the lakes, of the rivers, is released and it chases away the armies of Bad Taste and of Tedium: in our mind, through the nostrils the power of fantasy is turned on and fantasies of rivers and of fountains and showers are turned on and apparitions of dripping choruses of Tritons and Sea nymphs with endless retinues of all kind of fresh fish of every taste and flavor from salted or muddy sweet waters, and all of them mischievously slapping their exquisite tails, as they usually do. And wherever you see, either laying on marble slabs or hanging from hooks in the poultry shops, those darling chickens, turkeys, guinea fowl, silvery pheasants, thrushes or well
36

Cooks and architects essential intermediary role between humans and places, between individuals and their construction of cosmological structures is unfortunately not always obvious, even to most sensitive observers. To see architects merely as designers of buildings is a sensible reaction but it does not encompass the most significant function of architects work. The majority of people do not see architects and cooks as intellectuals able to operate within realms outside the perceptual boundaries of senses demarcated by cultural regions and enforced by social customs, collective behaviours and language constructions. A primary feature of the interlaced cosmos of architecture and cuisine is its penetration of the veil separating material and immaterial existence, allowing an intimate relation between gods and men and a metaphysical extension of space. A second feature is its eschatological expansion of time, and, third, its restoration of equilibrium between human action and divine destiny. However, as Gadda has masterly told us, this can only be achieved in the realm of the everyday and the cross-modality of human senses.

NOTES
1. The ironic effect of the title is achieved by the homograph word Bolli which means both boiling and stamps. Barbella is a common Italian last name but similar to the Milanese dialect word barbel meaning teeth chattering with the cold. 2. The Cross of the Two and Eighty-eight is a reference to 2.90 metres, the minimum standard
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 31 NO 1

COOKING AN ARCHITECTURAL HAPPY COSMOSPOIESIS

building code requirement for ceiling-height in Gaddas time from which were taken away two centimetres as acceptable building error.

REFERENCES Calvino, Italo (1988) Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Castelot, Andr (1972) LHistoire table, si la cuisine mtait conte . . .. Paris: Plon. Collins, Peter (1965) Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture 17501959. London: Faber and Faber.

Colombo, Giuseppe (1935) Manuale dellIngeniere. Milan: Hoepli (rst edition 1908). Freedberg, David (1989) The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goodman, Nelson (1978) Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Mazzotta, Giuseppe (2001) Cosmospoiesis, The Renaissance Experiment.Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Price, Cedric with Isozaki, Arata, Keiller, Patrick and Obrist, Hans Ulrich (2003) Re: CP. Basel: Birkhauser Verlag.

BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 31 NO 1

37

You might also like