02 SPOTLIGHT: BOMPAS + PARR

MULTISENSORY SCIENCE AND THE DINING EXPERIENCE

With marketing expert, Sam Bompas, and architect, Harry Parr, at the helm, globally renowned Bompas & Parr are leading experts in multisensory experience design.

They call themselves designers, while others call them culinary installation artists - one thing is for certain: it’s hard to compare Bompas & Parr to anyone else in their delivery of emotionally compelling food-based experiences.

With a background in jelly making, the duo quickly developed into a fully fledged creative studio — offering food and drink design and immersive dining experiences. Projects vary dramatically, but always seem to find a footing in the marriage of food, creativity, and science. We sat down with them to discuss their work, including last year's project, ‘Taste The Sky,’ which took the discipline of dessert-making to infinity and beyond.

Where does your passion for ‘Bompas and Parr’ projects come from?

We’re experienced designers and our main focus is on visitors’ trajectories through whatever has been concocted. The ethos comes from our initial starting point; food and specifically jelly. In feeding someone, generosity holds the key. People are ingesting your work so their experience of it is far more important than your own thoughts and intentions. Good art provokes all sorts of emotions including confusion, revulsion, melancholy, but you probably don’t want to feel any of these with respect to your lunch!

When starting a project which is both scientific and wildly creative - for example, Taste the Sky - where do you start? What is the process?

Projects begin with a blizzard of research. The studio has an extensive culinary, esoteric, architectural, and scientific library with shelf marks inspired by London’s great libraries. When you go in, you may not find what you are looking for but you will find something to work with and we always start there.

‘Taste the Sky’ started with research around aerogel, which is a remarkable material. Derived from a gel and the world’s lightest solid, it’s composed of 98% air and looks as though you are holding a piece of sky in your hand. The material was discovered during an academic bet about jellies (always close to our hearts), the quivering deacon of desserts. In 1931, the bet was won by chemist Samuel Kistler, who successfully removed the liquid component of a gel, replaced it with gas, and kept the internal gel matrix intact – an heroic feat in our eyes.

Though aerogels are known to be some of the world’s best insulators, Kistler didn’t see the widespread use of the super-light solids in his lifetime. They were simply too expensive to manufacture. But now the global scientific community is finding increasingly creative and outlandish uses for them. For example, an aerogel matrix was used by NASA in 1999, on the Stardust mission, when a spacecraft was launched to intercept the comet Wild 2 as it hurtled from the far reaches of the solar system, approaching its centre, as it does every 6.5 years. The spacecraft was able to maneuver itself into the comet’s slipstream, 237 km behind it, and collect, for the first time in human history, virgin comet dust. According to Tom Duxbury of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an article with the Guardian in 2006, this is currently being analysed to help build our knowledge about ‘the most profound questions of our solar system’. Aerogel is also being evaluated by the US Navy for use in undergarments as passive thermal protection for divers and as a drug delivery system, due to its biocompatibility.

Aerogel pioneer, Kistler, focused his research on silica, alumina, chromia, and tin dioxide gels but his curious spirit also pushed him to speculate on the far reaches of what it might be possible to create in his supercritical dryer. These speculations included nickel tartrate, stannic oxide, tungstic oxide, gelatine, agar, nitrocellulose, and even egg albumin. It is the final ingredient, not well documented, that had us really intrigued. By creating an aerogel with egg albumin, we realized we had the potential to make, for the first time, the world’s lightest meringue, and one that looks like a piece of sky.

At this point, we began collaborating with our favorite art and science curator, Sandra Ross, who introduced us to the work of Dr. Raman Subrahmanyam of the Technische Universität Hamburg (TUHH). Raman has been innovating with aerogels for over a decade. He collaborated with Bompas & Parr’s development chef, Danny Cheetham, to make a dish previously only speculated about - aerogel meringue. It can be flavoured any way you like, but the texture is really unusual. Those millions of layers that helped NASA trap comet dust in a silica aerogel, helped us trap flavour in the meringue, to be unleashed in a gush as you chew. We really think it might be the taste of the future.

And has ‘Taste the Sky’ inspired any other project ideas, combining food and physics, that you would like to explore in the future?

At Bompas & Parr we always put considerable resources into innovations which might influence how we may eat in the future. Visiting Dr. Subrahmanyam in Hamburg was a real stimulation for creativity and suggested a number of future applications for novel aerogels. We are currently working on forums for people to taste them. As French gastronome Brillat-Saverin famously said in his Physiologie du Gout, (1825) ‘The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star.’

What is Bompas & Parr working on currently?

Lots! And it certainly covers many scientific disciplines. Some of the worlds we are exploring at the moment include the psychology of magic applied to the bar experience, ultra-rare and exotic fruits with ethnobotanists, food as a medium for soft power in intergovernmental relations, cooking with plasma, and organoleptics related to in-car (socially-distanced) dining, which is perhaps the most interesting to us in the current circumstances.

Where can we see your work now or in the near future?

The Fountain of Hygiene, our sanitiser design competition, will be displayed at Design Museum, once it safely re-opens. In the meantime, you can see our design team’s vision for future enhanced hygiene at the online show www.fountainofhygiene.com and vote for your favourite. There’s some remarkable innovation there all geared to get people safely back into the public realm. And as the world moves beyond lock-down, Bompas & Parr are working on practical and luxurious party installations that combine hygiene and theatricality. Think vapour tornados of sterility and cascading sanitiser fountains - partying conscientiously with clean hands.

And we are publishing a new book, DIY Decadence with Bompas & Parr and Friends, focusing on wonderful food pleasures one can relish in at home and making fantastical things with whatever’s left in the back of your cupboard.

Head over to www.bompasandparr.com or @bompasandparr on all social media channels to explore more of their work - you’ll never cease to be amazed.

Kate Tighe19 June 2020