Architecture, Food & Human Behavior
Utilizing fine dining as a vehicle for research and design, this project explores the social structural hierarchies resulting from centuries of developmental tendencies of human behavior. We accept fine dining as the ultimate convergence of food and architecture, intended to create an experience that stimulates the senses while executing the principles of gastronomy, here defined as a study of the relationship between food and culture and the practice of producing, preparing and consuming good food. By applying architecture as an agency to study the shaping of human behavior, the project operates at the 1:1 scale, producing physical models that address the effects of cognitive engagement while implementing the design techniques of functionality, material instability, and counter figuration.
The research explores how fine dining mobilizes and manages behavioral dependencies on the latent infrastructures and tacit rules that define any given space. In a study of fine dining, the manipulation of human behavior and the ritualistic patterns can become normalized through total architectural control, presenting a platform by which other experiences can therefore be executed. The following design thus aims to emphasize ten chosen traditional and unconventional rules and practices of consumption by exaggerating their attributes, leading to a fully curated and executed dining experience that tests a series of interventions within fine dining.
This research project is the product of collaborative studies between Food Studies students from the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics and Architecture students from the School of Architecture at Syracuse University.