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The Culinary Institute of Foraged Ingredients: An Architecture Measured Out of a Meal

Project details

Student Ian Blashe
Programme
Unit UG21
Year 2

To forage is to read a landscape, to negotiate what is visible against what stays hidden, to weigh the instinct to search against the decision to commit.

Bologna already moves this way beneath its portici, covered passages that order the city between inside and outside. Walks through this network were recorded and reconstructed into precise movement paths, then used to train a pathfinding logic that could be re-run on other ground. The portico becomes less a structure than a way of moving, one that can be carried elsewhere.

It is carried to Villa Ghigi, a hillside park on the city's edge and a former estate whose order has quietly collapsed, its paths faded with its fields. What the site has lost, the city lends as navigational behaviour.
The building is measured from a single plate of Bolognese, the meal that concluded a day of foraging in the city, scanned and resolved into the smallest spaces in which the dish can be made: a burner, a counter, a sink, a place to eat. The recorded movement threads these into ten foraged rooms along covered and open ground. The building is the portico, re-learned: a foraged architecture for the making of Bolognese.

A series of 36 motion-extracted foraging scans in Epping Forest, processed through SfM (Structure-from-Motion) scripts to convert the recorded searching into measurable data.

Foraging Catalogue

A series of 36 motion-extracted foraging scans in Epping Forest, processed through SfM (Structure-from-Motion) scripts to convert the recorded searching into measurable data.

The minimum volume required for a space to cook a single plate of Bolognese. This acts as the spatial unit that dictates the masterplan’s scale, measured from a single serving.

The Bolognese Microkitchen

The minimum volume required for a space to cook a single plate of Bolognese. This acts as the spatial unit that dictates the masterplan’s scale, measured from a single serving.

Spaces Within the Bolognese Culinary Institute

Spaces Within the Bolognese Culinary Institute

Scaled from the micro-kitchen as a spatial unit of measurement, the 10-building masterplan derives its materiality from its selected position within the Bolognese point cloud, and creates scattered spaces to teach, to eat, and to cook.

After the building is fully realised, it is then reprocessed through the original SfM scripts that provided the data to generate the structure’s orientation, breaking the spatial sequence and allowing the building to exist as imagined, seen space.

Reimagining the Masterplan

After the building is fully realised, it is then reprocessed through the original SfM scripts that provided the data to generate the structure’s orientation, breaking the spatial sequence and allowing the building to exist as imagined, seen space.

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The Bartlett
Summer Show 2026
25 June – 12 July
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