MTKS | Design Week | Lisboa | 2003
Charles and Ray Eames were commissioned to design a kitchen for the American National Exhibit in Moscow in 1959. This kitchen was very successful among the visitors, generating long queues of Russian people wanting to enter the pavilion. It created more excitement than the space and war technology displayed in the exhibit due to the Cold War. The kitchen sparked a socio-political debate between Nixon and Khrushchev during their visit to the pavilion. This debate is known as the Kitchen Debate and was published in the New York Times on July 25, 1959, one day after it happened.
MTKS-3: The Meta-territorial Kitchen System-3
A Year 2003 Contemporary Kitchen
1. The kitchen is not an atelier, nor a laboratory, but an interface where we deal with resources that we can open or not, install, uninstall, execute, etc. The basis is an open operative platform.
2. Open source code system: All people, not only professionals, have the possibility to design new tools based on the operative system.
3. The object: A console. Status = Contemporary X/3 reduced Luxus, based on the capacity to question the convention. To use, not to possess. Informal, not provisional. Schematic. Impersonal/customizable.
4. The construction: De-professionalization of the construction, configuration, and customization.
5. Food: The meta-territorial cuisine.
6. Homage-reference to Eames Kitchen Debate.
What's NEW?
- You can buy it piece by piece.
- You don't need previous planning before installation.
- Can grow and change.
- Adapts to exceptional situations: Cooking for a lot of people, change of cooking room, picnic, outdoor in general, special cooking actions (marmalade making, for example).
- Allows you to give components as a present.
- Total mobility of the elements to adapt the composition to the individual's personal style.
- Allows storage of hardware (like sink, tap, stove) when not used.
- Allows interchanging elements with friends or neighbors in some situations or for special occasions.
- You can cook any type of food from any culture, depending on the components you collect and the way you configure and use them.
- Allows expanding the system with new components and new technologies without changing everything.
- Allows mixing elements that conventional kitchens don't allow, for space reasons and ideological reasons.
- Allows you to create your own components: Open source.
Martí Guixé, 2003
Photo Inga Knölke 2003
