D.4.1 Remembering Food in the Design of the Home

Michael Windover, Carleton University

Preparing, consuming, and/or storing food provide structure to domestic life. Indeed, architectural historian Elizabeth Collins Cromley has argued that the spaces associated with food have fueled the development of domestic architecture in the United States. Certainly a significant element in the design of domestic space, the spatial practices connected with food (acquiring ingredients, making dishes, dining, etc.) also play a key role in notions of identity, heritage, and belonging for many individuals and communities.

Based on initial findings from a collaborative research project between faculty, curators, and students at Carleton University, Algonquin College, and Canada Science and Technology Museum, this paper explores the intersection of food and domesticity for members of the Anatolian community in Ottawa. In keeping with the theme of this session, we contend that the spatial practices of food consumption are essential to domestic placemaking. The preparation and consumption of food (and memories of these activities), combined with the accompanying organic changes to domestic interiors, produce opportunities for making and remaking culture. In other words, these everyday practices provide the space and substance for enacting heritage and help to illustrate the quiet intensity of conventional, quotidian activities upon the character of the home. Drawing from interviews held with the Anatolian community, this paper demonstrates how a consideration of food’s role in domestic interiors, in terms of design and use, can nuance understandings of placemaking for members of a diaspora.

D.4.2 Fashion, Food Identity in the Ebony Test Kitchen, 1972

Karen R. White, Humber College

An interior’s materiality exists at a variety of scales: moving from intimate, to interpersonal, to architectural. It can be examined as an artefact using material culture methods of description, deduction and speculation, and is an embodiment of specific historical processes linked to craft, technology, labour, access to wealth, and trade. Yet this surplus of materiality is also essential to the process of placemaking in the interior, specifically through the entanglement of material with cultural memory and identity. The focus of this case study is a corporate kitchen designed in 1972 by Arthur Elrod Associates for the Johnson Publishing Company – an icon of African American culture led by John and Eunice Johnson, and publisher of Ebony magazine.

Ebony magazine understood the important role of food in the lives of its readers and the presence of a fashion-forward Test Kitchen in the Company’s new modernist building ratified this support. Famously, the new Test Kitchen avoided the limitations of International Modernism’s language of form in favour of the opportunities afforded by a palette of surface, finish and colour. As part of the only corporate project in Elrod’s successful career designing interiors for the homes of the (chiefly white, California) elite, this singular kitchen suggests the mutability of home and workplace. In seeking out Elrod’s design team for this project, Eunice Johnson had been guided by her experience building the Ebony Fashion Fair yearly fashion event. A stylish tastemaker, Johnson had worked hard to gain access to the world of elite fashion, and she understood the racial politics surrounding black adornment and consumer aspirations. By extending an elite approach to design, styling, and procurement to the Test Kitchen, the project can further be viewed as the client’s acknowledgement of the increasingly politicized role of food and the ‘culinary turn’ in Black nationalist movements of the time. This paper will develop a contextual and comparative method to explore how an interior’s materiality can be related to aligned cultural considerations imbued with cultural identity, making it an example of the role of materiality in placemaking.

D.4.3 Architectural Digest Visits... Artists

Béatrice Cloutier-Trépanier, Queen’s University

From 1971 until the mid-1990s, most if not all issues of Architectural Digest featured a photo-reportage presented under the heading “Architectural Digest Visits…”. Along with collectors and creative types – authors, designers, and architects – visual artists appeared regularly within these pages. Amongst many others, Georgia O’Keeffe (July 1981), Willem de Kooning (January 1982), Helen Frankenthaler (March 1985), Kenneth Noland (July 1985), and John Cage and Merce Cunningham (November 1988), have been the subjects of this long-running monthly feature. Focusing on these postwar American examples, this paper explores how this chronicle of interiors contributed to the  construction of the artistic identity in popular media during these decades, focusing on how AD’s incursion into the domestic spaces of artists functioned to represent art practices and art-making as non-work, as a lifestyle. My examination of the textual and photographic representation of artists within the pages of AD is inscribed within a larger project that contributes to understandings of the coalescence of art(work) and life within the home, and the performative and representational codes that mediate an artistic public identity.

D.4.4 An Unapologetic Affair – Reflections on a Home-Based Installation

Sara Robichaud, Artist

Through images and video footage, this presentation will review and discuss my home-based installation, An Unapologetic Affair, as a lived example of Placemaking and Materiality in the Domestic Interior. This project began in 2010 with our first home, an Edwardian house located in a working-class neighbourhood of South Nanaimo. It was a place to start a family and, unknowingly a muse for my artistic practice. For comfort, I surrounded myself with a palette of soothing pastel tints, and over time I’ve gathered and arranged historical household items, which not only hold the resonance of their material use but are beautiful objects made to last. The process has unfolded naturally. As I observed subtle nuances, moment-by-moment, I’ve shaped my environment, raised my daughter, played hostess, painted and drew on the walls and floors, and integrated depictions of interior elements onto my canvases. At the same time my house has become a painting. Cast shadows are painted on the walls including a vintage green lamp rendered in the same soft mauve as my living room but with a value shift so faint that it is often mistaken for a real shadow. I’ve taken care to create a seamless ephemeral experience in the hopes of initiating curiosity for visitors who may view my home as an artwork.

Imbued with personal and maternal histories, my work echoes domestic labour in the physicality of its making and with a directness in scale and replication of form. I strive for a kind of minimalism in surface and design to convey the intimacy of my home and to let aesthetically attractive elements shine. An Unapologetic Affair is the ongoing site of my identity and memory where I’ve embodied the material and social experience of my domestic life as a sustained installation and a subject for my paintings.