Culinary Center: Food, Architecture, and Identity

The vast diversity of Ecuador, combined with globalization’s influences, has caused an identity struggle within the country’s gastronomy. There are no clear recipes, techniques, or guidelines on how to delineate and re-create its traditional food. This confusion in culinary culture creates little precedence for students and chefs to learn and develop. Consequently, a Culinary Center is needed to identify, study, and structure Ecuador’s gastronomic culture. Architecture has the role of being the intermediary between the people and the institution, the kinetic and the static, the informal and the institution. It needs the flexibility to adapt to different scenarios that are modeled according to multiple cultural settings while negotiating with the rigidity of the building’s services, therefore allowing culture to flourish and formalize itself in the same place.