A personal design library and a curated reference point: a way to communicate aesthetic direction, patinated materiality and design history. I am personally extremely interested in the social patina of an object, what it represented in its historical context and what it represent today. To me, it is about telling a story and creating belonging within a space. The Sassu Archive of Public Treasures Inspired by Auktionstipset , this archive functions as a personal design library and a curated reference point: a way to communicate aesthetic direction, patinated materiality and design history. I am personally extremely interested in the social patina of an object, what it represented in its historical context and what it represent today. To me, it is about telling a story and creating belonging within a space. Symbolic value and cultural context will always silently accompany any object, so I believe in choosing it thoughtfully. Moreover, I think it’s important to understand what design already exists (“Know the blueprint!! ”) and work with existing pieces whenever the project allows. I really don’t believe in having to “reinvent the wheel” within furniture production each year and each collection, there are plenty of pieces that already do their job. And many of those show, frankly speaking, a deeper understanding of artisanship, quality and functionality than much of today’s furniture. All images and item descriptions featured in this gallery are sourced from Auctionet and the respective auction houses represented on their platform. Copyright and all related rights remain with the original owners. This website does not claim ownership of any of this material; it is presented here solely as a curated, personal selection highlighting items of interest. https://auctionet.com Louise Schouwenberg & Hella Jongerius:

Photo documentation of the built environment, the way people interact with it and style. New York, Svalbard, Sardinia, Berlin, Tokyo. I think of these pictures as postcards, a personal archive of contemporary life. Photographic Documentation of Contemporary Culture Svalbard , 2026 New York , 2024 Sogni Sardi Colorati , 2025 Sogni Sardi Già Passati , 2025 Zu Hause in Berlin , 2025

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. The Meaning of Butter for Architecture Josephine Sassu 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 Fig. 3: https://oda.com/no/products/125-tine-ekte-smor/ “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 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. 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. SASSU: Culinary Spatial Practice

Sassu Studio About My practice emerges from a multidisciplinary, research-driven approach, with the human experience at its core. I create spatial concepts that translate identities and intentions into the character, atmosphere and materiality of a space. In other words, I specialise in abstracting processes or values from other fields and transforming them into spatial language. Working with the character or essence of the space, I use my practice to tell stories of what has been and what can come. There is a certain honesty to choosing materials that honor a site’s history while shaping spaces that are durable, sustainable and authentic to the future. This way of working creates a strong sense of belonging and a genuine connection between space and site. I truly believe that spaces should carry meaning beyond aesthetics. We owe it to the people who spend so many hours in the spaces we create, whether at home or at work.

A collection of postcards/ visual memoire from New York, November to December 2024. Everyday happenings, quirks, culture. Call it visual ethnography or street photography — this is how I saw and documented Manhattan. This series is about urban situations. The photographs are meant to be seen in the presence of one another. It is a documentation work of style and architecture, meant to preserve moments of cultural contemporaneity for the future. Captured with a Leica Q2.​ Manhattan A collection of postcards/ visual memoire from New York, November to December 2024. Everyday happenings, quirks, culture. Call it visual ethnography or street photography—this is how I saw and documented Manhattan. This series is about urban situations. The photographs are meant to be seen in the presence of one another. It is a documentation work of style and architecture, meant to preserve moments of cultural contemporaneity for the future. Captured with a Leica Q2. Descriptions become visible when clicking on the picture.

Josephine Sassu Oslo National Academy of the Arts , 2024 What Is Culinary Spatial Practice? An introduction to my master thesis within interior architecture Essentially, I wondered how interior architecture can enhance a culinary experience and contribute to a deeper connection to the served dishes and the stories behind them. Food Space Culinary spatial practice is the intersection between food and space. It is space created around and for the experience of food. This project explores the meeting between a culinary experience and interior of a space at the moment of dinner. Through essays – attempts – I focus on the movement of Nordic cuisine wondering how design can enhance the culinary experience of the eater. Through the act of translation, I wonder whether notions of seasonality, locality and emotivity can benefit design and capture the essence of a space. Balancing between critical theory, conceptual practice and personal sensibilities, this project serves to open a discussion on how we design culinary spaces of the present and eventually of the future. How can we design spaces for and around food in a more meaningful way? How can culinary values from Nordic cuisine be translated into design? Introduction A meal contains so much more than its ingredients, it contains sentiments of contentment, of feeling home and belonging and fascination for what is strange and new. It contains memories of what have have experienced and memories of what we do not know yet. A meal can be seen as a bearer of culture in its purest and densest form – for the good and for the bad, mirroring the contemporaneity. A meal and the way we eat is closely connected to the way we experience the world. The evening dinner emerges as a focal point of cultural and social importance. Unlike breakfasts and lunches, which are often constrained by the rigours of daily schedules, dinners possess a unique fluidity. They begin at twilight and, and if one wishes, they can extend into the early hours – until breakfast. Dinners have the notion of something ceremonial, an implicit invitation to partake in a shared experience that transcends mere sustenance. They are not just meals but rituals that foster a sense of community at the close of the day. The evening meal serves as a platform for the difficult conversations that demand more room than a lunch break can afford. Here, topics of significance find their voice, from personal dilemmas to global issues. Historically, dinners have been at the heart of pivotal events. In certain cases, a dinner does not simply signify the end of a day, it can mark the end an era while making the guests aware of the transition with a blend of reflection and anticipation. Take for instance one of the world’s most known dinners – the Last Supper. Jesus invites his disciples to dine together one last time, announcing his soon to come death – and thereby symbolising the dawn of a new time. Alliances are forged, tempers ignite, and global politics shift—all over the course of a dinner. Consider also the Rothschild dinner party in December 1972, hosted by Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. It was not just a lavish feast with a surrealist theme but a gathering of influential minds, where conversations likely shaped the future of cultural and political landscapes. In this light, the evening meal is more than just a part of the day—it is a moment where history can pivot, and the future can be subtly, yet profoundly, influenced. The evening dinner, therefore, sits at an interesting border in time. In this project, I focus on what it can mean in terms of interior architecture to create spaces for the ritual of dining. With the focus being put on the act of experiencing food, I wondered how personal sensitivities could be facilitated within a space and how the how the spatial experience could enhance the culinary experience. I was particularly interested in whether it would be possible to transpose values that we encounter within the world of cuisine to ways of working as an interior architect. As a designer, I see myself as a facilitator, creating communication between objects, spaces and people. In this project it was to facilitate a dialogue between food and space. This is an act of translation between two realms. What could culinary space entail? Looking for answers and possibilities, I approached culinary space from different scales – visible within the research and the result. I listened to farmers, spoke to chefs, artists and ceramicists, collected existing knowledge from writings of architects and theoreticians to continue building ideas on and conducted field studies from the perspective of being a guest. Essays become my way of collecting ways to talk about the atmosphere of a space for dining. Through those descriptions I try to connect language used in culinary contexts with language used to describe architecture and spaces. The result is a collection of essays – attempts – with thoughts and observations exploring the relationship between space and food in the Northern Region, with focus on Norway. Although this work engages with various theoretical concepts, its primary focus is on how these ideas apply to the practical field of interior architecture and design. Hence, the project is meant to be read and understood within the context of design practice, rather than purely as a theoretical exploration. In this project, artistic research is used as a practical tool to build a foundation for design practice. It is a creative combination of research, translation and adaption to strengthen and refine the process of designing spaces for culinary experiences. The project uses a conceptual framework informed by critical theories and ideas to better understand design in the intersection of food and space. My goal was not to create a technical and concrete guide on how to design spaces for Nordic Cuisine. Consequently, this work does not solve a space at a specific site. Moreover, exploring the spatial phenomena of kitchen or eating within the confinement of a home are deeply interested to me, however, I plan on exploring those in other future projects. As of now, the collection is a process or a prototype – fluid and shapable, ready to be discussed, enriched with new perspectives, remodelled and improved. And that is exactly what I want it to be in this stage: a work that leads to a discussion on what culinary place is and what it can be, giving the reader a chance to reflect on their own encounters with spaces built around and for the experience of food. I believe that this artistic research can be of interest for various parties – those from the field of interior architecture, design and gastronomy and those that see space as an ingredient of a meal. Explore the background and referential framework of my work here [While I am working on this site, breaking my master thesis down into quickly graspable key thoughts and outcomes, you are welcome to read it in its wholeness as a pdf. Click on the PDF symbol to open it in another tab.] SASSU: Culinary Spatial Practice

Projects within art and design from my years at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts Archive of works from my time at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and Krabbesholm Interior Architecture & Adaptive Transformations All Eyes on Nybrua Sápmi Forever Restaurant Sleipnir What is Culinary Spatial Practice? Object Design Somebody Chair Candide Chair Art Would You Mind? Prussian Blue Porn Kunst som Terapi Huub26

"Somebody" is a three legged chair with small feet inspired by a Charles Bukowski poem. Somebody

Artistic research exploring how interior architecture and Nordic cuisine inform restaurant design and shape future dining experiences. Josephine Sassu Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2024 A guided tour through my thesis: What Is Culinary Spatial Practice? This project investigates how interior design can shape and enhance the experience of eating. Through a series of short essays, I look at Nordic cuisine and explore how ideas as seasonality, locality and emotivity can inform the design of culinary spaces. The work sits between theory and practice and aims to open a conversation about how we design the dining environments of today and tomorrow. The most immediate spaces around food are often plates. In the following I have chosen plates that either symbolically represent a thought or that are aesthetically associated with it. Through this artistic research, I wanted to shift the focus from creating a surrounding based on aesthetics to communicating a coherence that revealed the interconnections between objects, spaces and people and thereby also the cultural narratives the food embodies. In a way this was a project about story-telling. A chef can tell a story through ingredients and composition — and I wanted to see whether I could tell the same story through objects in a space. So in this project, my design is the transposition of values from one domain to another, my design is the act of translation which came down to a collection of essays that can be described as something between conceptual design practice and critical theory. Within this project my conceptual framework focused on the act of translation . To translate means to convert or render meaning from one form or system to another. It derives from the Latin verb "transferre," meaning to carry across. Hence, this project is a “carrying-across” of values, practices and ideas from the domain of the culinary to the world of design. Ethically there was something I had to consider: Most of the book sources on New nordic cuisine and its practices are publicised by haute cuisine restaurants as proves of their extraordinary way of handling and understanding produce. How would that affect my work of translation? I want to introduce you to Flora Danica to explain this thought. In the age of enlightenment, botanist Georg Christian Oeder was sent out by King Christian VII to paint all the flowers that bloom in Denmark. Oeder spent 9 years on the drawings, they were meant as a gift for Catherina the Great. However, she died before the set was ready. That is how it became the royal Danish table service. In its completness, the project Flora Danica took 122 years to completion and contains more than 3500 works. I did not want my project to be a work on the greatness and luxury of haute cuisine. I wanted it to be about the preciousness that can be found in the amount of time some of these restaurants put into research and development for what they perceive as an alternative utopia for food culture. These experimental sites, their urge to understand their local habitat, those were the values I decided to translate. An insight, that started a learning process within me were Jane Rendell’s explanation of critical theory and Ina Blom’s idea behind style-site. Both of those concepts frame an element that has been interesting to me for many years: design as communication. Rendell defines critical theory “as a self-reflective form of practice in its own right, one that is both creative and speculative, that engages with the world and seeks to act to change things”. This understanding suggests a communication between the designer themselves – self-reflective – and a communication with the rest of the world. Ina Blom’s concept of the style-site originally derives from art criticism, however adapting my understanding of it to the field of design, broadened my understanding of how the communicative aspect of design. The translation of Blom’s idea suggests a silent dialogue between the object and the viewer/recipient, and emphasises its role in reflecting social identities and cultural processes.Her concept of “style-site” consists of the interplay between appearance , recognition and social identity . Before understanding what critical theory and the style-site could be, Design to me is the communication of culture – and all the visible and invisible interaction happening between spaces, objects and people. The silent social happenings in different scales: Place, space. object and people and in this case also food. To me this project was about understanding the driving forces behind what can be described as an atmosphere . Looking for answers and possibilities, I approached culinary space from different scales – visible within the research and the result. I listened to farmers, spoke to chefs, artists and ceramicists, collected existing knowledge from writings of architects, designers and theorists to continue building ideas on conducted field studies from the perspective of being a guest. The biggest challenge however, was not the field work but organising the experiences, thoughts and input of others into a structure – or narrative. The challenge was to find out how I wanted to structure and communicate my findings : Would it be a handbook? A guide? A personal memoire? What story did I want to tell the reader? And what story did I want to tell myself? Figuring this out took me two attempts. I focused on the act of translation as the cornerstone of my design practice and explored how this process can serve as a research foundation for future designs of culinary spaces. Chapter 1 On expressing purity , freshness and simplicity This is a direct connection to the first and most essential statement in the nordic kitchen manifesto. And just to explain: The nordic kitchen manifesto is a collection of 10 guidelines — basically the 10 commandments of taste and sustainability for nordic cuisine, signed by 12 (male) chefs from the nordic countries in 2004. However, the first statement “To express the purity, freshness, simplicity and ethics we wish to associate to our region “– might need additional explanation regarding the use of the word “purity”. It is not to be read in a ideological or religious way —- more in a “free of what is not essential way” Finding and understanding the essence of a produce through translating purity, freshness and simplicity. Whereas purity describes the quality, the character of a space, freshness communicates an immediacy – a relational closeness within and towards a space, and simplicity is a means to compose a design or a space in the way its character becomes clearest visible. The combination of these three ideas expresses the invisible understanding of the space – a similar concept to what Danish architect Dorte Mandrup characterises as the “irreplaceability” of a place. Chapter 2 Time and Place This chapter thematises what it means to put the essence in a context, being in connection with time and place, seasonality and locality. Moreover, I introduced a new layer with social and ecological qualities to the translation: the circularity of cultivating – harvesting – preserving and composting as concrete ways of enacting time and place. Understanding the act of cultivating in interior architecture led to a close connection between design and culture, revealed design as a means to grow, preserve and care for culture, essentially, design as the cultivation of culture. Through time and place closely connected to cultivating is the act of harvesting. Harvesting describes the needed knowledge to rightly observe to determine the right moment of action and the feeling when the conditions align and everything seems to be just right – and ready to be harvested. In spatial terms that can be understood as the connection of inside to outside to be able to observe the changing of the surroundings. Chapter 3 On finding newness in the existing / Transformation The standing on the intersection between past, present and future is thematised in this chapter. I connect the topic inseparably with the urgency to work transformatively in architecture. Diving into what preserving can mean for design, I wonder whether buildings can be fermented in order to preserve their identity and sense of belonging, and conclude that it in order to ferment a building, on must first design a carescape . Through adding an element of restoration through care with the act of composting, the carescape widened. Transformation now concerns not only buildings but our mindset, asking for alternatives to capitalism and whether transformation can communicate this thought of change. These translation essays resulted in more questions than answers, something that I hope to open a conversation within design and culinary practises with. Let's enter the phase of concluding thoughts, the crumbs that would be left after all. Throughout this project, I moved between the realm of the personal and the professional. I learned that personal and professional experiences are inherently interconnected in the life of a designer. Through sensibilities and intuition, the personal realm informs and shapes the professional realm, contributing to a design that also communicates my own identity. What seems to emerge is yet another possible constellation of Blom’s idea of the style-site: a reciprocal dialogue between my work and me. In the present and for the future. I hope this to be a work that leads to a discussion on what culinary space is and what it can be, giving the reader a chance to reflect on their own encounters with spaces built around and for the experience of food.

Excerpts from my thesis: Place as a Foundation of Culture and time visible in the materials tas a means of story telling Josephine Sassu Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2024 Time and Place and Place and Time “Material and construction have to relate to the place, and sometimes even come from it. Otherwise I have the feeling that the landscape does not accept the new building.” – Peter Zumthor (Zumthor, 2006) Place as a Foundation of Culture All in all, place serves as the foundation of culture. Making space for both human culture and the natural culture of the environment. Being closer to the origin of produce not only deepens one’s connection to human traditions but also increases the likelihood of experiencing the micro-organism cultures that thrive in the surrounding ecosystem. These micro-organisms, including bacteria, fungi and other microscopic life forms contribute to the taste of a meal – especially when the micro-organisms collaborate in the fermentation of produce. I therefor wonder whether using the word habitat instead of terroir, would contribute to highlight the aliveness of the land and of place itself. In the context of an ecosystem, a habitat refers to the specific environment or space where a particular organism or community of organisms lives. It includes both biotic (living) and abiotic (non-living) factors. Each habitat supports a unique set of species adapted to its specific conditions, creating a complex web of interactions within an ecosystem. In cities, the built environment, including architecture, infrastructure, public spaces and private corners, forms what could be called the foundation of the urban habitat. These structures create their own nature, their own character, different from city to city. And can be deconstructed and analysed in similar matters as biologists do to understand natural habitats. My thoughts return to a conversation with Anette Krogstad , the artist and designer who made the plating objects for renowned restaurant Noma . In her studio, she shared memories of a restaurant called Pjoltergeist that used to live in the lower floor of an apartment building in Tøyen, a district in Oslo. Pjoltergeist had something unconventional, something seriously striking, something unforgettable that not many restaurants are capable of. The reason I take up Pjoltergeist , is that I believe it must have had a connection to the surrounding, to the neighbourhood, that was truly alive . It was part of its habitat, it reflected it and interacted with it and thereby brought out the essence of the place. It must have truly been place as the immediacy of culture. She said that one never knew what to expect there and suppose that the space carried this very notion of excitement in its essence. Sadly, I have not experienced Pjoltergeist myself, I was in a way late to the party. All I can do now is look through old images that visitors uploaded on google maps and try to imagine how it felt – through the eyes of a distant spectator. There is something warm in looking through pictures on google maps taken with the camera of an smart phone when smart phones didn’t have cameras that work well in low light yet. There is something cozy in looking through blurry, dark pictures, taken for the sake of the personal memory. Often the pictures don’t even depict the food, just a plate or a bowl, carefully scraped for the last bit of its delicious content. The plates are of the type one has with 19, living in a flat share and all the plates and glasses one owns are found somewhere, not bought. Each with of them with their own personality and notches and impossible to stable on top of each other in the shelf. Personally, I think those plates paired with the solidly extraordinary wine choices, is brilliant humour. The problem is – and that is when it hit me – a great culinary space is about the immediacy, the aliveness of experience. Culinary space and the feeling of it cannot be reproduced visually through images. It is an experience of all senses, it has to be felt, heard, smelled and tasted to be understood. It is the act of experiencing that brings and keeps the space alive. Moreover, identity lies within the people and the culture, not within the notion of place alone. While the essence of identity is rooted in the people and culture that make a space come alive, it is also through culinary practices that this aliveness is expressed. Nordic cuisine aims to create the illusion of a living environment being served on a plate. It is about understanding and “deconstructing habitats” (Redzepi, 2015, p.14). This understanding sets the stage for a deeper exploration of the relation between place – cuisine – space – design in the context of time . To Capture Time Materials can be a tool to capture time. Space can act as a time capsule which translates through its materiality. However, some materials reflect time clearer than others. Some materials adorn themselves beautifully with the traces of use and time, they adorn themselves with traces of care – they capture the life of a space. Materials tell a story, their patina reminds us of the past, their physical presence underneath our fingertips substantiates the present moment and their signs of care give us a feeling of reassurance for the future. In the same matter as a chef tries to perfect a dish and its appearance, there is undoubtedly the need for spatial perfection within fine dining. However, the common believe that the perfection is achieved by flawlessness, by newness, irritates me. What is wrong with signs of use, signs of age, signs of care? It’s the small tactile pleasures in finding a piece that has been fixed carefully. It gives the material a certain warmth and value. Patina becomes a tactile pleasure. Growing patina takes time and patience. One can of course control the process as much as humanly possible, but the true beauty often lies in the traces of fate – which we have no control over. Materials are a way of communicating – and through design materials can communicate what lies beyond their physical qualities. The choice of material opens possibilities of making a meaningful statements of social, political and/or nature. Materials is a strong and especially tactile way to say something, to position oneself in the debate of today’s consumerism. Time is a fundamental element that shapes and pushes the relationship between food and culture onwards. In cuisine, time can be investigated in various scales: from the natural cycle of seasons giving a rhythm to the human cycle of cultivating, harvesting, conserving and composting, to the time one spends eating dinner. Time, as expressed through the seasons, becomes the driving force behind the cultivation and harvest of produce, influencing not just what is available, but also how it is prepared, preserved and cherished – and eaten. Halvar Ellingsen, chef at Kvitnes Gård in Northern Norway, centres his culinary practice around the natural rhythms of the land. At Kvitnes , cultivating, harvesting, conserving, and composting are fundamental and structure-giving principles that guide the rhythm of the restaurant and the dinners. How can architecture tell the story of cultivating, harvesting, conserving and composting? Read here