TASTE
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| Chelsea Barracks, Quinlan Terry, 2008 (source)
In the current economic crisis potentially expensive experimental proposals may be overlooked in favour of buildable, cost-effective ones, as tested methodologies are safer bets. But why would a member of a commissioning body resist supporting a project if cost is not a concern?
Prince Charles was recently involved in halting Richard Rogers’ scheme for Chelsea Barracks by directly contacting the Qatari royal family (the owners of the site) to lobby for an alternate Classical proposal by Quinlan Terry. Prince Charles’ architectural taste appears to privilege how well the style of the proposal relates to the style of the surrounding area, rather than how the scheme relates strategically to its surroundings. Here taste enters the design debate when the origins of an architectural form do not appear to be superficially justifiable. In this case, the very factor that can challenge the Prince’s position is what he has taken issue with—that is context. Not whether a proposal relates to its context, but rather how it is relating. Because the style of the proposal does not reflect the style of its surroundings, the proposal is then deemed to be out of place, undermining and conflicting with what the Prince has determined to be good design.
If good taste manifests itself in respecting and maintaining social and formal norms, what is its place in architecture in regards to experimental design? Is poor taste within the context of a recession and global warming to design aimlessly while wasting materials? Where style is concerned in relation to taste, what is most important is how a design relates to a context on a purely formal level. Perhaps then, poor taste is something that is applied for the sake of agreeing with a context on a superficial level, rather than for strategic reasons, or alternatively when a design conflicts with its context.
Fionnuala Heidenreich
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Still from Peas, Wolfgang Tillmans, 2003 (source)
For Immanuel Kant, taste is both personal and beyond reasoning. Perhaps this explains Kant’s culinary desires which include peas, turnips, cod, caviar and Göttingen sausages. Through the careful assemblage of ingredients, an individual is able to satisfy their unique palette.
Cooking, much like architecture finds its form through building. Both professions draw upon a plethora of raw materials to assemble their basic elements into entities that evolve and endure in the form of memorable temperatures, textures and tastes.
Given the similarities between architecture and the culinary arts, could taste be the next frontier to be explored by architects? Beyond appealing to a consumer’s visual sensibilities, companies such as Ikea are branding their retail spaces through the creation of unique scents as a means of cementing their identity, perhaps taste is next in line as a novel purveyor of atmospheric potential.
Erandi de Silva
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3 Responses to “TASTE”
Lick, lick. Hi Adam! Thanks for mentioning this article. Of particular interest and relevance to the above post is the fourth lesson from Ruy’s article which states that:
“…taste is not entirely in the mouth [as] seeing is not entirely in the eye…Design has been heavily influenced by the classification of the senses. The dubious but commonly held notion that each of the senses is an independent pathway has lead to a correspondingly dubious strategy for engaging individual senses (usually sight) through representations – this smells like, this sounds like, etc. Experience itself is never as simple, and our sensory apparatus is far more complex than is suggested by the widely assumed categories of the senses. Acknowledging that experience is fundamentally multi-nodal and that the sensory apparatus is a synthetic amalgam of the sense categories, other possibilities that do not rely as much on strategies of representation may open up for the designer.”
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Erandi, check out “Lessons from Molecular Gastronomy” by David Ruy in Log 17 (http://www.anycorp.com/log.php?id=35), its a surprisingly lyrical exploration, via MG, of how scientific tools, technology and techniques can be used creatively and intuitively at the service of sensory pleasure and phenomenal delight, rather than using scientific tools and jargon as architects tend to do, as quasi-scientific self justification with no ends other than the rigour of the process itself. I don’t know if its the same for you, but when a building really knocks me out, it does feel as though I am being fed a dish that’s both satisfying my hunger, and setting the palette alight…