Spanish architect Anna Puigjaner has revealed how she is applying her “Kitchenless” housing typology within her own projects in a recent interview with Metropolis Magazine as one of their 2018 Game Changers. After receiving funding from the Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize for her controversial proposition in 2016 (after which ArchDaily published an interview with her), Puigjaner talks about the time she spent traveling the world and visiting the many different cultures that share her idea of communal cooking, adding that millennials are more inclined to co-habit or share resources.
The kitchen is the most provocative part of the house. It has been used as a political tool for a long time, to the point that nowadays we can’t accept living without a kitchen.
Recognized as an advocate for shared kitchens by Metropolis Magazine, Puigjaner’s concept may be difficult to comprehend, but the proposal to create "kitchenless" homes with a central, shared kitchen for a community tackles the issues of the growing population’s lack of social outlets and forms a community within a building. As she explored when traveling to Southeast Asia, Scandinavia and Latin America, many cultures share cooking duties and eradicate the need for a personal kitchen. Their solutions varied massively in scale; the Comedores Populares in Peru are responsible for the daily nourishment of half a million people and many such networks could be found in Mexico City and Quebec.
MAIO have reimagined how we define a room’s function by anonymizing them in their latest 22 apartment building aptly named "110 Rooms." The Barcelona firm co-founded by Puigjaner suggests a happy medium in their project that removes spatial hierarchy with more-or-less interchangeable rooms that free the inhabitants to determine where they want sleep, cook or relax instead of being inhibited by how they are expected to use the space.
Read more about Anna Puigjaner’s research into why we don’t need kitchens in our homes with Metropolis Magazine here.
