Advanced Option Studio (AOS): American Food Fictions — Pure Food: Architecture, Appetite, and the American Identity
This studio investigates food as one of the most intimate architectures of American identity and power, tracing how belief and political economy enter factories, churches, kitchens, supermarkets, laboratories, highways, homes, bodies, and media platforms.
America wants its food pure, its choices infinite, its labor invisible, and its traditions authentic. We trust clear bottles, government seals, family recipes, perfect kitchens, celebrity testimony, disciplined bodies, and the promise that somewhere beneath the plastic there is still something real.
Yet pure ingredients require complex industrial infrastructures. National cuisines are made through immigration and appropriation. Pure bodies depend on supplements, metrics, and purchased services. Pure landscapes depend on displacement and resource extraction. Pure traditions are reconstructed through advertising and nostalgia. Pure choices are structured by subsidies, labor, zoning, logistics and law.
This studio investigates food as one of the most intimate architectures of American identity and power. Beginning in Pittsburgh with Heinz's clear bottle and the industrial invention of "pure food," the studio traces how belief and political economy enter factories, churches, kitchens, supermarkets, laboratories, highways, homes, bodies, and media platforms. Food gives these incompatible systems a shared language: we become American through what we grow, prohibit, preserve, package, bless, advertise, consume, refuse and discard.
Students work from documentary evidence to construct speculative architectural realities. Historical places, objects, rituals, regulations, images, and infrastructures are sampled and recombined into propositions that are strange because they are plausible. Evidence gives the work authority; fiction reveals relations and consequences that ordinary description cannot. The studio does not begin with a correct diet, a better farm, or a predetermined food-system solution. It asks students to expose the systems behind taste, trust, health, family, and belonging — then make those contradictions spatial.