Fascinated by an article about how quickly the built environment would degrade if humanity disappeared, Swedish set designer and photographer Johanna Mårtensson constructed a mini cityscape out of a material known by all for its tendency to go bad quickly: bread. Much like other feats of food architecture—Jell-O row houses, anyone?—Mårtensson's trying to emphasize the impermanence of these structures, essentially highlighting with moldy aplomb the tug-of-war between man and nature. "Within 500 years all buildings would be half fallen or fallen. The forrest [sic] would soon grow in cities," she explains, adding that if a "ufo came here in a couple of hundred thousand years [it] would not see many signs of a gang of primates ones thought that they where the lords of the planet." For her six-photo Decor project, Mårtensson photographed bread construction every day for six months. "The hardest bit of the realization of the piece was the smell." Ah, the things we do for art.
· Watch This City Made of Bread as it Decays [Co.Exist]
· A' Design Awards: Decor by Johanna Mårtensson
· All Edible Complex posts [Curbed]