Summoning Daena: drawing the parallel

To Marco Frascari, the intersection, assimilation and transformation of influences, processes and materialities in architectural making, like cooking, contain intermediary and bifurcatory steps that frequently overturn the objective methodological authority of recipes. To Frascari, such continuing poiesis in the act of making produces not only the originary dishes and architectures, but augurs the somewhat unpredictable emergence of leftovers. Architecture, like cooking, is therefore cosmopoietic: "a discipline that begins in the mastery of the reuse of leftovers" (2005: 31).

In March 2004, I commenced a conversation with Frascari on the relations between gastronomy, architecture and the virtues of "plainness" when we were invited speakers at the Architecture Symposium of Adelaide Festival of Arts. I used a family recipe for steamed fish to explain the concept of plainness in Chinese cooking.

This essay commemorates and continues that conversation by picking up the concept of "leftovers" which Frascari evoked in his opening address for the 2009 Interstices Under Construction: The traction of drawing symposium; many papers presented there are published in this issue of Interstices. Our conversation on this occasion concerned finding the angelic in leftovers in the fields of cooking, and philosophical research on drawing. The recipe I presented this time around is a family recipe for leftovers.