The Meaning of Butter for Architecture
Josephine Sassu
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Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2024
An Essay
The Meaning of Butter for Architecture
In Oslo, butter is something we find in a colourful plastic container with a plastic lid in the cooled disk of a supermarket. Some butters come wrapped in silver foil which is covered in a colourful print and pictures of buttercups in the sun. Stocked on top of each other in the shelves, we stand there, facing a few hundred little packages, averagely containing 250g of different buttery products. No one has really time to even read the names of all packages, the presented choices are too overwhelming. Our eyes are trained to quickly scan the cooled shelves and find the colour combination of our go-to butter. Some are yellow and green, others yellow and red and some are golden and green and some are white and red – and then there are those that aren’t butter at all but pretend to be according to their placement in the cooled shelves. Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson describes the cultural hearitage and meaning of butter in his reflection work Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End.
Fig. 1: https://digitaltmuseum.no/021027791000/oskje
Fig. 2: https://digitaltmuseum.no/011022545898/smorboks-med-lokk
“In Scandinavia, butter was originally used as a
way of making the most out of the short summer’s enormous abundance. Butter is one of the nicest ways of preparing milk for storage, which is basically what it is, even though people tend to forget that today, and regard it as something produced all year round just because it is good for cooking with.
[...] In Sweden, butter was so valuable as a trade commodity that you could even pay your taxes with it, and along with cheese it was also many farmers’ only way to get any cash income into the household. Typically the butter was made in the chalet near the summer pasture by first skimming the cream from the top of the milk (the skimmed milk later becoming gammelost), then storing it in wooden vessels for a few days until enough was obtained to churn it. During this time the cream would have fermented from the abundance of microbes in the pores of the wood and in the atmosphere in the stone cellar where it was kept. The cream was then churned in a wooden churner, washed and salted heavily. In this form it would keep in the cellar for a very long time. In the restaurant we have kept butter for up to a year. It becomes more and more rancid and powerful in terms of aroma the older it gets, but it doesn’t become inedible as quickly as you might think.”
Nilsson, M. (2020). Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End. Phaidon Press Ltd. p.306
However, the difference between modern mainstream butter and butter of the past goes far beyond the packaging. It is the cows themselves that had been redesigned. The new age cows are called Norsk Rødt Fe, lovingly referred to as NRF within the industry. Instead of only giving a couple of hundred litres of milk (and for most of the year none) like the old local breeds did, NRF gives up to 10.000 litres of milk every year – making it quite evident for the dairy industry which cows to breed and keep. From the 1960s, NRFs had become the dominating milk cow breed in all of Norway (Vangen, 2023). This change affected the way we saw land and the way we built in the landscape.
On being critical
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This is not to discard modernity and the way processes take place nowadays. Neither do I want to convince you to stomp heavy cream to butter with wooden tools in the evening and use the remaining butter milk to bake breakfast pastries (even though I really like the utopic notion of having communal cows and making home-made butter). Contexts of the past were more local, not global. Nevertheless, my work does not aim to compare needs and methods from the past with contemporary needs and methods. When talking about the simplicity of life in the past, one will nearly always taste a note of criticality towards modern consumerism. And even though there might be a tone of nostalgia swinging in the words of the author, things were not necessarily better before. Life was not as harmonious as the rose-painting ornamentations we find on butter boxes from a century ago. The way we live now is an answer to wanting life to be easier after the first and second world war famines. It is an answer to wanting to know how far we can get with exploring technology and to wanting to live as carelessly as we can in the confinement of our apartment after working 9-5.
Our world consists of happenings touching onto different realms. On top of that, can each realm be seen through different lenses that can be of social, ecological, economical or other quality. Whatever fields we divide the world into, do not exist in isolation, in fact, they exist in the context and presence of each other. It is impossible to see where one realm ends and another one starts. And it is impossible to place a happening into clearly one of them without acknowledging its impact on other areas. Shortly said: everything is connected and everything influences something. In this thought we are mostly moving through the realm of culture, agriculture, cuisine and architecture/design. Design is the omnipresent structure that connects them. Sometimes design makes it easier to understand the connection between product, culture and origin and sometimes the task of design is to hide what connects them. Design is a way to communicate – power, a lifestyle, a belief, a way of doing something.
Butter gives us the possibility to reflect. It leads our gaze towards what has been and why. It allows us to encounter choices of form and material with a deeper understanding. Food and architecture shape our lives more than we maybe want to acknowledge. Culinary and spatial factors define how we feel in our surroundings and how we feel inside our bodies. We become what we eat – and we also become our surroundings. Does the future we want to live in consist of standardised pre-fabricated solutions? Imagine your life if you never were to experience something outside the average, the mediocre. It would result in an unbearable feeling of numbness. If we never experienced a truly exciting taste or a truly exciting space, we simply would not know how to imagine it either. We can only ever really imagine what we have experienced ourselves – with all our senses. It is the tangibility of experiencing something extraordinary, that makes it possible to survive within the average.
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True joy does not lie packaged in a super market shelf as one of many hundred tidily stacked plastic boxes containing a different type of same. We do not want to live our lives between buildings and spaces that are average. In that averageness lies a the sentiment on having given up.
True joy lies in daring something that is different and feels like it takes courage to do. We only get to feel a sense of accomplishment if what we wanted to achieve felt scary in the start.​​​ Culinary spatial practice is about desiring the extraordinary. Extraordinarily good butter and extraordinarily exciting spaces.
