CREATE AN INITIAL BRIEF: to create enriching culinary spaces for the visually impaired. This is done through consideration of tactility, touch, smell, temperature, sound and new technologies.
WHAT ARE THE SPATIAL DYNAMICS AND HOW DO THEY INFORM STRUCTURE, MATERIALITY AND THE IMMATERIAL (LIGHT, SOUND, ATMOSPHERE): having separate free flowing rooms differentiated by various floor materials (e.g., carpet, tile, wooden, cork, concrete). The sounds produced by walking on and also by interaction with the materials will help the blind to realise they are in a different space – a different course of the meal. By taking out a sense (vision) the atmosphere of a space totally changes.
WHAT IS THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY AND SYSTEMS: sound systems play an important role. Braille is an important component.
HOW ARE THE SENSES ENGAGED AND EXPERIENCE SHAPED:
Performers: the kitchen staff creating sounds, smells, tastes and textures.
Audience: the blind that come to experience a culinary event with just four senses.
WHAT ARE THE VARIOUS SPACES FOR...
FRONT OF HOUSE: eating space or a space to read menu
BACK OF HOUSE: kitchen
THE PERFORMERS: multi–room/spaces for multi courses
HOW DO THE VARIOUS ZONES SEPARATE OR INTERSECT: through the use of other senses touch, smell, taste and sound. Through barrier free and free flowing spaces. Through changes in materiality especially floor surfaces, changes in illumination, changes in temperature, changes in sound, changes in textures
WHAT IS HIDDEN AND WHAT IS REVEALED: sight is hidden. sound. taste. touch. smell is revealed.
Sculpture Relief Depicting Christ Healing the Blind Man
SACRED NATURE: Thoughts on including/bringing in the sacred history of the building.
Bible passages relating to food and also the blind:
The last supper: Matthew 26:26-28
As they were eating, Jesus took some bread and blessed it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, "Take this and eat it, for this is my body." And he took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it. He gave it to them and said, "Each of you drink from it, for this is my blood, which confirms the covenant between God and his people. It is poured out as a sacrifice to forgive the sins of many.
Blind: Isaiah 29:9
Be stunned and amazed, blind yourselves and be sightless; be drunk, but not from wine, stagger, but not from beer.
Blind: Isaiah 42:16
I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them.
Blind: John 9:39
Jesus said, "For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind."
The Last Supper - Leonardo Da Vinci 1495-1498
INITIAL Research:
Details
As vision is most peoples’ dominant sense, our environment is keyed to visual orientation and communication. Planning for visually impaired and blind people therefore means rethinking familiar everyday rituals. Visually impaired people encounter barriers that would never occur to someone with normal sight. Visually impaired and blind people have to construe the overall context from details, whereas sighted people are aware of the overall context first and the details second.
Design
"Just because a person can't see doesn't mean design doesn't matter, it simply means the design has to be more specific. A well designed space sounds nice, it feels nice. The way sound moves through it the way air moves through it all become very important."
Michael Moloney
Sound
Mary Loeffelhoz cannily identifies the container of the house as an ear "a permeable but protective boundary organ." Loeffelholz reads the Dickinson Homestead as a sensory structure that continually channels and returns sound. As a sensitive medium of sound, the house-lyre embodies for Dickinson "a poetic model of perception and reception." Sound succeeds where sight fails, passing through windows and doors, penetrating walls and floors, infiltrating corners and crannies.
Unlike the body's other orifices, the ear is the only organ that cannot close itself. The portals of the ear remain perpetually open, capable at any time of receiving messages from a world beyond the bounds of the strictly visible. The ear's receptivity makes it the most vulnerable of human orifices, and the most finely tuned. It is the ear, not the eye, that offers the most direct route to the human heart.
Invoking the nineteenth-century belief that hearing is the last of the corporeal senses to fade upon the demise, Dickinson notes that "The ear is the last face. We hear after we see."
References:
Fuss, D. (2004). The sense of an interior: four writers and the rooms that shaped them. London, Great Britain: Routledge.
Skiba, I & Zuger, R.(2009). Barrier free planning. Germany: Birkhauser.
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