Lecture 8 : 5 Senses of Architecture

Question : Pick 1 building in Kuala Lumpur, and study how that building perfectly plays with 1 or more human senses.

The building that i choose is a restaurant, called Dining In The Dark. Dining in the Dark is a name of intrigue and mystery of delving into the unknown. This restaurant is so special because it has play with the senses of human. Think about what happens when your world stops at your fingertips? What are the width, depth, and height of spaces for you, when perceived without the gift of sight? This restaurant is located at Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur.

The concept of restaurant plays to our thirst for novelty in society willing to pay pretty penny to experience something that's never tried before. When typical concept restaurants enhance and sometimes overwhelm the senses of its customers, Dining in the Dark does the exact opposite by removing the sight senses at the same time it strongly enhance the others senses, since customers can no longer rely on what they see. What is it like to be blind? The answer lies within this restaurant. It’s worse or better than any blindfolded games ever played. There are no slivers of light to help us cheat here.

When removing the sight sense, it enhance the touch, taste, and smell senses. Customers has been order the food and drink at the lobby there. After that, the waiters will guide the customers go into a fully dark room and having meal inside the dark room. The blindfold makes its debut as we struggle to find paper clips in a container of uncooked rice and beans, or to fit puzzle blocks into place, without seeing them.

The door beside the bar is the entrance of the dark room.

When in the dark room, the touch sense has been strongly enhance. There have a swallow issues that the waiters also can't see in the dark room so, the waiters are guiding the customers by touching one by one in order to lead them to their seats. However, when the meal was sent to their table, the actual dishes are surprises meant to be discovered as we touch, smell and taste the food. Robbed of sight, the guessing game becomes a lot harder, as we tend to ‘tag’ things we know primarily by sight. Throughout the meal, we relearn each dish by their aroma, taste and texture without their usual association by imagery. Whether we are correct or not remains to be seen.

Moreover, come into the taste and smell senses, it is indeed a challenge to eat without seeing the food or the cutlery. You will pay more attention to taste and smell the food to guess what is the food they gave. This means that you active the taste and smell senses to bring the messages to your brain in order to know what is the food.

At the end of the meal, customers are led out of the dining room after a brief pause during which the waiter in charge advises us to keep our eyes closed while we transition out of the darkness. The same feeling of disorientation revisits us althought we basically retracted our step back to the entrance clearly by using the same route once doesn't mean we can regognized it will our feet and memory alone.