Pro : Portion - Invigorating the sensory experience of hospitality

Abstract

In western society restaurants often the dining experience is lacking in sensory invigoration. Therefore, the dining experience is dissatisfying, and leads to countless social issues. This design thesis primarily investigates the connection between multi-sensory triggers and hospitality satisfaction in architecture. Consideration of the principles of Japanese cuisine has informed this investigation, and the resultant toolkit and architecture exemplifies the link between the two subject areas. It can be argued that hospitality satisfaction is not a necessity in life, but the advancement of social and cultural understanding leads to a coherence between the physical need for nutrition, and the want for gastronomic experiences. The output of this thesis shows a correlation between; materiality, colour, lighting, and spatial form, in creating desired emotive spaces. A series of material and precedent studies informed this investigation, and a resultant toolkit was created. Research on the Japanese cuisine and culture was undertaken to determine how another society successfully achieves sensory invigoration of the dining experience. This toolkit in combination with the other areas of research creates an epistemological outline which was then applied to a representative restaurant, in order to create a series of predetermined sensory responses. The programmatic form is a restaurant, bar, bakery and culinary school, all fine tuned on a sensory level to augment the satisfaction of a dining experience. It is implied in conclusion, that there are multiple ways to indicate a specific emotion; through the tailoring of criteria (materiality, colour, lighting, and spatial form) in architectural representation.