Suyue Jin
Food Culture Complex
Visible and Invisible Immigrant Culture, Capital Colonialism, Culturally Integrated Food
Food has opened new avenues and complications in the formation of immigrant cultures. On the one hand, it builds a system that integrates taste, cultural memory, and historical evolution; on the other hand, the interdependence of food and place alters human behavior and social patterns.
Chinese food culture is transformed and reshaped with the mobility of immigrants. Shifting/Flow/Mobility represents a survival state of contemporary culture and points to the tendency of architecture to break through the inherent order to shape free space. The thesis uses mobility as a beginning point for design, catching the links concealed in the mismatch between the material growth of architectural space and the concept of culture, and creating a new cultural space.
Chinatown was chosen as the site for the thesis practice. It is vanishing in violent demolition and was transformed into an ethnic theme park Mobile cultural forms become solid and encased in their architectural forms. The first generation of immigrants were evicted from the neighborhoods they had constructed when their land leases expired and relocated to the outskirts of the ever-expanding plains of Los Angeles. Is it possible to construct a new order solely by removing the previous one? Is there room for vertical development of old cities in addition to horizontal expansion?
The thesis aims to design a food culture complex that explores food through “taste”,” smell”,” look” and “touch” as following the flow of architecture. It reinterprets Chinese food culture, which was simplified and compressed within the dominant culture from the perspective of its original culture. Building new structures on top of existing properties on the site. Investigate the spatial possibilities that exist “in-between” the old buildings and the sky overhead. The actualities of the dominant culture are confronted at the critical edge of urban life and culture as a whole, and the new ideas essential to the growth of a new culture can emerge.