cityofsound

Journal: Open Kitchen is open for business

A picture is worth 1000 words. Which I think means I now have to write 1000 words, right? This is my favourite picture from the last Ravintolapäivä pop-up restaurant day (I've written about Ravintolapäivä before) As someone commented on Instagram, "I wish I could open 10000 Instagram accounts so I could like this photo that many times."

This is a local Argentine living in Helsinki talking to my friend Lucas's daughter. The woman is dressed as a human empanada, in order to convey that you can get empanadas here. "Here", being their second floor window apartment, using the same basket-pulley-cash-food technique that the egg-and-bacon-muffin lady pioneered for the last Ravintolapäivä.

And this edition of RP was just as good as the others. Although we didn't use Kalle's pop-up coffee shop to conduct research this time, we did use Kalle's pop-up coffee shop. We also enjoyed the empanadas, and much Italian food served off the street near an (oh the irony) closed kioski at Johanneksen kirkon puisto.

As before, the streets of Helsinki were alive in ways they usually aren't, full of people you don't usually see eating food you can't usually get. It's really like a vivid new Helsinki emerging from within the hardened chrysalis of the old.

But you'll also know, if you've read my previous entries, that the only problem with Restaurant Day is the Day After Restaurant Day. It is a tactical intervention, rather than strategic. It relies on pop-ups, which, of course, pop-down again as easily as they pop-up.

So our new project aims to help resolve this. Called Open Kitchen, it's a kind of start-up incubator but for the small food business, and particularly the kind of "everyday food"—street food, small cafes, coffee shops—that materialises on Ravintolapäivä. We want a few of them to stop dematerialising!

Here's a short introductory video:

This is about the small percentage of those Ravintolapäivä pop-ups that would like to really do it for a living; to take those temporary pop-ups and try to make a few stick. Or perhaps you've never done Ravintolapäivä but you've always dreamed of opening an cafe—yet you have no idea how to go about it. You know how to cook, but don't know what permits you need, how to run a team, how to design a space, how to organise the finances, how to deal with customers, how to source local and organic ingredients ... Open Kitchen explains all of this, and reveals the tacit knowledge, from practitioners who have really done it, that will help you through this most challenging aspect of starting a successful food business.

You can find out more here, and more importantly, you can apply!

Open Kitchen is staffed by the those in the know. And that means not us! So we're running this in collaboration with Antto Melasniemi—who you can see in the video above, and who has opened several successful and utterly transformative food businesses in the city (Kuurna, Atelje Finne and Putte's), as well as producing the travelling HEL YES! extravaganza, the Solar Kitchen and much more—and Elina Forss, as well as Ville Relander from the City of Helsinki. Antto and Elina are selecting the best of Helsinki's food scene to be teachers and advisors on the course.

It's running at the fantastic new Kellohalli space, part of an amazing reworking of the old abbatoir space in Kalasatama into a food destination. Kalasatama is perhaps Helsinki's most interesting regeneration project, and this new market is at the heart of it.

The structure is simple, running from theory in week one (which is really about concept, logistics, permits, training, running a team, legal issues, funding, sourcing etc.) to practice in week two (the group collaborating on their choice for the design and build of a restaurant space at Kellohalli) to REAL practice in the last week (actually running that restaurant as a real, live restaurant with real customers.) 

We don't think there's anything quite like it here. While the fine dining scene in Helsinki has improved to the point of being competitive with most medium-sized European cities, if not better given the New Nordic Cuisine agenda, but almost all of the "everyday food" scene is as poor as any previous populist conception of "Finnish food" would imagine. (Read more about that here.)

Yet Ravintolapäivä suggests there is a much broader scene that could emerge, a much richer, more diverse set of offerings, and that the people of Helsinki have a genuine appetite for this.

So, again, find out more about Open Kitchen - and apply, why don't you? 

Now for a brief note on the back story, for those more interested in the practice than the project itself…

Essay: Foreword to Rory Hyde's "Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture"

We had the Helsinki launch of Rory Hyde's new book "Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture" today, featuring a panel discussion between Rory, Bryan Boyer, Jenna Sutela and me at the World Design Capital Paviljonki. 

Rory kindly asked me to write the foreword to the book, and as per usual, I've reproduced an edit of that below. The book features interviews with a fairly stellar cast of Bruce Mau, Indy Johar, Reinier de Graaf, Laura Baird, Mel Dodd, Wouter Vanstiphout, Camila Bustamante, Steve Ashton, Matt Webb, Bryan Boyer, Todd Reisz, Marcus Westbury, Hedwig Heinsman, Hans Vermeulen, Martine de Wit, Jeanne Gang, Conrad Hamann, Liam Young, Arjen Oosterman, Lilet Breddels and Natalie Jeremijenko. You can read more about it here, in this nice reflective post by Rory (including a note on the book designer's Robin Kinross-inspired insistence the book should lie flat, open, on a table.)

It really is a cracking book, exploring all of the most interesting practices in and around architecture today, with a suitably open and broad reading of what that word "architecture" might realistically mean. In doing so, it genuinely attempts to wrestle with the serious questions being asked of the profession's current and future status. This is one of the many places to look for clues as to the way out of the dead-end that architecture has backed itself into, but you don't often get so many strong, intelligent, interesting, and convincing voices gathered together in one place.

Rory's short introductions to each chapter are one of my favourite aspects of the book, too. Reading those pieces alone would give you a bracing primer in the challenges and opportunities within the field.

The book's genesis is also interesting, as it springs from a blog post that Rory wrote a few years ago, which exploded in the comments, almost like it was 2004 again. Internet alchemy, transforming blog post to book.

You can pick the book up at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com—please do so! Also, Rory's doing a similar event in Amsterdam this Friday, so do go along if you can.

Anyway. Here's the foreword.

(Given the book's subtitle describing the edge of architecture, I drew a bunch of quotes from the great urbanist Kevin Lynch's stone-cold classic "The Image of the City" (1960), which pepper the text. The other references are mostly well-worn favourites, I'm afraid. I really must read some new books KTHXBAI.

Essay: 21st Century Gestures Clip Art Collection

A month or so ago, Nicolas Nova asked me to write an essay for a project he was doing. He said they'd been working on a catalogue of novel "gestures, postures and digital rituals" and could I write about that, please, as a kind of foreword.

"Curious Rituals is a research project conducted at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) in July-August 2012 by Nicolas Nova (The Near Future Laboratory / HEAD-Genève), Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu from the media design program. (It) is about gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies..."

It so happens that, for some years now, I'd been collating a catalogue of novel gestures and interactions myself and had never got round to doing anything with it. So Nicolas's kind request gave me the chance to get it off my computer and onto the internet. Thanks Nicolas!

One outcome of their project is a rather nice short film; another is their book, here. My "preface" is reproduced below. Please note: as you'll see, this is not intended to be thorough, complete or even coherent—but you'll get the gist. I would guess many of us have such a list. It's probably more about noticing as a kind of practice, as a curious ritual of its own, rather than the particular gestures themselves. Even though I spent a little too much time trying to get the hands right. (Only to get the arms all wrong.)