A realm of architectural delight:
the gastronomical analogy as a novel tactic to achieve
Marco Frascari March 30, 2008
11:24 AM
sustainability
My aim is to claim that eating and drinking, as sources of creative imagination and
aesthetic pleasure, are connected to the creative process in architecture, and hold a double
denomination integrating the good with the beautiful. Gastronomic and architectural
creations are mutually enhancing and mutually inspiring in their common pursuit of
beauty. Exemplifying the values of sustainability and sustenance in the culture of
architecture and cuisine, eating, drinking and building considered on the same plate
contributes to finer, richer understanding by shedding a cross-cultural light on the study
of traditional architecture and contemporary searches for sustainable architecture.
Colors, sounds and flavors are the essence of a knowledge that cannot distinguish
between intelligible and imaginable.
When in Venice, a traveling architect should not fail to visit Scarpa’s Olivetti Store, in
Saint Mark’s Square, and he or she should not miss the occasion of tasting two Venetian
dishes: one is the risi col nero de sepa (a rice dish where the sauce is prepared with squid
ink) and the other, a Dogal dish served during Venetian spring holidays, is risi e bisi, a
kind of risotto all’onda—undulating risotto, that is a soupy risotto fluid enough to form a
wave on the dish when served—tossed with fresh baby pees. The critical synesthetic
imagination, the magic poiesis beyond the adding of squid ink or tiny peas to the rice is
the same by which Scarpa choose to substitute the pebbles with small monochromatic
murrine to the traditional mix of mortar and of the terrazzo paste of the Olivetti shop.i
The comparison between risotto and terrazzo floor is not only a accidental formal
analogy, but also a technological correspondence: Amy Tan, in The Kitchen God’s Wife,
(Ivy Book, New York 1992) tells how in local pisé construction, a soup of egg-whites and
mud is spilled on the floor for three consecutive days to make a rammed-earth floor dust
free and shiny-hard as porcelain and how crumbling pisé walls can be made clean and
insect free by spreading a sticky porridge of rice and mud on the interior of the walls (pp.
245–246).
To persevere in my humorously telling of edifying stories regarding the tellurian and
cosmic triplets that are architecture, alchemy and cuisine, I must return to the table at the
Trattoria del Gaffaro. The event is again one of Scarpa’s communal lunches and this time
the special dish ordered by him for his cohort and prepared by the patient chef of the
Gaffaro is the “risotto col tastasal.” Prepared traditionally in the Venetian mainland this
unusual seasonal fare is usually cooked to make sure that homemade salami-blend of
pork ground meat, salt and spices is properly done and balanced in the taste before to
stuff it into the casing. As an alchemic procedure of analogies, the cooking with rice
achieves the same result of the evaporation that takes place in the dry cellar where the
salami are going to be stored and although the final flavor is totally different the balance
of spices and salt in the stuffing can be easily detected.
Making a few considerations on the strange nature and role of the food to be eaten—a
fictitious victual (res ficta), to unveil something hidden, the salt, in something (res facta)
that in the end will be completely different from the preparation tasted--Scarpa digressed
by drawing a parallel between the function of the risotto col tastasal. A set of
architectural drawings is completely different from a building but its purpose is to taste in
advance the architecture of a future building. This speculation lead to a further
comparison by considering how one risotto is sufficient to taste several potential salamis
and many future outputs can be judged how through one single sampling. Further
elaborating the point of relationship of one to many for an understanding of architecture
Scarpa uttered a warning that might sound as paradox in our age of smorgasbord teaching
of architecture. Scarpa’s macaronic paradox was that to teach architecture it was crucial
to tutor architectural students about the work of a single architect or better to educate the
students about the architecture of one single specific building. Undoubtedly, he was
already thinking of the building by Giovanni Maria Falconetto that was going to be the
topic of the afternoon lecture he was going to deliver. As typical of that period of
Scarpa’s teaching, the lecture was going to be presented using no slides, but just drawing
plans, sections and elevations on the blackboard. He also exploited during his lecturing
any kind of analogical references that he could found looking around in the classroom as
he did in the Falconetto lecture by directing everybody attention to the rather beautiful
knees of a female student sitting with crossed legs in the front row strongly illuminated
by an above spotlite. He pointed to them to visibly demonstrate how the play of light
worked on the surfaces of the moldings of the only building of Falconetto he analyzed
during his lecture. Built in 1530, the selected building was Porta Savonarola one of Padua
city gates was in itself equivalent to a “risotto col tastasal” since it was employed to
“taste” the architecture of a future building, the Odeo Cornaro, a gateway to melodic
contemplation, on which Falconetto was working together with his powerful patron
Alvise Cornaro.ii The Odeo, an octagonal central plan building modeled after the
“studio” of Marcus Terentius Varro. Both the buildings are vaulted structures, with an
octagonal room at their center to deal with pneuma, the salt of life. In the case of the
Odeo, the pneuma not only gives the proper ventilation and temperature during the
changes of seasons but also allows the physical and the spiritual to merge in a
decompression chamber through the arias of chamber music performances played in it—
Odeo, in Greek, meant a small construction for musical performances. Porta Savonarola
is in the same condition of synesthetic merging, the octagonal room a negative tower of
winds is the space necessary for urban decompression filtrating and merging the “odors”
of the countryside and the city.iii
i Murrine are sliced rods of layered Murano glass mostly known for their use in the
internal ornamentation of millefiori glass-paperweights. The rod is built as the old
system for candles.
ii Giuseppe Fiocco, Alvise Cornaro, il suo tempo e le sue opere, Vicenza : Neri Pozza
Editore, [1965
iii I am using the word “odor” with the same pneumatic meaning as in locution “odor of
sanctity.”