Kitchen; Deconstructivism

The modern Western home consists of a number of predetermined building blocks. These do not necessarily have to be rooms, nor special zones, but emotional rooms where we can fulfill our human needs. In a home you need to be able to; sleep, cook and eat food, go to the toilet, wash yourself and be able to carry out some form of recreation (to relax). Of these emotional rooms, these building blocks, the kitchen is the heart. In the kitchen, people have traditionally gathered to warm themselves from a heat source, and to eat/cook food.

Personally, I think of the kitchen in the apartment I grew up in when I think of a kitchen. The kitchen in that apartment is of course made up of the specific, in a way timeless, modules. The kitchen was built in 2003 with cabinet doors of yellowed birch lamniat which gives a hint that they come from the neo-modernist era of Swedish design. This kitchen is an emotional place where I travel in my mind to find some kind of peace. The kitchen has an emotional value.

The absolute majority of modern Western kitchens follow the principles of the Frankfurt kitchen, made in 1926 by the architect Ernst May. The Frankfurt kitchen emerged after long studies of how a person moves in the kitchen, how they cruise and stretch. These resulted in the embryo of the standard for how kitchens should be designed today. This standard is made up of modules measuring 600 x 800 x 900 mm, with a characteristic chamfer at the bottom towards the floor to accommodate your toes. These modules form a puzzle that adapts, albeit rather clumsily, to the size of the room; the larger the room, the more modules. The modules are fitted with either storage or appliances, and get a workbench for processing food on top. The modules become a large volume that swallows various kitchen utensils and machines. An oven is reduced to a front. A stove for a submerged stovetop. We lose sight of the three dimensionality of these machines and they become fields, a two dimensional volume, as in graphic design. The kitchen has therefore been moved from the third dimension to the second.

These kitchen frames can be found in almost every home in the western world, they can be made in different ways, but the most common is that they are constructed from white laminated chipboard, which adds an element of immateriality to the system. This standard is used by kitchen manufacturers in all price ranges.

Can we take the kitchen back from the flat world and make it three-dimensional? Can the modern appliances that define the Western kitchen contribute to giving us new ground-breaking floor plans for a kitchen in which to work as humans and not machine? I want to investigate this by adopting deconstructivist principles on the modern kitchen. I explode the kitchen, pull apart the modules and break the modular principles. The kitchen is primitivized down to the metaphysical essence of a kitchen; a source of warmth, both emotionally and practically.