［essay］Looking Back on the Research / Toshikatsu Ienari (dot architects)
Following on from the previous research on water, this edition of Kansai Studies turned to the theme of food. That single word encompasses many approaches, so we narrowed it down to okonomiyaki, a dish that all of us have eaten and know well from everyday life, and proceeded with the research through a process of trial and error. We at dot architects particularly focused on the following five characteristics as the possibilities of okonomiyaki: 1. The ease with which its ingredients can be obtained
2. The ease with which it can be made
3. The ease with which the tools to make it can be obtained
4. The ease with which the tools to make it can be handled
5. The potential for someone to make various modifications and create infinite variations
https://gyazo.com/6f02e703787e6ee9e443bb1abf3894e7
These offer us a set of pointers for when making something, not only okonomiyaki but things in general and even architecture. The aim of our research this time was to attempt to delve deeper into the first entry in that list: the ease with which its ingredients can be obtained. Okonomiyaki ingredients are indeed easy to obtain by exchanging them for money at a supermarket. But if we investigate how the ingredients reach the “super” market, we must turn to the various human deeds taking place on this planet of ours, not least in terms of the advanced logistics and infrastructure, national policy, and food and environmental issues. With the exception of a handful of special professionals, those deeds are ordinarily hard to see for those of us going about our everyday lives. This is due to how very technologically and politically advanced they are, making it utterly impossible to understand everything, while we are also unable to directly access them. Because we can neither see nor mentally visualize them. The open image offered by the dish that is okonomiyaki presents a beautiful contrast with the more immediate, closed image of the procurement of its ingredients. As we approached the deep layer of okonomiyaki, a whole other world unfolded. During the research this time, the questionnaire about okonomiyaki conducted by Nagara Wada taught us something important: that each okonomiyaki dish has its own story. We get emotional looking back at our memories of sharing okonomiyaki with our friends and family. That these stories are plentiful is the reason we like okonomiyaki. At the final performance, okonomiyaki was cooked from these different perspectives. This was not something at all limited to okonomiyaki. It encouraged us to reconsider the various things that surround us.