Bompas & Parr’s intoxicating experiences

Diagram for Bompas & Parr’s choreography for a Victorian dinner.

In a sweeping survey that canvassed Victorian cuisine, architecture made of gelatin, and a brief survey of the science of sense perception, Harry Parr of experience designers Bompas & Parr sought to gently undermine the illusion that taste is anything near objective. Bompas & Parr gained renown for immersive installation projects such as “Alcoholic Architecture,” where they filled a closed space with vaporized gin and tonic—visitors literally inhaled cocktails.

In a conversation with A/D/O, Parr talked about his early interest, as an architecture student, in jellies—not jam but the desserts made from gelatin that were popular prior to World War I. “They’re a kind of intrinsic design element,” he said. “It’s a form you can change, but there are also very tight parameters. So you can change the form, the color, the flavor — and within that there are infinite possibilities.” A stint selling architectural desserts in London’s Barrow Market led to an historically exacting recreation of a Victorian dinner. Choreography of the service was laid out like blueprints. “Ten years ago people had just started getting interested in food in the way they are now,” Parr said. The lay public began to have a more exacting interest in what it put in its mouth. Designing for the particular qualities of that interior space interested both Parr and his partner Sam Bompas.