Bodies, Buildings and Other Broken Matter
Araldo A. Cossutta Prize Nomination
Tutor: Alfredo Thiermann
Spring 2021
Harvard University
The kitchen as a spatial unit disappeared. With the dissolution of the traditional family, the Frankfurt kitchen - a mono-functional room, choregraphing an efficient sequence of actions for individual production, became obsolete. Not a ‘meal machine’ or a ‘domestic prison’, the kitchen now returns to the center of domestic life, fostering new forms of social and productive activity. But if not a room, then what is the kitchen now? From the scale of the facade to the unit and the core, the project invites us to reconsider the (de)lineations of domesticity as new forms of collectivity permeate the intimacy of the home through the kitchen. Working with the existing and the context, restoration is pursued without nostalgia, but with critical inquiry. The project reuses, transforms and reinvents an existing parking garage structure through new forms and materials. It emphasises efficiency and economy, as limitations become opportunities.