On the Architectonics of Food

We live in a world of plenty: natural riches and cultural artefacts, human intellect and powerful We live in a world of plenty: natural riches and cultural artefacts, human intellect and powerful technologies. We revel in an abundance of energy and information. Everything is available to us. However, the contemporary paradigm of thinking is dominated by the principles of scarcity. In contrast, holistic approaches aim to sustain our habitat by expanding our understanding of planet Earth. That knowledge is intended to provide mankind with the necessary toolset to act proportionally inevitable. In this dissertation, we primarily meditate upon the notions of Land- and City Scapes. We take ourselves into a Land Scapes go in sync with the limits of a Cosmic Mold. A Horizontal Scape frames immediate, a Flat Land which is governed by Inert States. In contrast, City Scapes celebrate the plenty derived from a Wandering Earth. A distant Vertical Scape casts symbolic Civic Characters, which are staged in Venturous Plays and thus made to talk. This inversion is enabled by the advent of Informational Thinking and Computational Grounds and their underlying principles. The intelligible structure elaborated in the in order to listen to those who think they know what a certain subject is about. We prepare Generic Grounds which allow us to erect an Intelligible Instrument. This Instrument Sensible Applications. To show the potentials of the Instrument, we embark upon Four Ventures in the world of food. Venture 1 novel digestible natures. We confect Chocolate from Cacao Cell Cultures. Venture 2 vineyard. We raise a remote Vine Yard. This informational instrument allows for the navigation of a probabilistic cloud suspended high above the actual vineyard. Venture 3 approaches the subjects and objects of wine. We enable symbolic terroirs that give the wine itself a voice and thus allow for rich talks. Venture 4 deals with subjects that give values to the object of food. Value Cloud from which numerous articulations and values of food can be derived. In this dissertation, we present nature as contingent. Thus, Intelligible Instruments bear novel Viands which we can render edible and visible on the sensible stage of Food. The Venturous Plays continue to be luxuriant and keep the worth of food as a cultural artefact alive.

David Schildberger, 2020

The following lecture provides an extended version of David Schildberger’s PhD presentation “On Food”. Supervisor Prof. Ludger Hovestadt, Chair of Digital Architectonics, ITA, ETH and Co-Supervisor Prof. Tilo Hühn, Centre for Foodcomposition and Processdesign, ZHAW Wädenswil and Prof. Christope Girot, Chair for Landscape Architecture, Dean of DARCH and Head of doctoral committee.