The runny yellow yolk of an egg poached just right, lying softly on a mound of freshly steamed rice, can be as invigorating and breathtaking an experience as an unplanned encounter with an exquisitely designed, well-made building discovered by the side of a road.

Gastronomy and architecture, otherwise known as food and shelter, are the most basic of human needs. Closely connected to a place, a terroir, both disciplines are useful tools in gaining a better understanding of the locality in which they are set.  

Nineteenth-century women's-rights activist Margaret Fuller captured the essence of a home—the basic need for a place that offers both shelter and food as well as the added value that they provide in combination—when she wrote that “a house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.” However the merging of the two disciplines must not be mistakenly simplified to that of restaurant design or a stylish plate composition; gastronomy and architecture share a deeper connection.  

Winston Churchill wrote “We shape our buildings: thereafter they shape us.” We project ourselves onto our environment, which, in turn, becomes a reflection of our identity, similarly to Brillat-Savarin's notion “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”

The built environment, the practiced cuisine, and the food culture construct the identity of a place. It is thus no coincidence that these elements echo and reflect each other as well as their respective locality, since it is the soil, climate, topography, traditions, religion, and history that define a local architecture and food culture.

Architecture is most often associated with the built environment, but as architecture theorist Bill Hillier stated, it is merely “an abstract thought applied to building," the means to express an idea, a concept.

”System architecture” is a model that defines a system of components functioning in space through time, an ever-evolving dialogue between object and site. This definition frees the concept of architecture from buildings as such, and opens endless possibilities to the disciplines in which architecture can be found. Within gastronomy this definition can be applied to consider such essential elements as food, terroir, history, culture, and tradition as metaphysical spaces for architectural constructions.

Goethe famously said that architecture is frozen music. Similarly, food made from carefully picked ingredients, assembled, blended, and modified with intent is the edible version of a structure. It is an emotional, intellectual, and physical experience that also functions as a building block of our biological system.