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ET26.2 A Culinary Design · The Downing Arts Podcast

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  Welcome to the Downing Arts Podcast.
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  Creative activities have slowed down a little bit as we head into exam season,
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  but the choir gave a splendid rendition of Stanford in C on Sunday,
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  and preparations are underway for the forthcoming DDS production.
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  My guest today is Aram Muradian, a BI Fellow here at Downing.
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  Welcome, Aram. Thanks very much, Louisa. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very
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  much for being with us. So, as well as being bifello at Downing, I believe
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  you also have an academic role in college, is that right? Yes, I'm the director
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  of studies in architecture and in design. Great.
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  And do we have many students doing architecture? It's actually probably
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  one of the most competitive courses at the moment, and Downing,
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  to say, is one of the most competitive colleges for
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  it. So, yeah, we have. I mean, we have about six. There should be more,
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  really. The Hyung Gallery has been a big draw for the architects,
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  but Downing has that kind of appeal,
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  a special appeal compared to a lot of other colleges because of the Hyong.
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  Cool. Okay, so I know you have a really interesting background, and I know
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  you do a lot of really, really interesting work. So do you want to just
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  tell us a little bit about what you're going to talk about today and the
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  kind of background to it? Sure. I mean, I guess, you know,
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  you've. You've given me the brief of discussing a kind of creative project
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  that I've been working on. And recently my
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  architecture firm, Meridian Studio,
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  which is based in the UK and in Armenia at the moment, won an
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  international competition to redesign part
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  of the historic center of a city called Gyumri in Armenia.
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  Gyumri is a city that suffered a terrible
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  earthquake in the late 80s. And I
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  suppose with Armenia opening up now and hopefully borders opening
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  soon, it seems that there's a lot of investment to rebuild some of this.
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  So it's quite an unusual project. The land was purchased by
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  an educational charity, which is an unusual client for such
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  a large urban project. But they ran to the
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  EU and said, look, there's this amazing piece of land.
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  Help us. So I have this fantastic client who's taken a risk
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  on us, and they're letting us rebuild some of the historic market
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  buildings and a free culinary school and
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  experimental food garden, which will be
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  very exciting. Wow. What's an experimental food garden? Yeah,
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  well, it's actually. I mean, we. We called it a civic farm, which maybe
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  is a slightly pretentious term for an urban farm, but we had quite a
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  bit of land to deal with, and we
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  decided that it'd Be a nice idea to bring on board a
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  man called Mark Mill Hermansson, who's. He's actually a food anthropologist
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  who works with the restaurant Noma in Copenhagen.
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  And we were having discussions during the competition stage about how
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  we could increase people's and students sense
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  of connection with where ingredients come from and
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  how food relates to the landscape. So we
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  decided, well, why don't we make what essentially is a public park,
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  but have it run by the students and
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  have it be full of all of the kind of sampling of
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  all the local ingredients that are available in that region.
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  Wow. Gosh. That was kind of the idea that
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  we came up with and probably the reason why we won the competition, despite lack
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  of experience as very, very projects. Gosh. Well, it's certainly an
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  innovative idea. And I know you've talked about using new
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  technology and stuff like that. Do you want to just elaborate a
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  little bit on that side of things? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think,
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  you know, thinking about ingredients,
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  food, I suppose one can think about buildings
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  in a similar way, actually. I mean,
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  we talk about new technology. I mean, a lot of
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  the movements in architecture and the discussions
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  in architecture today are actually rooted in ideas that are
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  historical. So how you use materials
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  that are locally available, how you understand our relationship to
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  wider supply chains, what that means politically,
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  what that means in terms of the impact of the extraction
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  of those materials. So it really is conversation about understanding
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  the ingredients of buildings, and out of that we start
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  looking at what's readily available. So in Gyumri,
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  I don't know if any of the listeners have ever been to Armenia, but there's
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  one thing that Armenia is not short of, and that's stone. So to
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  give you an idea, most houses are just made out of tuff,
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  which is very light, volcanic stone, and you
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  can just take a circular saw and cut it out of the ground and pick
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  it up and build your house out of it. And that kind
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  of stone is actually cheaper than concrete in Armenia.
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  So when you look at that kind of abundance of material,
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  so there's low material cost, and then you look at the labor costs,
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  which are much lower than the uk, you can actually make buildings out of
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  solid stone relatively affordable in the way that perhaps in the UK you
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  can't do without spending a lot of money like they did in the library.
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  So I think. I think that that's where
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  we saw an opportunity and we. We're working. We brought on
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  board a firm called Web Yates Engineers and a
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  stone mason called Pierre Bidou.
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  They work together quite often and they look at how
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  you can replace very ambitious
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  scales of structure, which we usually use concrete for,
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  with stone instead. Because, of course, stone is much
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  more carbon friendly, lasts forever.
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  So we're looking at ways that we can use lots of stone instead
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  of concrete, which has some engineering complications, but, you know,
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  thousands of years. So that's, that's one
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  of the aspects of the project, I think, and I know you've talked about sort
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  of remodeling this, this patch of ground or this, this area.
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  And I mean, how, how creative can you be with that? I mean, presumably there
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  are some limitations in terms of perhaps topography
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  or landscape or whatever, but. Yeah. Has it been a
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  very creative project? Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about this this
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  morning before the interview and how, you know, architecture,
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  on the one hand, it's creative discipline, on the other hand, it relies
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  on so many other people. So it's
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  a bit like Ready, Steady, cook. They're like, you know, there and
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  defined by somebody else in a way, and you have to make something out of
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  it. So you, you're. You, you have a brief, you have a client,
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  but you try to,
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  you know, get a piece of yourself and your own kind of way of working
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  into it. I think there is. There is never one way of doing something.
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  There are an infinite number of ways of doing anything, even with lots
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  of parameters and restrictions. So it's within that infinite space
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  that you be creative, if that makes sense.
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  So I think that if I look at my own work and
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  in my own research and looking at how you actually
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  tap into historical methods of construction,
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  how you look at modern forms of fabrication,
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  how you look at data around carbon and these
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  kind of questions, what you're actually doing is defining a.
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  A palette of materials and a palette of processes.
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  And it's with those that again and
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  again and again with each project, certain themes, certain attitudes,
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  certain senses of proportion emerge.
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  And that's where I think the architect's creativity comes in.
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  So I think it's possible. Yeah, there's always infinite possibility.
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  Despite all the constraints that architecture imposes
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  on a project. Do you find that having constraints or having
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  parameters actually enables you to be more creative? Because I
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  know you said there's still limitless possibilities, but I mean,
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  example, I mean, many years ago, I worked for a practice that specialized in art
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  galleries and had lots of artists as clients and things like that. There was one
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  client who came and said, well, I want a studio and maybe some
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  flats. It was a little bit vague and brief, but then she had
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  these reference photos and what was most important for
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  her as a sculptor was these reference photos. And she said one was a photograph
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  of a slice of a pastrami sandwich. The other one was stacks,
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  crates in the desert. I think they were apple crates, and another one
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  was some stacked concrete blocks. So in a way, like,
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  you know, we were like, okay, so there's stacking.
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  You're interested in stacking things and creating solid and
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  void and layers,
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  like the layers of the strangling. So somehow out of that,
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  we could develop a project that reflected that
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  intuition, and it was really exciting. And then as a studio,
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  we ended up doing something that we never would have expected. So absolutely every
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  project comes out of the client, Every single one. The creativity
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  comes out of that dance that you have, which you can't do
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  alone. You have to do it with somebody else. So, yeah, I think.
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  I think so. And, And. And what I. What I want to say about,
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  you know, all those ingredients, about, you know, and the project in Gyumri, in Armenia,
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  is that when you tap into those local systems,
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  when something grows out of all of those elements,
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  you start creating associations, or the
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  people who live there and work there start creating their own associations
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  with those materials. They have their own memories about,
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  you know, they recognize patterns in the
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  work that you're creating because those patterns are locally embedded,
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  even though it could look completely contemporary and surprising at the
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  same time. Wow. And how far into this project are you at the
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  moment? I mean, is it near completion or.
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  We haven't started construction yet. We're in the process of designing
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  and detailing it. It's been an unusual project because what
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  we do is we do a lot of surveying in the beginning, and we try
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  to map what the resources available are and things like this.
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  Usually what an architect will do is they'll just design everything on paper and
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  then give it to a builder, and that builder will go out and buy all
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  the products. You want to reuse things, and when you want to use local things,
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  you have to buy the materials first around it.
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  So we're doing it backwards. So we've been traveling out to Armenia and buying
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  bits of old Soviet factory and going shopping
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  for all the bits and pieces before we actually finish designing the project. Yeah.
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  So, I mean, how often do you go out to Armenia? Is it. You know,
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  you say you're going out there sort of regularly, but. Yeah, well, I mean,
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  I've been going nine times, but that was very brief
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  periods. But usually what I'll do is over the summer period,
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  I'll go for a month or two and spend more time
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  there. Now there's a team there so I don't have to go out as much,
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  but I teach a summer school in a village outside Yerevan,
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  which is the capital. Again, all about looking at how you build with the
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  community and out of local materials, things like that.
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  So I'll usually go for that and then I can do all the administrative stuff
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  around that time and then it doesn't inter interrupt with my teaching
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  in the UK and things like that. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for chatting
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  today. It's been quite a quite a wide ranging and interesting discussion
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  and yeah, best of luck with the project. Thank you very much. I think
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  this is a wonderful initiative. Thank you.
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  This week in college, the chapel choir sing the final choral compline
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  of the year tonight at nine in the chapel followed by port and hot chocolate.
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  Before that, 6 till 8pm in the gallery there's a lowering stress with art session.
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  Do drop in. On Sunday, the chapel choir give a sneak preview of some of
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  the music for the Commemoration of Benefactors service at evensong at 6pm and
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  on Monday 6 till 6.30pm in my office, the Take a Break choir will
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  be singing through hits from the show Miss Saigon. Do drop by and let off
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  some steam. Don't forget the Twining Egginton exhibition is open in the
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  gallery until Sunday. Thanks for listening.