The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
From processing plants to restaurant chains to the dinner table, architecture engages with food production at every stage, forming the landscapes in which it is grown, slaughtered, manufactured, distributed, sold, shared and eaten. This week's Reading List brings together the spaces food creates and how the practices of production, cooking and eating intertwine with the shapes of our daily lives. And while the monumental plastic doughnuts of fast-food architecture take the art of place-making to another level, the collective cooking and eating within our own homes has also long been a playground for creating and connecting around a good meal
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Come dine with me: the dinner party, art, and revolution, AR October 2018, Rahel Aima
‘As with the Futurist restaurant, diners would eschew conventional cutlery and instead cut using a scalpel, or spear food with a screwdriver. Is there any better metaphor for building community, for dining together?’
Kitchen aid: care through collective cookery, AR March 2021, Gabriela Aquije Zegarra
‘Through the act of commensality, or sharing food with others, tables and kitchens can be seen as everyday care infrastructures that link multiple scales of the food system: from rural to urban, local to global, production to consumption’
Chicago meatspace, AR August 2015, Thomas Mical
‘The narratives of social significance of the point source of modernity in the corner butcher shop, before refrigeration, and the move from passive to active systems of ‘thermal delight’, staged the rise of the grocery store’
Cake architecture: the design of desserts, AR January 2015, James Haldane
‘The structural analogy between these nuptial centrepieces and building is obvious enough – the batter as an edible concrete, the thick icing a decorative stucco, and the stacked tiers professing a language appropriated from the Classical orders’
Comfort eating: the greasy spoon, AR October 2018, Edwina Attlee
‘These cafés, with their nailed-down furniture, unchanging menus and lack of pretension, might be thought to epitomise a somewhat bland nostalgia, a tepid balm for those who like things to be the way they used to be’
Conspicuous consumption: fast-food architecture, AR October 2018, Mimi Zeiger
‘But restaurant trends now emphasise lifestyle over sign, leading to increasingly bespoke designs. Your burger now comes with a side of personal values – community, sustainability, and, despite heart-stopping calorie counts, health’
Book of the month: The Sausage of the Future, AR October 2018, Jon Astbury
‘The sausage is perhaps the ultimate ready-meal, capable of containing numerous necessary food groups and ingredients, in many cases shelf-stable and eminently pocketable’
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Lead image: Conceived during pandemic quarantine, Kate Pincus-Whitney’s vivid painting I Heard a Fly Buzz, is one of a repertoire of artworks celebrating food and the theatre of the dinner table. Credit: Cary Whittier / courtesy of the Artist and Fredericks & Freiser
