Hors d’oeuvres: Consuming La Petite Maison

Abstract

This article foregrounds the philosophical and architectural interpretations of Jean-François de Bastide’s novella La Petite Maison (1758) to discuss creative work included in Banquet, a recent exhibition at Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney (2022). The exhibition explored the relationship between food, the human condition and architectural production through critical literary and film sources. Here, we centre on the first course, the hors d’oeuvre - inspired by the desire, love, and illicit liaison traced throughout Bastide’s novella.

The term hors d’oeuvre came into usage within the context of architecture and gastronomy across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hors d’oeuvres were inherently extravagant and excessive—their most elaborate entwining encountered in the clandestine houses of the French bourgeoisie. Through Edmund Burke’s sublime, we will discuss the interiorisation of the architectural hors d’oeuvre within the novella until its climactic ending, not just in the unfolding ardour but through the intensity and delight of the Maison’s novel machinery.