Seminar with Anna Puigjaner (MAIO)
29 May – 2 June 2017
This workshop will explore signs of daily domestic collectivity that go beyond the limits of the house itself and blurred the domestic and the urban sphere, with an special interests on collective kitchens and other types of collective domestic food production and consumption. Through that exploration, we will try to understand the diverse political and economical agendas behind these phenomena, and its consequences in the built environment.
Meanwhile collective kitchens and kitchenless living have been popularly known by its communist character, collective architecture is apolitical, so shared spaces lacked, per se, of a political agenda. It has been sometimes used as a political tool but as Aldo Rossi claims, form cannot be political per se, in fact, it can only be re-politicized again and again, over the course of time, in a never-ending, recurring cycle.
For instance, long before Kommunalki appeared in the Soviet Union, there was a time in New York, at the verge of the XIX C., when housing had also collective spaces and services. At that time the house was designed, not as a single entity, but as a set of connected fragments that could change depending on the need, on the demand. The kitchen was optional as the rest of the rooms and sometimes it was left apart, kitchenless. And in opposition to Kommunalki, this North American typology lacked of a political agenda but it had a pure commercial aim.
This typology between apartment and hotel was quite successful. It not only reduced significantly the costs of living but also eliminated the annoyance of housekeeping, and consequently redefined the role of women at home. Life in these new apartments, therefore, constituted at some point an alternative that had more to do with increasing comfort than lowering costs.
Fortunately, despite the decay of the newyorker kitchenless typology, the phenomena of communal services was not only an American trend. The typology has appeared in different contexts and answering to different needs in an incredible manner. In the midst of the actual global crisis, the rise of pooling-economies is having an impact in our domestic sphere as well, and collective cooking seems to have a renewed interest for different economical and political agendas.
