Edible Architecture: Cake 2.0
A collaboration between Vestal designer Jeffrey Warren and Gabriel Smedresman, this project examines the architectural symbolism and spatiality of cake. The cake designs built upon a manifesto which was published in the Yale food magazine Taste:
Edifice, artifice. The time has come for cakes to rise to ever greater heights. I have seen the future of Confection, and it is Crenellated.
For centuries we have walked a fine line in both our culinary creations and our aedicular aspirations. Our collective tendency to live in our food, whether literally or figuratively, begs the eternal question: Are we eating it or is it eating us? Reformulated: why do our cakes demand to be Inhabited? Why do they so often, so irrationally, look like buildings?
To find the answer, let us scoop deep through the layers of our buried lives, our homes, and our daily bread, and our religion. Exodus tells of the departure of the Jews from Egypt, an icon of architectural achievement: for what? For the desert, the flatlands, a void unfilled by stone and brick! This unleavened wasteland was made habitable only by the culinary gift from the heavens: the manna, the holy bread of life, which replaced the first edifices of the Jews and was the badge of their freedom from the oppression of an inedible architecture.
Thus, when Marie Antoinette famously remarked, “let them eat cake,” was she, an educated woman, showing her insensitivity to contemporary socio-economic issues? No, I say! No! Rather, she called into question for the very first time in Western boulangerial philosophy the adequacy of bread in bearing the brunt of millenia of metaphorical meaning. Wise Marie showed us that Bread, as we had up to that point believed, was not indeed the guerdon of humanity, that in fact, we would need a richer, more structural substance for that weighty load. Hers was not an exclamation of exasperation, but an acknowledgment of the paradigm shift from the Chunk of Bread to the Brick of Cake! From the regressive C => B to the progressive B => C! Misunderstood by her contemporaries, she boldly ushered mankind from the Era of Bread to the Golden Age of Cake.
Yet somehow we have lost our way, the significance of our cakeish edifices have been forgotten, and the art of, shall we say, CAKE-ITECTURE, has been buried under the sands of a barbaric and uninhabitable modernity… we are left with only crude gingerbread.
Come now, Citizens Cake – to lead a second exodus, from the oppression of an consumptive and spaceless architecture of the present to the glories of a once and future cake!
