Bong Appétit
TEAM: Grace Ng, Hannah Han – Singapore, America – Columbia GSAPP
Smokin’ food porn
Fancy a bite of Anthony Bourdain’s Lamprey à la Bordelaise?
Want to overcome that nut allergy?
Perhaps a taste of the forbidden fruit?
Bong Appétit reimagines an alternative way of food consumption. It is both the olfactory and the gustatory. Each puff promises to satiate any craving and guilty pleasures: from the finest gourmet dining to the most comforting fast food. By essentializing the eating experience to aromatic qualities, the ritual of inhaling/exhaling becomes a mode of ingestion. This gaseous state seeks to titillate taste buds while bypassing all medical, moral, economical diet dilemmas associated with the tangibility of food. If the medium is indeed the message, the project’s aeriform posits that smoking up blurs the line between fantasy and reality.
Spatially, the project materializes as an inflatable, its form resembling a conglomerate of smokestacks. Set in dense urban environments, it transforms unused rooftop areas into habitable sites high in the clouds. Dwelling space is created and occupied, contributing to architecture that lives and breathes responsively to consumption within its own microcosm.
The act of eating has gone up in smoke.
Bong Appétit, we hope you enjoy your meal.