Hasta La Ideas

An innate fascination with food is a structural part of being human, but what about structural food? Dinara Kasko is an architect-trained pastry chef, and her work melds classic desserts with stark geometry and 3d printing. While inviting, Kasko’s creations look less like food and more like architectural renderings or diagrams from a chemistry textbook. 

After graduating from Kharkov University Architecture School, Kasko started her career as a design-visualizer at at Dutch architectural firm. After a few years of imagining, illustrating and photographing buildings, she took time off to have a kiddo and reconsider her options. 

It appears that she’s found a sweet middle ground between interests. She now uses her background in precise aesthetics alongside culinary perfectionism, aided by 3DMAX modeling and 3D printed silicone molds. 

Aggressively shaped modern food has gone a bit out of fashion in the States, in favor of “honest ingredients” and fusiony takes on “authentic” homestyle dishes. While good food is always good, the excitement and awe prompted by highly designed food is hard to describe. Many chefs and food theorists consider sense confusion a great tool for deepening an experience of food, since core assumptions about texture, color or form as they relate to flavor are tossed out. 

While some of her designs harken back to more aestheticized architect/culinary crossovers of the past, I’d bet the use of sugar and fat guarantees these “function” just fine. Whether or not it helps me pick up nuances of flavor, I’d love to take a bite out of a sleek confectionary building just to know how Godzilla feels.

Catch more of Dinara Kasko’s work on her Instagram.