Infinity Kitchen

MVRDV designs transparent Infinity Kitchen to make food healthier and sexier


Venice Architecture Biennale 2016: Dutch office MVRDV has designed a completely see-through glass kitchen that aims to inspire a "more healthy, if not sexy" approach to food (+ slideshow).

Making its debut at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Infinity Kitchen has been proposed as a way of improving the cooking process by drawing greater attention to food choice, preparation and waste.

Each of the units and shelves is transparent, as well as the tap, sink area and worktops.

"If we imagine everything is transparent, clear and clean, doesn't it mean that the only thing that is colourful and visible is our food?" said the firm's co-founder Winy Maas.

"Doesn't it then imply that we are encouraged to love the food, in that way, and that maybe it even becomes more healthy, if not sexy?"

MVRDV hopes that the transparent elements will expose all aspects of the kitchen's function and processes, highlighting people's food choices as well as less attractive aspects like waste storage and disposal.

"The Infinity Kitchen wants to make better cuisine, better food preparation practices and it wants to raise awareness for the one room that we all rely so heavily on, and the processes that go on inside of it," said MVRDV.

"How much food do we have hidden away? How much waste is really being created? Is the kitchen really as clean as we like to think it is? But [the Infinity Kitchen] also wants to do one main thing: celebrate food and cooking."

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More Bompas

While they work to establish a permanent home for the BMoF, B&P do collaborations with established institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum as well as temporary installations. “We’re sort of a moving, roving nomadic museum at the moment,” he says. The latest iteration took place at the Borough Market this winter. It included exhibits like “Be the Bolus,” whereby visitors could experience what it feels like to be a hunk of chewed-off food going along the human digestive track. The cross-modal experience was obtained with a PillCam, and a massage chair that pummeled you up and down as watched the film, so you could feel what it’s like for the bolus. There was also the butterfly gallery that highlighted the fact that butterflies are “some of the unsung heroes of pollination.” The takeaway? “We are trying to think about how to make sustainability really sexy, making people ask questions rather than belaboring them with gloom and doom about the current state of the planet and food security.”

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Food Better - Harvard

Throughout the academic year, the Harvard community focuses on the food system and how to improve it – how to grow better, eat better, shop better, conserve better . . . how to Food Better. In 2014-15, the Harvard Innovation Lab hosted a year-long Deans' Food System Challenge, in which students from across the university were invited to develop innovative solutions to make our food system more healthy and sustainable. In conjunction with the Challenge, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, Harvard University Dining Services, Food Literacy Project, and Harvard Office for Sustainability opened a community-wide dialogue about how we can Food Better, which included events, field trips and more. These events continue on into the 2015-2016 school year.

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Southern Food and Beverage Museum

“Everything is a trail through the museum,” said Williams, referring to the museum’s current exhibit titled the Trail of Smoke and Fire. “BBQ is not monolithic. In some parts of the south, it might be mutton or chicken. Or along the gulf coast we have roasted oysters and smoked mullet and other kinds of fish. And we’ve put them in the states where they happen just for context.”
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Southern Food and Beverage Museum

16th century food porn

Though the contemporary phenomenon of food porn may feel like an Internet-era excess, there’s a long history of different cultures taking part in obnoxious public displays of meals. The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals, currently on display at the Getty Research Institute, considers the history of table decoration and food display in early modern Europe. The underlying message of these centuries-old examples feels echoed in contemporary TV cooking contests like Cake Wars or The Great British Baking Show: So much of eating is about spectatorship, about consuming feats of gastronomy with the eyes more so than the mouth. So lavish Pinterest planning and meticulous Instagram filtering of Thanksgiving dinner isn’t a corruption of the ages-old communal joys of eating—it’s a natural extension of it.

When it comes to party food especially, the sense of sight has always trumped the senses of taste. For Voltaire and other philosophes of the 18th century, taste was not a single sense but the act of discrimination in general, whether applied to painting or pastry. Its opposite was bad taste, or tastelessness. The meat mountains, fruit pyramids, and marzipan castles that graced princely and aristocratic tables from the 16th century onward may have pleased the palate, but they were primarily intended as feasts for the eyes: visibly expensive, fragile, and time-consuming to create, using hard-to-find ingredients like white sugar or out-of-season produce.

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Urban Forest

Italian architect Stefano Boeri dreams big and green. He has created six bold, transformational "ideas for a bio-diverse metropolis" that could be installed in and around the city of Milan, to establish "transitional states between the city, nature and agriculture" and provide "energy sources for a new model of urban economics." Visionary and Idealistic, they challenge us to think about cities and the possible in new ways. The concepts were first introduced to the public at an exhibition in Rome last year.

While all about landscape and greenery, BioMIlano is also about urbanist revitalization and putting a stop to sprawl. The key philosophy seems to be taking advantage of creative opportunities to green the urban core while also developing a greenbelt around the city.

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Food Design

Sonja Stummerer & Martin Hablesreiter
According to Austrian designers Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter, “People should talk about food as an aspect of culture, as the most important good, as business, as a design product of daily life.” They founded the interdisciplinary design studio honey & bunny productions, curated the exhibition “Food Design” for Museumsquartier Vienna and performed as eat designers in Milan, Amsterdam and many other places. As authors they published the award-winning books “Food Design” and “Food Design XL” that show how shape, colour, smell, consistency, production methods, history and stories influence food product design. Stummerer and Hablesreiter have given a number of international lectures and taught at schools including Bucharest and Istanbul. In 2008 they directed the movie “Food design – a film”.

CHeck it out here

Food Installation by Honey & Bunny

What is alpine cuisine? And could that be the approach allowing Austrian food to position itself internationally, just like it happened for the New Nordic Cuisine? Those were some of the topics examined during "Culinary Art 2015: Gates to the future", a two-day conference on food and eating that took place on March 16 and 17 in the beautiful city of Salzburg, in Austria, where local restaurateurs, hospitality professionals, tourism experts, as well as scholars and writers, discussed food and eating in theory and practice.    

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Thinking Food

The thinking food design project asked a question, what is Food Design?

Participants send a 2-minute video response.

Tagging each, we find convergence and attraction.

Since its creation thinking food design has appeared in food festivals, blogs, catalogues, exhibitions, as well as Wallpaper, le Fooding and Core 77.

This non-profit platform has been consulted by over 20,000 visitors in 100 countries.

explore it here

Honey and Bunny

How can food designers introduce new behaviors to consumers? How can they move from ideas and projects to actual production? What is the best way introduce daring, paradigm-shifting innovation into the food industry, which is often hesitant to take risks and ends up proposing more of the same, often just in larger quantities? And how can these innovations become part of larger cultural and social visions?

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And HERE

Expos end...

The towers are the heart of the Swiss Pavilion. Visitors will be invited to discover Switzerland – the diversity of products and values which underlie the success of the Swiss approach – by engaging in a fun exploration of the towers. Switzerland wishes to take part in Expo 2015 as  an active, caring and socially responsible stakeholder in the area of food and sustainable development. 

The journey through the towers is guided by this leitmotif, thus prompting visitors to reflect – on the basis of their own personal experience – on the global availability of food and sustainable development throughout the food value chain. Visitors will be free to take away or consume any amount of the products. How much will be left for later visitors – and for how long – will be determined by the consumer behaviour and level of awareness of each visitor.
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Bompas & Parr

Bompas & Parr leads in flavour-based experience design, culinary research, architectural installations
and contemporary food design.

The studio first came to prominence through its expertise in jelly-making, but has since gone on to
create immersive flavour-based experiences ranging from an inhabitable cloud of gin and tonic, the
world’s first multi-sensory fireworks and a Taste Experience for the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin,
officially the best place to taste Guinness in the world.

The studio now consists of a team of creatives, producers, cooks, designers, specialised technicians
and architects. With Sam Bompas and Harry Parr the team works to experiment, develop, produce
and install projects, artworks, jellies and exhibitions, as well as archiving, communicating, and
contextualising the work. Bompas & Parr also collaborates with specialist technicians, engineers,
artists, scientists, musicians and many other disciplines to create wondrous events.

The studio works with some of the biggest companies and the world’s foremost cultural institutions
to give people emotionally compelling or inspiring experiences.

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MOFAD

The Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) is creating the world's first large-scale food museum with exhibits you can eat.

MOFAD will be a global leader in food education, featuring innovative exhibits and programs that show how exciting it is to learn and care about the culture, history, science, production, and commerce of food and drink. Imagine a place where you can use an Aztec kitchen, see cereal made before your eyes, decode food marketing, taste West African street food, make Chinese hand-pulled noodles, learn about agriculture and composting, and see how the body digests a sandwich—all in one museum.

In 2013, MOFAD debuted its first explosive mobile exhibition, BOOM! The Puffing Gun and the Rise of Cereal. The exhibition, which featured a 3,200-pound breakfast cereal puffing machine, drew accolades from media outlets such as The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal.

MOFAD Lab, the organization's first brick-and-mortar home, will open in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn on October 28, 2015. In this space, MOFAD will design and showcase its exhibit concepts as it works toward opening the full museum in New York City by 2019. Join the MOFAD mailing list to stay updated on upcoming exhibitions and programs

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Edible Monument

The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals, at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) section of the Los Angeles center, features rare prints, elaborate serving pieces, as well as early cookbooks and serving manuals that show monuments of food from hundreds of years ago. One section of the exhibit is appropriately called the Theater of the Table, a title that could have pertained to the whole presentation.

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food art

photographer sam kaplan‘s obsession with organization has led to a still life series that sees candies, cookies and tea cakes turn into semi-architectural structures.

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More Milan

"...While Herzog has a point that the planned structures are indeed fantastical, it is debatable whether interesting, informative exhibitions and wild pavilion designs are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, innovations in architecture, construction, and urban design are an integral part of how the world will address the food challenges of the 21st century..."

"...However, there are a handful of designs that stand out as attempts to rethink the way we build and how it relates to modern agriculture and sustainable food production for the next century. Most of the pavilions use sustainable materials and construction methods that utilize national building techniques. Inside, exhibitions—often interactive—showcase the biodiversity, culture, and food traditions of each nation..."

"...While the architecture of the Milan exposition overall continues the recent trends of the “vanity fair,” some fragments exist that might shed light on how architecture can interact with innovations in agriculture and food production in the coming decades. Ideally, this concept would be pushed much further, but for now these will have to serve as examples for future projects..."

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Food Cart + Mobility + Social Causes

Geneva-based architect Aurélie Monet Kasisi has designed a mobile stand based on street-food carts to travel around Switzerland as a promotional vehicle for a suicide prevention organisation.

"The mobile units often used to serve food or sell various goods host a small collective experience within the city," she said. "That is exactly what I wanted the mobile stand to generate in Swiss public spaces."

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Milan Food Expo - romantizing food

Policy-makers have shied away from targeting agriculture because food is a personal issue for many citizens; the agricultural lobby in Brussels is very well organised because it’s been around since the early days of European integration; agriculture is also seen by many with romantic eyes.

“We have a very idyllic image of agriculture, but that romantic image no longer exists in many places”, noted Eickhout.

Romantic picture of agriculture
Most of the 14 national pavilions in Milan which this website saw from the inside, had romantic touches which don’t correspond with reality.

Almost three-quarters of the world's poultry products, and half of all pork, were created by industrial sized farming. In the EU, just 5.7 percent of agricultural land in 2012 was used for organic farming.

But the Spanish pavilion, for example, showed scenic videos of a shepherd and his flock, and of families eating together, accompanied by serene music. Spain is “Europe's kitchen garden”, an explanatory text noted.

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Milan Expo

"The World Expo is once again upon us. Last time it was Shanghai's turn, now Milan plays host to the gargantuan global trade fair.

The original master-planners, a team that included Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, walked out in 2011 after their vision for a new typology of the Expo, one based on content rather than the individualist (and often propagandist) architecture of national pavilions, was rejected by the organisers."

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Landscape as Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Food Security

Titled ‘Landscape as Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Food Security: Perspectives from Switzerland and Qatar’, the day-long event will feature a series of lectures and a workshop on green roofs. 

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