FUNGI: Anarchist DesignersFUNGI: Anarchist Designers

The team at the Nieuwe Café in the Nieuwe Instituut, led by chef Manuela Gonçalves Tavares, serves up colourful, mainly plant-based and seasonal dishes. For the FUNGI specials, the team has created a mushroom soup of the week that changes regularly, as well as a Fungi Burger with a vegan patty, fried shiitake mushrooms, rocket, onion chutney, jalapeño and coriander. This is topped with creamy miso-mushroom mayonnaise and served in a brioche bun.

Bar Bocht, located on the Goudsesingel in Rotterdam, is a coffee, wine and food bar run by the team behind the neighbouring Restaurant Rotonde. The two establishments share a philosophy: “We want a world where there’s enough food for everyone, without harming animals, people or the planet.” The food is sometimes plant-based, sometimes locally grown or farmed, and often both. For its FUNGI special, Bar Bocht has created a buckwheat and flaxseed tostada with salsa verde, mushrooms and pumpkin, which can be enjoyed with a homemade kombucha or a koji-based cocktail. Koji-kin is another name for the fungus Aspergillus oryzae, which is also used in the fermentation of sake, miso and soy sauce.

While the FUNGI special is available, Bar Bocht is displaying two reproductions of drawings selected for the exhibition. These architectural drawings are part of the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning. For a change, the pieces on display here are not being exhibited for what they teach us about human solutions to housing and urban challenges, as they would be in a traditional architecture exhibition. They were selected because they reveal evidence of a different kind of architecture.

The irregular colour spots that you can see are not ink or coloured pencil marks, but the remains of fungi that once inhabited the paper. In one drawing, a spot has become a breeding ground for a fungus – a close relative of the Aspergillus found in soy sauce and cocktails! – which has spread through the fibres of the folded sheet. There, it has created a landscape of destruction, overtaking the clean lines.

Across the surface of the other drawing, a fungus has formed a fine net of mycelium. This unintentional white haze interacts with the architect’s precise pen strokes.