Kyoto Food Shaping the City

Investigating the Metabolism of Cities

Vitra Design Museum
Weil am Rhein, Germany

Participants: Kyoto Design Lab, Kyoto Institute of Technology
Manuel Herz, Manuel Herz Architects, Basel and
Shadi Rahbaran, Rahbaran Hürzeler Architects, Basel
Photography: Tomomi Takano
Exhibition: 07 - 17 june 2019

In June 2015, we invited Manuel Herz and Shadi Rahbaran from the University of Basel in Switzerland to conduct a series of workshops that endeavored to understand Kyoto’s urban context by unraveling the local cycle of food from production to consumption, using Nishiki Market as a research subject.When we invited them again to host another round of workshops in October 2016, we noticed considerable changes happening at Nishiki Market.

An increasing number of shops had started processing and selling food intended for tourists to eat on the go.Tourist guidebooks also wrote about Nishiki Market as a place to eat food while walking around. Not looking favorably on this trend for tourists to walk along the narrow street while consuming food, Nishiki Market has established an eat-in facility nearby in partnership with a nonprofit organization.

  • Addressing the problem, our workshops aimed to investigate the food culture at the marketplace and propose architectural ideas for the future of Nishiki Market. Nishiki is not just a place merely for trading food ingredients.The whole of Japanese culture is condensed in Kyoto, a city with an enduring traditional spirit. Many schools of the tea ceremony as well as flower arrangement are based in Kyoto, and these have always used kimono in their activities.This has led to the prosperity of Kyoto’s wholesale district that handles products related to kimono. During these cultural events, hosts offer food to guests by relying on shidashiya, a type of vendor that caters and delivers food, while kimono wholesalers also have business meetings at ryotei (high-end Japanese restaurants). Nishiki Market is the market that sells food ingredients and items for these occasions. It is also the place where the god ofYasaka Shrine on a float comes and strolls.Though Nishiki Market’s fortunes have risen and declined at various times during its 400 years of history, it has always been a base for disseminating Kyoto’s food culture, which is a pillar of Kyoto’s cultural essence.

    During the workshops we started in July, we first conducted research on aspects of eating at various overseas markets.We then interviewed several vendors at Nishiki Mar- ket regarding the current situation in the market. Based on these findings, we designed Food Lab to research and think about food culture, supervised by Manuel Herz and Shadi Rahbaran.This publication contains the results of this project.