Who could possibly have guessed that from a slowly dehydrated leek, desiccated pomegranate, pared papaya, forensically sliced pepper, deconstructed beechnut, magnified coconut or fermented mangosteen you could construct an array of architectural projects? Ingredients such as these were the starting point for all our drawings and 3D work this year - a pantry of references that represented quite a departure from our usual modus operandi. Over the last few years our shtick has been to revisit, and in the process attempt to reinvent, the B-side of modernism’s golden generation, usually settling on an overweight and over-indulged figure like Stirling, Aalto or as we intended this year Jørn Utzon. However, having spent much of October on a fleet of sturdy bikes scouring and scraping the little of what’s left of the barrel of Utzon’s legacy in and around his Danish hometown, we changed tack and dropped in on a not insignificant upstart in Scandinavian culture - star chef René Redzepi’s restaurant Noma - in the process transposing the model of the overstuffed and overfed onto ourselves.
For the uninitiated, over the last dozen years a bunch of jumped-up ‘seal fuckers’, as Redzepi as his fellow chefs were once termed, have foraged their region in assembling plates of unparalleled deliciousness for Copenhagen’s midday and evening diners. We joined them in sampling this fare, but on a following morning, when we visited the Noma kitchens, the chefs spoke of an architectural imposition they were currently battling - a proposal to build a bridge from the city’s mainland København quarter to their own, fiercely independent, dockland Christianshavn Island. And so responding to their anguish, we changed tack and set the unit the task of using the same urban ingredients to produce a more palatable solution for the city’s disconnected harbour.
Among the 11 new projects we produced many obliterated the offending bridge, a couple of others crowded out its failures with multiple other bridges, at least one relocated the restaurant to the adjacent Papiroen Island, a few more turned it into a ‘church of the poisoned mind’ or ‘yellow brick road’, and one French student who, having had more than enough of what she considered a bunch of ‘arrogant, self-obsessed, celebrity chefs’, realigned the city and its cuisine along more appropriate Francophile lines by drowning the whole thing in sauce.
Christopher Pierce completed his architecture studies at Virginia Tech and gained a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on seventeenth and eighteenth century drawings as well as critiques that cover a range of contemporary architects and buildings, from Léon Krier to Ron Arad. His recent publications include an edited monograph - Ceramic Cumella: Shaping Ideas | Modelando Ideas.
Christopher Matthews is Director of Pastina Matthews Architects (PMA) and studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture. He worked for James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates on projects including the Singapore Arts Centre, The Lowry and No 1 Poultry before setting up PMA in 2000.
Charlotte Moe graduated from the AA in 2014 and currently works at John Pawson Architects in London.
