Jingbo Huang
Salt Institute
The project is located in Carrara Italy, the same location as the world-renowned Carrara marble quarry. A specific food culture — curing “lardo”, which is curing pig’s back fat, was derived from the local mining of Carrara marble. Pig’s back fat was cheap meat that the quarry workers could get and they cured the meat in sarcophagus-like marble boxes with salt and local herbs deep in the quarry trench to sustain their meals. The project is to replan a local lardo maker, Larderia Giannarelli, into a campus of buildings including a lardo factory, a seasalt plant, a degustation with steam spa and delicatessen, and an exhibition space. These programs can enhance the experience of lardo making and eating through tasting, touching, smelling, and seeing. The crucial ingredient, salt, is used not only in curing lardo, but also in queering people and architecture. Salt in this project is tested and treated as a queer material to transform both organic and inorganic materials.
In order to provide an immersive experience with lardo, the guests are designed to be treated like lardo. In the steam spa, they encounter the steam from the sea salt evaporation process and are able to rub sea salt on their body and soak into salted water. As the skin reacts with salt, the skin is rejuvenated, deep cleaned, and detoxicated. They get queered. While bathing and steaming, they take a bite of lardo, which is cured by salt, flavored, prolonged, and matured. Salt is also embedded within the building materials on the campus to demonstrate its ability to queer architecture. Queer as a verb is to transform and to ruin. The solubility of salt makes the solid salt rocks in the building materials dissolve to liquid, leaving scars and holes on the facade, revealing its queered and ruined appearance. Another kind of salt, Copper Sulfate, can exchange with active metal ions like iron and aluminum, common building materials, and eventually erode these metals. As a result, these metals are exchanged into copper, completing their transformational process of identity and appearance.
Casting Cement Detail 01
Casting Cement Detail 02
Coordinates
Section on Coordinates
Massing 3 Diagrams