第19页 Raw,Medium,Well Done:A TypologicalReading of Australian Eating Places

    While a menu can give blatant clues to the typing of an eating place, raw, medium and welldone classifications are not dependent upon the literal presence of food in the architectural brief. Rather than produce a fixed set of rules,the various states are more like general ‘performance criteria’ that can be applied to the defining typological characteristics of any building type. For example, the observed similarities between the raw places – their immediacy to the street, diminutive size,simplicity of layout and one-off ownership – are not immutable characteristics of all raw places,just as a baguette or picnic can be made many ways, eaten inside or out, with a knife and fork or with the hands. Similarly, well-done places might not be entirely removed from the street,or employ a minimalist design vocabulary and rely on silver service. They are, however, identifiable by the level of design detail and control of each aspect of the eating experience, in the same way that cordon bleu cooking relies on elevating cooking to a precise art form. Just as cooks interpret recipes according to taste,technique and memory, this system of typing is not rigidly prescriptive. And just as typing is about collections and recollections, food, in whatever state,is part of an immense collection of ingredients, recipes and processes itself, and a catalyst for intensifying memories of common experiences.Claude Lévi-Strauss, the definitive philosopher on the raw and cooked, hypothesised that cuisine forms a language through which society codes messages and unconsciously reveals its structure.2 The purpose of using raw, medium and well done is to combine that language with a typological framework to tease out imaginative associations, offsetting otherwise prosaic processes of analysis with an emphasis on the holistic sensory experience of architecture.