Part of the beauty of an architectural education is that it provides you with design skills that can be applied to a wide variety to jobs. So when it came time for Kharkov University Architecture School graduate Dinara Kasko to select a career path, she chose to pursue something a little bit sweeter: architectural pastry chef.
When you come to think of it, most of the food on your plate has a history behind it - a long journey that we are unable to describe. In her book Food Routes: Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics of Eating (2019), Robyn Shotwell Metcalfe refers to the paradox of fish being caught in New England, exported to Japan, and then shipped back as sushi, revealing a large and complex network that nobody can see when they buy takeout Japanese food at the local grocery store.
As populations continue to migrate from rural to urban areas, space is at a premium. Many settlements are becoming ever-more congested – with adequate, affordable housing in short supply and transport systems struggling to serve their respective residents. But as much the conversation about urbanization is about people, it is sometimes also about the animals that come with those people – urban livestock that play a key role at providing sustenance on an individual level, in addition to becoming an avenue for communal trade.
Do you know what urban farms are? Have you ever thought about growing your own food at home in your garden or in specialized freezers? Transporting food for consumption in cities is one of the major environmental (and financial) pollution problems in the world today.
Selected among five invited architects including OMA, Snøhetta, 3XN, and Toyo Ito & Associates., the BIG-designed building for the Basque Culinary Center, is a new food tech hub located in San Sebastian, Spain. TheGastronomy Open Ecosystem (GOe) is in fact a 9,000 m2 project that seeks to push forward the art and science of gastronomic innovation, bringing together food start-ups, researchers, and chefs. Currently in progress, the building will focus on the development of alternative proteins, agricultural robotics, the prevention of food waste, and much more.
On March 31st, the Health and Nutrition Day is celebrated in Brazil, factors that are gaining more and more notoriety in the society in which we live. After more than two years living through the ups and downs of the Covid-19 pandemic and facing the evident need for a healthier, more active and community reality, it is important to reflect on how architecture and urbanism can become tools for accessing healthier daily lives.
Food cultivation is one of the great historical milestones of our society's development. The knowledge of agriculture was fundamental for the evolution of a nomadic society into a sedentary civilization. Centuries later, agricultural production has become one of the main contributors to the organization of the land. This phenomenon can be seen in the aerial images we have selected below.
YACademy launches the first edition of Architecture for Food, a high-level training course offering 8 scholarships and internships in internationally-renowned architectural firms.
102 hours of lessons, a 30-hour workshop, lectures and placement opportunities in internationally-renowned architectural firms like L22, MVRDV, Snøhetta, and Barozzi Veiga.
3D printing itself is no longer a new technology, but that hasn’t stopped researchers and innovators around the world from coming up with new applications and opportunities. Some experiments with new materials have been driven by sustainability concerns and others are simply the result of imagination and creativity. Others have chosen to invest their time utilizing more traditional materials in new ways. Materials, however, are just the beginning. Researchers have developed new processes that allow the creation of objects that were previously impossible to print and, on a larger scale, new building typologies are being tested - including a Mars habitat!
Universal Favourite have developed a range of modular chocolates Complementary that are formed in 3D printed moulds to satisfy any architect with a sweet tooth. The architectural forms have been developed to establish a connection between the two pieces to be eaten as one, complementing one and other.
Ice Cream Books is a conceptual art project with a rather predictable, if not delightful, output: "great reads paired with frozen desserts." The work is beguilingly simple and stunningly direct – wafer cones act as columns and space frames, ziggurats and buttresses, all supporting popular tomes.
And so, for little other reason than pure gratification—and to ease you into your Monday morning—enjoy these books paired with (largely structurally sound) frozen desserts!
Earlier this month, The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman tackled a common narrative in the architecture and urban planning community. It goes like this: once upon a time, in the 1990s, Medellín, Colombia, was the “murder of the capital of the world.” Then thoughtful architectural planning connected the slums to the city. Crime rates plummeted and, against the odds, the city was transformed.
Well, yes and no.
What happened in Medellín is often called “Urban Acupuncture,” a way of planning that pinpoints vulnerable sectors of a city and re-energizes them through design intervention. But Kimmelman reports that while the city has made considerable strides in its commitment to long-term, urban renewal, it has prioritized huge, infrastructural change over smaller solutions that could truly address community needs.
Urban Acupuncture needn’t be expensive, wieldy, or time-consuming. But it does require a detailed understanding of the city – its points of vulnerability, ‘deserts’ of services, potential connection points – and a keen sensitivity to the community it serves.
So what does this have to do with food? Our food system presents seemingly unsurmountable difficulties. In Part II, I suggested that design could, at the very least, better our alienated relationship with food. But what if we used the principles of Urban Acupuncture to bring Agriculture to the fore of urban planning? What if we used pinpointed, productive landscapes to revitalize abandoned communities and help them access healthy foods? What if we design our cities as points of Urban “Agripuncture”?
What would our cities look like with Urban Agripuncture? Read more after the break…
Missed Part I and Part II? You can find the whole series here.
Everyday, in the city of London, 30 million meals are served. That’s millions of trucks arriving to millions of stores and restaurants in a complex, tightly scheduled orchestration of production, transportation, and distribution.
We take it for granted that this system will never fail. But what would happen if these trucks were stopped? As unrealistic as it sounds, it’s happened – and not so long ago.
In 1989, over 57% of Cuba’s caloric intake was imported from the Soviet Union. When it collapsed, Cuba became, virtually overnight, solely responsible for feeding its population – including the 2.2 million in the city of Havana. [1] What happened next is an incredible story of resilience and innovation.
As our world becomes increasingly urbanized, our farms increasingly endangered, and our reliance upon fossil fuels increasingly undesirable, the question of how we will feed billions of future city dwellers is no mere thought experiment – it’s an urgent reality.
The story of Cuba offers us an interesting question: What would our cities look like if we began to place food production/distribution as the primary focus of urban design? And what will it take to make this vision a reality?
More on how Food can shape our cities, after the break…
