Unplated: A conversation with classical architect Rene Salas

This conversation is the first in the Unplated series, a collection of interviews with folks whose work intersects with food, but who work outside culinary spheres. My hope is that these conversations not only spark your curiosity, but help you think about how what you eat is connected to the world well beyond your plate.

Rene Salas, an Atlanta-based architect, imbues his work with the historical and the modern. In that way, I see an overlap between his work with built environments and my own work in culinary and intellectual spaces.

The Interaction Between Text and Reader, mixed media, 2017

JS: To start, can you tell me a bit about your career as an architect? What drew you to classical architecture as a style? 

RS: I can't quite say if I chose architecture or if architecture chose me. I fell into it after highschool and started working part time in an architecture firm while starting my education at a community college in San Antonio. Classicism was essentially unheard of as an option in academia, for very interesting reasons, so my formal education was strictly modernist and abstract. Nevertheless, architecture itself remained extremely interesting and fun and I enjoyed my undergraduate experience immensely. After years of part time education and part time practice, I ended up working for a traditional architect, Michael Imber, who showed me a way of thinking about place based architecture that resonated with my already humanistic tendencies. The concern for the human being is what ultimately drove me to classicism. What I began to understand was the nature of human identity,  the nature and power of tradition, and the organic curation of our built environment, can come together in a public and communal expression in our built environment. Classicism is a way of thinking about how to provide a framework such that our communities' physical environment can be enriched and made meaningful. 

JS: In our previous conversations, you’ve discussed classical architecture as a way to build environments where communities can thrive. What lessons can we learn from the past to support strong communities today? And how can those lessons support existing residents rather than displacing them?

RS: A thriving community exists because of many influences from architecture and urbanism to economic equality and political structures. Any of these areas individually have various scales of effect on thriving communities. One aspect of a community that I think architecture and urbanism can be enriching, is at the cultural level of identity and expression. One of my favorite things about living in Reynoldstown and by Cabbagetown, is that all it takes to know that the community is alive, and is able to convey shared visions and shared passions, is simply by walking around. The community becomes self-evident in reading the physical environment. There are shared expressions in the graffiti, in the  types of floral landscapes, in the color pallets of homes, and the shared articulations of detail in the architecture. The shared form-language of the houses and businesses tell a story that connects the past to the here and now and remains as a sort of palette for a designer to contribute to place meaningfully. The community is made stronger by cultivating these shared expressions because it enables their voices to become louder and more legible. 

JS: We’ve talked before about food and architecture, and I think there are a lot of directions that conversation could take us, but I want to start by considering specifically how using classical building techniques supports the culinary life of a community. Let’s start with home kitchens: how do you think historic building methods can provide home cooks with spaces that are functional and enjoyable? 

RS: I'd first like to say that I find the connections between the culinary arts and architecture to be many faceted and parallel in many many dimensions. Architecture itself can be broken down into many aspects from the actual assemblies of walls, to the arrangement of program, like in the various ways to organize appliances and workflows. When you begin to look at how human beings utilize space, you might find that there are basic patterns that arise simply because of the limitations of our bodies. These patterns transcend style and are so deeply rooted in the human experience that any designer that ignores them would have their work deemed inhumane. (Imagine something absurd like having a refrigerator on the other side of the house from the stove for example) As for the culinary life of communities, I'd actually point toward traditional urbanism as a source of knowledge of how humanity has lived prior to the world of the '3,000 mile cesar salad'.  When we look at any community that thrived prior to the train, we find communities that were walkable, maintained local farms at various scales, and cultivated communal participation. The point might be made best by pointing out the things many have lost in our modern developments; the very young and the very old often cannot walk to a grocery store because our communities are so car dependant, mono-functional zoning has diminished the ability for neighborhood restaurants to exist for families to walk to, mom and pop markets have been replaced by corporate grocers that support supply chains that are often harmful to our environment. The list can go on and on. 

JS: Now a similar question for restaurants: are there classical architecture methods that lend themselves to thriving, creative commercial spaces? 

RS: Beauty.  This is a word that isn't talked about as much as it should be. People gravitate toward beauty. We are compelled to it. It is true that people eat with their eyes, and it is also true that an evening is made better when surrounded by beauty. Coziness, elegance, relaxed, charming, etc, are all qualities that can be designed for and a great meal can taken to another level when it takes place that resonates with the culinary experience. Beauty doesn't only mean pretty forms. In architecture as well as in food, greatness ties together technical execution, artistic expression, and some aspect of familiarity or reference to some tradition. Beauty should hit all these aspects, quality ingredients, combined in good proportion, and expressive in ways that delight.  

JS: I’m curious what about classical architecture, specifically, lends itself to food spaces (home or commercial) in ways that other approaches don’t. What are the strengths of classical architecture in these spaces?

RS: I think it's important to state that there are two aspects of the classical at work. One aspect is formal classicism that emulates the architectural languages that are rooted in the Greek. Another aspect is the classical humanist mode of thought that comes out of the Renaissance. The formal classical side of architecture isn't always appropriate because it is so dependent on context and decorum. However, the classical humanist mode of design thinking is really a bottom up form of design that comes out of a deep understanding of human temperaments. And this is what sets classically trained architects apart, in my opinion. The classical humanist first and foremost seeks to unify the base human patterns of utility with higher order patterns of families, communities and culture. It is my belief that food has the power to tell stories, and such stories can be reflected in the architecture. The ability for architecture to be meaningful cannot be separated from communal symbols and histories. Onces architecture moves out of the abstract and into telegible articulations, it begins to utilize systems of meaning that are rooted in the language of construction. For example, if I were to describe to you a structure that has a pitched roof and upon this pitched roof is a tall spire, it would be easy to imagine that it could be a church. Why do we think this? Why do so many people understand the meaning of a building by a simple description? We share this understanding because of the culture in which we exist. Our whole city can be imbued with such meanings from the high civic to the humble dwelling. At each scale we are able to express meaning through architectural forms and ornamentation. It is the architect's job to understand what a chef client might want to say and provide to them a space that conveys those ideas, be it visceral or explicit.  

JS: I’m all about play and exploration in the kitchen, as well as the ways our spaces support mindfulness in our cooking practice. Is there anything about using classical architecture approaches that might support these goals?

RS: Architecture provides us the stage in which we play out our lives and can elicit emotional states. This occurs whether a space is classical or not. If you have ever walked into the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library, you will know how impossible it is to not feel ennobled and inspired by the space. If you ever sat in a cozy chair by a fireplace, you know that it can bring you into a calm and cozy state. So if one wanted to explore the playful and wonder in a cooking space,  I would look to find ways to bring in the unexpected. One example that comes to mind was when I was in the kitchen of Chateau Chenonceau. There was a large fireplace that was used to heat the room and large hooks to hang foods over a fire, but also a long horizontal iron bar that puzzled me. I followed this bar to one end and there were rotisserie spikes that were connected to a system of gears with bars continuing through the exterior wall and down to the river below. It turns out that this bar was connected to a water wheel that kept the rotisserie spinning over the fire. I was amazed and delighted at such a mechanism. I can imagine a whole host of surprises in a kitchen and the limits of interaction between chef and architecture is really only our own imagination.  

JS: Finally, I want to ask about sustainability and affordability. How can looking to the past help us create culinary spaces that are financially accessible as well as environmentally friendly?

RS: Steve Mouzon wrote a book titled 'Original Green', where he really drives home the point that the most sustainable and environmentally friendly practices can be found in a whole free of fossil fuels. Humanity has lived in such conditions before and learning how they did it can help us find that middle path that leads to a more sustainable future. We have allowed our homes to become so dependent on plastics and energies that keep our temperature perfect year round, allow us to ignore the natural advantages of a sites micro-climate, and all at an artificially low cost due to subsidies to these industries. Thinking locally will help us get to a type of sustainability that allows our communities to flourish. Let's try to not send our money to some large corporation that can provide us with exotic materials from around the world, rather let us send our money to the local mason, painter, plasterer, iron-smith, seamstress and sculptor.  When we enable the activities of local craftsmen, we can begin to build up a building culture that is increasing in skill and value while at the same time cultivating a community with a wider range of expression. Local artists using local materials stimulating a local economy, in part, through designing with ornamentation and the crafts.

JS: Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?

RS: My hope is that more and more people begin to see architecture as an art that can be rooted in place to such a degree that one could understand exactly what sort of place produced it, in much the same way that wine experts can understand the life of a grape that went into its production.  All the diverse lands of the earth have different impacts on all the diverse types of foods that can be produced in those areas, and for the same reasons so too does the diverse traditions of architecture depend on the soils and climates of each region. The heavy timbers of the German and French forrest enable architecture that the rocky deserts of Arizona and New Mexico cannot. Each place, naturally, developed their own architectural characters directly because of the qualities of the earth. Regional traditional qualities in food and in architecture have given rise to the many diverse cultures of the world and our own identities are wrapped up in their cultures. Through food and architecture we can explore our own cultures as well as the cultures of others. 

Architecture and the Culinary Arts share an interesting history that is rooted in the industrial revolution. Mass production and mechanistic thinking had played a huge role in our cultural understanding of each. There was a time when 'the machine' was embraced and futuristic conceptions dominated popular sentiments. Processed foods, microwaves, and industrial products of all sorts came into fashion for various reasons. Notice that in both architecture and in food we lost a bit of our humanity in this process. The stark white walls of the modernist movement contained instant just add water food stuffs that bear no relation to local place. Since that time there has been a food revolution with farm-to-table expectations and the rise of culturally authentic restaurants. Fewer and fewer people are satisfied with generic mass produced foods, and I would hope that architecture would also follow this same path, but on a longer time scale. Let us not settle for generic placessless architecture, and let's demand and expect that our built environment begins to reflect local communities and local cultures.