How to Cite: Rodríguez Alfonzo, Josymar and Liesbeth Huybrechts. "Gut feelings: Introducing the Everydayness of Eating as a Situated Pedagogical Attitude to Knowing and Caring for Naturecultures in Architecture Schools". Dearq no. 41 (2025): 127-138. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq41.2025.05

Gut feelings: Introducing the Everydayness of Eating as a Situated Pedagogical Attitude to Knowing and Caring for Naturecultures in Architecture Schools

Josymar Rodríguez Alfonzo

josymar.rodriguez@uhasselt.be

Hasselt University, Diepenbeek, Belgium

Liesbeth Huybrechts

liesbeth.huybrechts@uhasselt.be

Hasselt University, Diepenbeek, Belgium

Received: December 10, 2023 | Accepted: June 14, 2024

This paper explores the incorporation in architectural education of everyday eating practices as a pedagogical approach. By involving architecture students in cooking, eating, and digesting together, the study seeks to move beyond conventional architectural training. Through a focus on eating, this approach aims to emphasize personal experiences as a primary source of knowledge. It employs autoethnography to reveal the transformative potential of centering the everydayness of eating in architectural learning. Findings highlight a profound link between eating-centered engagements and students' capacity to address complex societal and environmental issues, advocating for a shift towards embodied architectural education.

Keywords: Eating, relationality, care, architectural pedagogies, naturecultures.

introduction

The curricula followed in many architecture schools focus on preparing students to be "hirable" professionally and fluent in the tools required to make sense of a space from a distance (Papanek and Lazarus 2005; Wilde 2020). This emphasis on technical skills and professional preparation often leaves little room for developing an understanding of the complex relationships between humans, nature, and architecture. Following Puig de la Bellacasa (2012), the authors argue that there is a need for designers to develop concrete relationships that begin with "everyday practices at the level of ordinary life"—vital activities (Carrasco 2001; Gilligan 1982) beyond self-care practices (Foucault 1987)—in order to connect personal experience with the collective. Drawing on feminist literature's assertion that "the personal is political" (Held 2006; Muxí 2018), individual experiences can be explored as the primary source of knowledge—a shift toward bringing ourselves and our students closer to our bodies rather than adopting distant perspectives.

This paper discusses our engagements with the everydayness of eating as a situated pedagogical approach to enhancing our knowledge and care for the intertwined realms of "naturecultures"1 (Haraway 2003; Puig de la Bellacasa 2010). Specifically, we look at the ways we have cooked, eaten and digested food with a group of architecture students to get to know, relate to, and care for others: soil, plants, animals, microorganisms, and humans. The reasons are multifaceted: personal fulfilment, practical considerations, an exploration of academic approaches, philosophical inquiry, ontological reflection, and pleasurable experiences have all played a part.

Eating enables us to immerse ourselves deeply as architects and designers in cultivating meaningful connections within the social, cultural, and natural worlds with which we engage. Eating is an activity we perform every day. It is essential for our sustenance and nourishment, but is also a fundamental bodily desire. As Boris Groys (2022) suggests, bodily desires are mechanisms by which we are brought back to our selves. Bodily desires connect our thinking with our bodies, with the fleshy side of being human. Eating allows us to engage with the materiality of our existence (Van Daele 2022). It reminds us of our interconnectedness with the world around us, as Annemarie Mol suggests in her book Eating in Theory (2021). Through eating, intimately connected to bodily desires and their materiality (Groys 2022), we seek to embed the understanding of architecture within the fabric of everyday life. Through eating, we nourish our bodies and explore our engagement with the world around us in a profound and interconnected way (Mol 2008; 2021). The multifaceted nature of cooking and eating is here explored as a pedagogical tool, as it allows us to cultivate meaningful connections with nature, culture, and each other. Within this context, we pose our central research question: How can we center the everydayness of eating as a situated pedagogical approach in architectural education to foster a deeper understanding and a greater sense of care for the complex relationships between humans, nature, and architecture?

In answering this question, we will describe how we introduce the viscerality of eating and its cultural entanglements in our research and teaching. We will explore thinking with (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012) our visceral body with the "explicit purpose to make things thicker" (Haraway and Goodeve 2000; cited in Puig de la Bellacasa 2012). Our explorations were part of a participatory design research process conducted by the Faculty of Architecture and Arts in Hasselt University, Belgium. The project aimed to make Kolmen, a small social housing neighborhood in the city of Beringen, more textured, diverse, and inclusive. In this paper, we discuss our approach by providing:

  1. An autoethnographic account of our position in the process and in the study site, guided by our gut feelings.
  2. An exploration of our students' engagement with the site through their visceral reactions, cultural subjectivities and interrelations during their learning process.
  3. A discussion of the challenges of incorporating visceral knowledge production into architectural education using our school's infrastructure, specifically the kitchen, as a learning environment.

Our findings section indicates a strong link between the viscerality of eating, cooking, and digesting and the potential to involve students in addressing various interconnected social and environmental issues, demonstrating that the multifaceted nature of these metabolic actions and processes not only provides nourishment but also fosters a profound and interconnected engagement with the world around us, showing its potential as a pedagogical tool, and allowing students to develop relational sensitivity (Akama & Light 2018 2020; Gottlieb 2022) by engaging in intimate experiences within nature and cultural settings (Haraway 2010).

introducing eating to deepen the relationality of knowing

Eating as a knowledge-building tool brings private matters into the public sphere and the urban realm (Carrasco 2001; Cuomo 2002; De Certeau 1988; Jacobs 1974). Taking everyday care of sustenance processes associated with our gut and thinking with them (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012) fosters an alternative way of being, knowing, doing and relating. In Eating in Theory (2021) Annemarie Mol supports this idea, as she explores the importance of reclaiming the fleshy side of being human, moving away from hierarchical views that separate humans from other creatures and disconnect them from nature. When it comes to the relationship between eating and knowing, Mol summarizes her argument: "In eating foods, the known objects become incorporated into the knowing subject" (2021, 4). Mol also discusses the situatedness of eating, the positionality of the eater, and the mutual transformation that results from this engagement.

Using the relation between the eating subject and the eating object when engaging with a study site invites us to consider everything as a possible source of nourishment—including elements within the site itself. When we process things through our gut, detaching ourselves from those study objects becomes difficult, allowing for a more intimate and interconnected understanding of the world (Law & Mol 2008; Probyn 2011; Van Daele 2022).

Eating as an approach to deepening the relationality of knowing aligns with a significant ontological shift that design is currently undergoing, opening up fields of study and expanding the repertoire of tools and processes to more relational research methods (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010; Huybrechts et al. 2022). This change is motivated by a curiosity to articulate a more caring and relational attitude toward our socio-ecological environment (Jönsson et. al 2019). There has thus been a reorientation of design discourses from a primary focus on methods towards reflections by designers on their attitudes and the embodied knowing involved in the act of design (Agid & Akama 2020; Baek et al. 2018; Light & Akama 2012 2014).

introducing eating to reimagine architectural education

By centering our gut, knowledge becomes intimately connected to the processes associated with our earthly and mundane bodies (Frichot 2019; Frichot et al. 2022). This emphasis affirms the centrality of vital activities historically associated with women, and, as Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) notes, reclaims the significance of neglected values in the realm of reproductive living. Societal labors of care, categorized as domestic or emotionally oriented tasks, are frequently overlooked and considered less important (Carrasco 2001; Muxí 2018). By centering our gut and recognizing the importance of its everyday doings, we can bring attention to the essential role of reproductive tasks and societal labors of care in sustaining life (Frichot et al. 2022).

Early feminist theories of care ethics were built on values grounded in the maintenance by women of everyday relationships (Gilligan 1982). These theories emphasized the importance of personal experiences as a primary source of knowledge, highlighting the interconnectedness of individuals and communities. Mol's ethnographic approach toward eating offers an insightful perspective into the ways our personal experiences as eaters and our metabolic processes can facilitate knowledge creation and how we can include the approach in architectural education. We can practice it in three ways. Firstly, we can document when our gut reacts to matter, physically moving stuff through our body. Secondly, we can trace what happens when our gut responds to thoughts, when we react not only to the idea but also to the cultural and historical significance of stuff moving through our bodies. Furthermore, by paying attention to our gut, we can become mindful of our primary visceral, emotional, or instinctual responses (Hayes-Conroy 2017; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2008; Probyn 2004, 2015).

The following section will review three situations in which our gut guided knowledge-creation and the challenges of incorporating bodily engagements in architecture-learning settings.

1. Gut feelings guiding sense-making in a garden city

Our research and teaching during the past two years took place in Kolmen, a small social housing neighborhood in the garden city of Beringen, as part of a collaboration between Hasselt University, city authorities and the social housing company Wonen in Limbrug (WiL). Beringen was designed and built according to the Garden City model, between 1954 and 1974. These housing developments sought to combine the best of town and country life in self-sustaining settlements, offering housing and amenities to all. Currently, Kolmen is a low-density, car-oriented, segmented social housing neighborhood which needs to address contemporary challenges associated with housing standards, energy and climate needs, and public space requirements which are central to building resilient communities.

The need for a visceral approach first emerged when the PhD researcher, the principal author of this article, joined the project:

I2 was a starting researcher with limited knowledge of Kolmen's cultural, social, and political background. I could not speak the language. I was lost in translation. And in the midst of not knowing, my gut stepped in. What my brain could not process, my body tried to. Guided by my gut, I sat in the discomfort of the unknown, trying to give meaning to everything through my senses without relying on spoken exchanges. I had a gut feeling that there was more to this neighborhood than this overly ordered, hyper-curated, clean suburban landscape. Having to come from a very different context was a difficult task to make sense of Kolmen, but this also provided an opportunity to add a distinct layer of interpretation to the site and the situation, centering the body of an outsider, the gut of an outsider, as a tool for creating meaning. My gut feeling incited a search for fellow outsiders, a couple of lonely mushrooms growing against all odds in a crack between road and sidewalk. I started by describing the site from the perspective of fellow outsiders who grew up in this neighborhood but never managed to belong.

I wrote: A lonely mushroom is a rare find. Soil is all a mushroom needs to grow, but this landscape is dominated by concrete. A harsh, thick, dense, hot, non-porous surface, ideal for enormous metal-wheeled beasts to flourish, but not for mushrooms or anything else. All other beings adapt to survive in the land of the beasts. It is a place dominated by empty plots, wide streets, and manicured lawns. A compartmented, segmented, monotone land where not only mushrooms are lonely. Overcoming solitude and engaging with others is only possible when the concrete cracks. We are all lonesome in the land of the beasts; only breakdown can bring us together (fig. 1).

Telling the story of the site from different perspectives—from that of the researcher and of a mushroom—helped us comprehend it better by thickening the layers composing its presence (Haraway 1988; Haraway 2016; Tsing 2021). Narrating stories became vital to deepening our journeys and, inspired by the words of Ursula K. Le Guin: "true voyage is return", we chose to return to ourselves, our bodies, our migratory histories, and our personal, cultural, and intimate relationships with food and eating (Light 2018). We allowed gut feelings to guide the work, prompting us to continuously sense the site's intricacies by weaving in other stories—of insiders and outsiders alike—bearing new meanings and enabling relationships, as Donna Haraway writes in her introduction to Le Guin's The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Le Guin 2019).

Figure 1

Figure 1_ A couple of lonely mushrooms, outsiders, in the concrete-dominated landscape. Source: the author.

Gut feelings are thus explored as actions that stem from our instincts, allowing us to comprehend the complexities of a site that may not be easily accessible through rational thinking and traditional architectural drawings alone (Frichot et al. 2022), aligned with an increased interest in approaching architecture through anthropology, an approach developed sytematically by scholars such as Tim Ingold (2013), Victor Buchli (2013) and Marie Stender (2017), and explored in architecture studios by Helen Frichot (2022) and many others as a strategy to break away from the universalism and develop more caring attitudes towards others, both human and more than human (Huybrechts 2022; Jönsson et. al 2019; Stender 2017).

Gut feelings help us navigate the intricate connections between our bodies, our emotions, and the landscapes we inhabit (Mol 2008). By relying on our gut feelings, we uncover hidden narratives and perspectives that may not be immediately apparent. Here, we exercised gut feelings as an auto-ethnographic approach for self-directed learning in an exploratory phase. However, we aimed to transition to a collective knowledge-making process. Therefore, we introduced the everydayness of eating as a situated pedagogical attitude in four architectural educational situations: a live project, a picnic workshop, a semester-long research assignment, and a kitchen-based seminar. The first two of these are discussed in a previous paper (Rodríguez Alfonzo et al. 2024), while the second two are discussed in the following sections.

2. Guts guiding a thick site perspective

Our gut approach was put into practice in a semester-long architectural anthropology course with six undergraduate architecture students working on an empirical research assignment. We engaged them in the continuum of 'thickening the present' of Kolmen from their perspective, as outsiders, engaging with the site through their bodies, trying to understand the imprints of physical space in the community and its matter as an active part of social life (Hastrup and Hastrup 2015, 16; cited in Stender 2017).

The initial task was to explore the neighborhood through its edibility. Kolmen is a social housing neighborhood that stretches into the Zwarte Beek Vallei, a vast nature reserve safeguarding one of the host country's most significant stream valleys (fig. 2). The students walked3 along the creek while conversing with a ranger about potential edible plant, fruit, and flower species. Discussions evolved from a focus on idyllic ways of connecting with the forest to debating conflicts; these were motivated by the idea of engaging the landscape through the gut. The questions guiding the exploration were: Can we eat or drink the site itself? Do we dare to move the site through our guts? Is it possible to make sense of it through our guts? The students and the ranger expressed concern about excessive fruit picking and potential soil and water contamination from a past coal-mining operation near the stream. Thinking with our guts highlighted the multifaceted nature of engaging with the environment, weaving together ecological, cultural, and ethical considerations.

The second task was intended to familiarize children from the neighborhood with the forest as edible matter. They walked together to the creek, and once there, the architecture students pointed out some of the site's edible species, such as mushrooms, nettles, berries, chestnuts, dandelions, and elderberry flowers, and how to make them a part of our daily cooking and eating practices. The children shared their experiences with these species while carefully collecting some samples. The students were surprised by the enthusiasm the children showed for tasting what they found and the way they spontaneously continued foraging in the neighborhood streets, eagerly searching for more plants, fruits, and flowers. The children's enthusiasm for foraging showcased their natural curiosity and willingness to engage with their surroundings in a meaningful and hands-on way.

These two site-specific teaching experiences, which focused on the edibility of landscape elements, prompted various reflections and deepened understanding of the site's complexity. This increased the interest of the architecture students in the following areas:

  1. The impact of a connection with nature on human health and well-being.
  2. The contribution an understanding of the human-food connection can make to environmental awareness.
  3. Soil and air pollution. Safety concerns prompted by the prospect of eating plants growing in urban areas and contaminated soils.
  4. Soil remediation practices and food forests as design outcomes to pursue in their architectural practice.
  5. The students questioned the current regulations governing forests. The picking of produce is forbidden, which prevents the forest from being denuded but also limits our ways of relating to it.
  6. The students became familiar with safe picking practices and reflected on foraging as a way to establish profound relationships with the natural world.
Figure 2

Figure 2_ The edible landscape of the Zwarte Beek Vallei. Source: the author.

Figure 3

Figure 3_ Neighborhood children engaging with the edible landscape. Source: the author.

3. Eating together to mess with power relations

To reflect on the semester-long experience, we hosted a cooking workshop at our architecture school (fig. 4). This endeavor involved navigating logistical challenges such as finding the kitchen, which was practically hidden away within the faculty, and obtaining permission to use it as a learning environment. The process provoked concerns from the school's administration about distinguishing between service and served spaces, prompting questions about whether a kitchen can be considered a 'proper' learning environment.

After briefly sharing previous foraging experiences, we cooked, ate and digested together. We designed a meal, assigned tasks, and spent 90 minutes cooking with the available produce and implements. Cooking became an activity where we learned how each of us works under material and time constraints while displaying internal group leadership and organizational strategies. We then sat down to eat together while discussing the food itself, the cooking process, our cultural backgrounds concerning food preferences and cooking methods, our relationship with food and soil, and the edibility of the Valley of the Zwarte Beek. The act of cooking, eating and digesting together not only nourished our bodies but also fostered a sense of connection, community and conviviality (Donati 2014) among the participants, allowing openness and vulnerability in their exchanges.

Moreover, the workshop provoked several meaningful reflections from the students on three topics: first, the strong connection between food and culture and the challenges faced by immigrant communities seeking to engage with soil and local produce, as food is an essential form of connection with their culture and their land. Second, the challenge of cooking with available produce brought to the forefront the students' life stories concerning food and the acknowledgement of the care structures underlying their daily lives. Lastly, the students reflected on their relation to labors of care, as well as issues involving the school's own duty of care and the lack of student well-being.

The initial reluctance of the students to participate in the process because of pressing deadlines highlights the struggle involved in balancing academic responsibilities with activities related to the labor of care for their own bodies, even when these are themed as academic assignments. In their own words: "To be honest, we were somewhat dreading cooking at first, as we still had many 'important' deadlines to meet". However, as they engaged in cooking, conversations flowed more easily, allowing them to form deeper connections that went beyond their usual classroom interactions: "While cooking, we also noticed that we got to know others much better this way. Because you sit together in class every day, but you don't talk much about things other than school". Additionally, the enjoyable nature of the experience emphasized the importance of taking breaks to renew energy and foster a sense of well-being in the midst of demanding schedules. The workshop provided a valuable lesson in integrating learning and daily life experiences, showing that education can be enriched by incorporating activities like cooking and eating together.

Figure 4

Figure 4_ Cooking and eating together workshop in the architecture school's kitchen. Source: the author.

conclusion

This research delved into the incorporation of everyday eating practices as a pedagogical approach in architectural education. By emphasizing personal experiences as a vital source of knowledge (Ballestero & Winthereik 2021; Held 2006), the study provides insights into the transformative potential of centering the gut within the process of architectural learning. It helps us adopt an experimental and transformative rather than a descriptive approach. It enhances our willingness to (quite literally) 'take in' the world in the act of knowledge-making (Gibson-Graham 2011, 22). Active involvement in processes such as harvesting, cooking, eating, and digesting fosters a shift away from traditional technical training methods, encouraging students to develop a deeper understanding and care for the intricate relationships between humans, nature, and architecture.

The three case studies used an autoethnographic approach, allowing researchers and students to reflect on their own roles in creating knowledge. This approach highlighted the importance of "pay[ing] attention to how matter and discourse combine in the visceral body" (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010, 1280). Engaging with the site through metabolic processes and gut feelings propelled a shift away from detached conceptualizations of architecture, fostering a more nuanced and empathetic perspective and highlighting the connection between visceral engagement and the ability of students to address complex societal and environmental issues by placing importance on embodied and experiential understandings.

In the specific case of the study site, embracing an outsider perspective, respecting gut feelings, staying with the trouble (Haraway 2016) and being lost in translation prompted the need to strongly connect with the Valley of the Zwarte Beek as a way for students and residents alike to create stories for collective futures. This is a process in which the neighborhood ceases to ignore the natural reserve, articulating a more caring and relational attitude toward our socio-ecological environment, and inviting a future in which the conditions for mutuality to emerge are created.

Yet, integrating life-sustaining practices, such as eating, into architectural education implies grappling with institutional challenges. Infrastructural support for alternative pedagogies is imperative if a diverse and inclusive educational landscape is to be developed. Embracing this opportunity means enriching our knowledge ecosystem with otherness, embracing the messiness that comes with engaging our bodies and our guts in knowledge creation, and creating conditions for profound changes in the infrastructure of architecture schools.

The research advocates for a paradigm shift in architectural education towards an embodied approach that centers the everydayness of eating and the agency of our guts as a situated pedagogical attitude. By embracing visceral experiences as a primary source of knowledge and actively engaging with the materiality of our existence, students are better equipped to navigate the complexities of the built environment and foster a deeper understanding of, and care for, the intricate relationships between humans, nature, and architecture (Puig de la Bellacasa 2010).

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1 Natureculture signifies the inseparability of the natural and the cultural against an ontological split embedded in modern traditions (Haraway 2006). Natureculture is explored by Donna Haraway as a mode of thought, a "cosmology that affirms the breaking down of boundaries of the technological and the organic as well as the animal and the human—whether this is considered to be a historical phenomenon, an ontological shift and/or a political intervention" (Puig de la Bellacasa 2010).

2 This section has been written in first person by the principal author to provide insight into their position and experience at the study site. This decision aims to highlight the importance of personal experiences and sensitivities towards sense-making while also aligning with the concept of the 'ethnographic hunch' as a way of knowing. The approach is consistent with Ballestero and Winthereik's (2021) suggestion of incorporating different ways of knowing into research.

3 Walking as a practice to engage with landscape has been widely explored in social action and participatory design, as well as in ethnography and landscape research (Bates & Rhys-Taylor 2018; Kanstrup et al. 2014; Vergunst & Ingold 2016).