Walking out of my first architecture job for the last time felt incredibly strange, and all I could see on my way home were the possibilities in front of me unfolding like an infinite flipbook. My anticipated yet unsolicited funemployment era had begun, and after months of creative blocks I finally felt like I had some time to sit and squash them.
I had a summer full of food. In London and in Mexico, I connected with the people I love through moments of shared consumption. My family spent their July in London, and we managed to tick off a bunch of places which must be talked about in another post. Then, Ben and I went to visit Mexico where we spent lots of amazing moments centered around sharing food with my family as well, but since my writing is not linear, that will have to be a range of separate posts as well.
This post is to talk about why the prospect of being unemployed has made me anxious in the best way possible (even though having another job is, to a fault, something I’m really looking forward to). Now that I have some time to refine my personal projects - mainly including “Why Are Plates Round” - I’ve been able to refine a lot of the untamed thoughts I have had on my mind for a while.
One of these thoughts was the idea of consumption as healing, instead of deteriorating. The ways we consume ultimately define who we are, whether its digital consumption, material consumption, edible consumption, alas. People consume so much nowadays, it’s difficult to exist without seeing yourself (and what you produce) as consumable, which makes me wonder if anybody truly knows how to exist as “unconsumable”. We’ve all had days where we’ve spent ridiculous hours on our phones consuming nonsense most times, or feeling crap because we overindulged in a late-night kebab the night before - wondering “was that really necessary?”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely guilty of it, but what I’m trying to end at is that I’d like to commit to consuming in ways that add instead of subtract, and one of the ways I’d like to explore this is through the realm of food consumption.
This goes beyond eating “healthy” and buying “local” and all of that (important!) talk. I wonder if the spaces in which we eat can help us connect back to ourselves as a means of making the ritual of consuming a meal something healing. When I was younger, I remember thinking the breakfast table at my grandparent’s house was one of the most comforting places ever. Having a breakfast sobremesa1 after eating before everybody got on with the day was a ritual that to this day hasn’t changed. It was always the people around me, but I wondered if it was my association to the space as well that makes sitting at that table even if it’s alone so comforting.
I started looking at similar man-made spaces - from churches to bath houses to restaurants with long tables - and ultimately focused on two types of spaces: The Japanese Tea House ( 茶室 ) and the Mesoamerican Temazcal. One dedicated to the ritual of drinking tea, and the other dedicated to rituals of rebirth. I thought merging the two could be an interesting point to start looking at how edible consumption, such as drinking tea, can be a form of feeling “reborn”, ultimately being a series of purifying and healing processes.
Both follow strict spatial rules. They are heavy on the geometric harmony of the space and its function, but ultimately it is all there to help dictate the person’s experience upon encountering the space. While the tea house is centered around harmony in space - specifically the man-made and the natural - the Temazcal is centered around forcing the visitor to focus on their “invisible” surroundings (particularly heat).
Both consist of small entrances that force the visitor to literally crawl into the space, physically making you practice humility. They each have specific materials used for their interiors as well, where the tea house is built with the geometry of the tatami mat in mind (2:1 ratio) and the Temazcal is usually built with volcanic rock, mudbrick and clay.
While this mash-up is purely speculative, I’ve started wondering how small confined spaces where the function is simply to be - perhaps drinking a cup of tea or eating a piece of fruit, forcing yourself to look at the place in which you are consuming holds a lot of potential to appreciate where you are and who you’re with. As a starting point, I’ve began sketching some layouts of what this type of space could look like:
It has been a nice exercise to start exploring what these ideas can materialize into, especially knowing the only restrictions are the ones I choose to impose, so I’ve promised myself to keep it up. As I write aimlessly about my funemployment days (which I truly acknowledge are a privilege to be able to enjoy), I’d like to keep these posts as records for myself to look back at, almost like progress reports, surrounding these new sections where I’d like to dig deeper at how this hobby can help me grow creatively in different ways. And tonight, when I sit at the dinner table in my flat having what will probably be another bowl of pasta, I’ll sit facing towards the room and not giving my back to it like usual :)
To end today’s entry I’ll leave you with a picture of the tea I’ve started having nearly every morning (hoping it becomes a new ritual and that I can substitute coffee for tea to some extent) - it’s a Genmaicha that I got at Japan House here in London (little puffed rice!):
until next time,
1 sobremesa: a word lost in translation, but ultimately means the moments you spend chatting at the table after the meal has finished.