The Architecture Of Taste

On November 27, 2012, world-renowned pastry chef Pierre Hermé arrived at Harvard University from Paris. He brought five chefs, two assistants, 600 sheets of gelatin, 150 eggs, 68 pounds of caster sugar, 40 pounds of unsalted butter, 32 pounds of cream, 25 pounds of milk chocolate couverture, 11 pounds of grated wasabi, and the alchemic techniques to transform these ingredients into an elaborate "lecture de pâtisserie." Together with Savinien Caracostea and Sanford Kwinter, he methodically deconstructed four conceptual desserts for 400 spectator-diners. The Architecture of Taste recaptures this night and the physiological effects of Hermé's pastry visions. Contributors Savinien Caracostea, Pierre Hermé, Sanford Kwinter The Incidents is a series of publications based on events that occured at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design between 1936 and tomorrow. Edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin Copublished with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design

The Architecture of Humanism offers a brilliant analysis of the theories and ideas behind much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. It discusses the classical tradition as reflected in the architecture of Renaissance and Baroque Italy and the role given the human body in that tradition. It is recommended reading for all architecture students, and essential for those interested in the revival of classical architecture.

Since time immemorial, cooking and building have been among humanity’s most basic occupations. Both of them are rooted in necessity, but both of them also possess a cultural as well as a sensory, aesthetic dimension. And while it is true that cooking is a transitory art form, it gives expression to the periods of human cultural history just as architecture does. Moreover, both arts accord a central role to the materials employed. Both involve measuring and proportioning, shaping and designing, assembling and composing. This book pursues the astonishing parallels and deeply rooted connections between the art of building and that of cooking. A variety of essays takes up questions of materiality and proportioning. Attention will also be given to food cultivation and architecture, to the places where meals are prepared as well as a range of different culinary spaces. With articles by Annette Gigon, Stanislaus von Moos, Claudio Silvestrin, Ian Ritchie, and others.

This book is an exploration of how time, space and social atmospheres contribute to the experience of taste. It demonstrates complex combinations of material, sensual and symbolic atmospheres and social encounters that shape this experience. Space, Taste and Affect brings together case studies from the fields of sociology, geography, history, psycho-social studies and anthropology to examine debates around how urban designers, architects and market producers manipulate the experience of taste through creating certain atmospheres. The book also explores how the experience of taste varies throughout life, or even during fleeting social encounters, challenging the sense of taste as static. This book moves beyond common narratives that taste is ‘acquired’ or developed, to emphasize the role of psycho-social histories of nostalgia, memories of childhood, migration, trauma and displacement in the experience of we eat and drink. It focuses on entrenched social dimensions of class, value and distinction instead of psychological and neuroscientific conceptualizations of taste and sensuous practices of consumption to be intrinsically linked to the experience of taste in complex ways. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, human geography, tourism and leisure studies, anthropology, psychology, arts and literature, architecture and urban design.

Humphry Repton¿s Red Books have long been the subject of scholarly interest for their unique contribution to British landscape discourse around 1800. Lavishly illustrated with Repton¿s own watercolours, the notorious Red Book manuscripts were used to suggest improvements to family estates all over England, Scotland and Wales. Through detailed analysis of Repton¿s working practices, Andr¿ogger argues that the landscape gardener¿s main artistic achievement is in the text-and-image concept of his Red Books, rather than in his grounds as finally executed. He presents the Red Books as artefacts in their own right, examining their creative potential as an entirely new genre of landscape appraisal. Assembling a comprehensive and descriptive catalogue of 123 original volumes, Landscapes of Taste: The Art of Humphry Repton¿s Red Books guides the reader through a fascinating part of the rich texture and legacy of Georgian landscape aesthetics.

What is taste? This well-curated collection documents new theories and emerging critical practices in the field of interior design. It investigates taste, a concept central to the formation of the discipline in the eighteenth century that was repudiated by architects in the early twentieth century, but which continues to play an important role in interior design today. Essays by historians and critics are complemented by interviews with practitioners on the margins of normative practice and portfolios of the work of contemporary designers.

Democratic in intention and approach, the book will argue that the home interior, as independently created by the ‘amateur’ householder, offers a continuous informal critique of shifting architectural styles (most notably with the advent of Modernism) and the design mainstream. Indeed, it will suggest that the popular increasingly exerts an influence on the professional. Underpinned by academic rigour, but not in thrall to it, above all this book is an engaging attempt to identify the cultural drivers of aesthetic change in the home, extrapolating the wider influence of ‘taste’ to a broad audience – both professional and ‘trade’. In so doing, it will explore enthralling territory – money, class, power and influence. Illustrated with contemporary drawings and cartoons as well as photos, the book will not only be an absorbing read, but an enticing and attractive object in itself.

How do countries acquire their distinctive features and appearance, their look or style? In this study, Jules Lubbock answers this question by focusing on Britain, with its characteristic terraced houses, Georgian squares, postwar slab blocks and Victorian floral ornamentation. Lubbock traces the fierce debates over consumerism, good design and town planning that have raged in Britain since the Elizabethan period, investigating how the design of buildings and possessions - domestic as well as official - becomes an issue of public policy and controversy.