ARCADE JOURNAL - Winter 2007.

Michael Hebberoy Table Making / Breaking
Fritz Haeg Olympic Farming 2012
Sarah Rich From Footwear to FoodBALL
Eva Hagberg Scar Tissue
Stephanie Snyder The Master’s Table
Michael Hebberoy Table Making. Steps 1–8.
Bill Fritts Setting the Table
Peter Lewis Taste & Memory
Greg Lundgren, Matthew Stadler, Adam Kleinman Cook Books
Thorsten Baensch, Chrisine Dupuis Moveable Feat


TABLE MAKING / BREAKING
Michael Hebberoy

For the past one hundred years or so the Western world has been busily building a machine for eating. The blueprints for a glorious global mechanism to produce and distribute the golden jewels of the dirt were drawn up and revised while we hummed from Industry to Information. Now we are all involved and partake daily in this vast architecture. Like many of the armatures of modern design it has left us wanting. This machine may be a grand structure, but it is as cold as a freeway and the tastes it offers are about as complex.

When asked to feature edit this issue — ARCADE’s first sideways glance at the intersection of food and design — I had no clear picture of the patchwork that would form. Kelly had already shoulder-tapped a few respected writers, and I had less than a month to cull the rest of our content from sources far and wide. Strangely it was not a case of lack — the excitement to be involved bubbled over, and if we had pursued every interested party, every concept we had for these pages, you might have a 1,000-page brick of words and images.

The connections between food and design are ripe, rich and densely tangled. We didn’t set out to be macabre or political or really anything particular, but it is clear that this inquiry has hit a common pulse: nostalgia, a sense of loss and enthused commitment to solutions. Scars and personal transformation, broken tables, sweeping proposals to rip up London commons and plant strawberries, and in one case a pitch of anger so intense that a completely uncharacteristic act of violence played out in the night — the articles herein are not military marches, but they clearly respond to the context in which we currently walk, shop and eat. They look beyond Koolhaas’s eerie summation, “Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity,” and suggest that eating can once again become public, vital and, at the risk of sounding overly romantic, passionate.


Bio. Michael Hebberoy studied literature at Reed College and architecture at Portland State University. After launching the City Repair Project, a guerilla architecture project, with artist/activist Mark Lakeman, Hebberoy turned to the table. In March 2001, Michael opened an unlicensed restaurant in his Portland rental home, called Family Supper, which quickly became the most visible underground restaurant in the U.S. In 2004, Hebberoy and chef Morgan Brownlow opened clarklewis to critical acclaim. Hebberoy now lives and works in Seattle. His recent work includes the launch of a new underground project called “one pot” (www.onepot.org).

from Geography of Home. Akiko Busch. Princeton Architectural Press. 1999.

...and yet we hold on to the big table which, in turn, continues to demand a room of its own. Never mind that the dining table may have a computer on it or often becomes the place to fold laundry or sort the mail. Its surface bears an invisible imprint that indicates placement of forks, spoons, knives, napkins, and plates, all of them promising order, civility, and good manners. Setting a formal table has retained its appeal through all the changes that come into the dining room. This room, a small domain of ritual, though out of sync with the patterns of contemporary life, nevertheless seems to answer some vestigial human need. 

When they were very young, my twin sons were the kind of boys who could look at a truly beautiful cloud formation and see in it rifles; they used their toast as semi-automatic weapons and lived in a whirlwind of chaos. But what always astonished me about these two small warriors os how they loved to set the table; they could not seem to get enough of the domestic task. Even they seemed to sense that there was something soothing about the rituals of dining. There was meticulous care in the way one carried a pile of napkins while his brother softly laid out the forks. There was precision in every move they made. And their behavior seemed to suggest that these simple rituals may be balms to aggression. 

That small domestic rituals can quiet the mayhem of the human spirit has been recognized and institutionalized throughout the ages, and recorded in the history of tableware and table manners. To my mind the seminal moment of that history occurred in 1669, when Louis XIV decreed the use of rounded knives, At the time, knives had a sharp, pointed ends and were as handy in resolving mealtime disputes as they were in carving up a tough hunk of meat. By outlawing such lethal cutlery at the table, the French king was making a reasonable suggestion that his court leave their aggressions elsewhere. Thereafter, knives were designed with blunt, rounded ends, and knives already produced had their sharp ends rounded. Here was legislation that promoted dining as a social, congenial, even gentle act. It was one of those moments in design history when the connection between the form of an object and social intercourse was clear and precise, when the shape of an object and human behavior took their cues from one another in a clear and beautiful sequence.