Josephine Sassu​
Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2024
What Is Culinary Spatial Practice?
A 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
[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.]