You're Not My Type #5

In her provocative PhD research, architect Anna Puigjaner makes a call for kitchenless cities, questioning individualized types of domesticity, and proposing domestic models anchored on collectivity. Puigjaner’s PhD lends from the family hotel typology, a “hybrid that combined the European apartment with the American hotel.” For decades, developers had successfully exploited a loophole in the legal definition distinguishing permanent homes from hotels, which didn’t require food preparation areas to be housed within dwelling units. Cutting out kitchens increased the number and variety of apartments. To Puigjaner this proved felicitous and “led to a greater interdependency between the house and the community, creating stronger social and urban bonds between the domestic and public spheres—without the kitchen, relations between the inhabitants were encouraged.”

Anna Puigjaner is an architect, researcher and associate professor at Columbia GSADD, and co-founder of Barcelona-based MAIO Architects.