Urban kitchen

Project description

Project Location：Chengdu Sichuan
Design Period： 2011
Category: Urban design

We think that public spaces can utterly become an informal yet congestive and interactive place interweaving the activities such as production and leisure, production and consumption, creation and sharing etc.

The design proposal aims to provide possibilities and methodologies of alternative planning and architectural design for the public supporting facilities and public green land of the new town. There were once ideas of the urban parlor and urban furniture. However, the urban parlor is a formal and static communication space, whereas the kitchen could bring alternative life experience to people. Kitchen represents a production space where the raw food is cooked and the creative idea is realized from scratch; it is also an informal communication space where working people interact, help each other and entertain themselves. Rem Koolhaas once mentioned “Culture of Congestion,” while we now further this idea to “Culture of Constant Congestion”. By means of the kitchen concept, a gigantic soft and hard infrastructure comes into being as a modern prototype that differ itself from the conventional and singular planning approach of the new town. This gigantic structure accommodates both the orthodox and unorthodox properties of temporization and subversion.