Bompas & Parr’s ‘Alcoholic Architecture‘ arrives in Borough Market on 30th July, featuring a walk-in cloud of breathable cocktail.
The installation is the world’s first alcoholic weather system for your tongue, where meteorology and mixology collide.
Set in a Victorian building that was once the original home and offices of The Trustees of Borough Market, the bar takes over the basement – itself a former banana store for unripe fruit arriving from the West Indies – and will source many ingredients for its drinks list from Borough Market itself.
Interiors are inspired by a collision between Miami Deco and the faux-medievalism of Jim Jarmusch’s Loudon in The Devils and augmented artwork by Tom Sewell.
The installation explodes drinks to the scale of architecture for a beautiful, inhabitable world that spatialises the world’s best cocktails and creates a fully immersive alcohol environment. The focus will be on the flavour sensation that occurs when fine art meets the world’s best bartending.
Guests will be asked to don special protective suits to enter. The cloud is entirely composed of fine spirits and mixer at a ratio of 1:3 and made using powerful humidifiers to super-saturate the air. Alcohol enters the bloodstream through the body’s mucus membranes: primarily the lungs but also the eyeballs.
With humidity at 140%, there is so much alcohol in the air, you can see less than a metre but the high humidity level enhances flavour perception. And by breathing the cocktail, alcohol bypasses the liver allowing you to consume 40% less (with correspondingly reduced calories) to feel the same effect! Bompas & Parr has worked with respiratory scientists and chemists to calculate safe dwell times guests can remain in the cloud.
