Architecture students adapt to modern-day eating trends

Architecture
students adapt to modern-day eating trends
…………………………………………………………………

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff

Wanted: Petite
beer fridge seeks hot relationship with other electrics.

This classified
ad printed on an index card was one of many messages that
recently got taped to coffeemakers, microwave ovens and
small refrigerators in study rooms throughout the School
of Architecture to make students aware of a project called
“The Outpost Kitchen.”

Fifth-year architecture
students Sara Stevens and Alex Knapp wanted to draw attention
to the places that have become “outpost kitchens”
— offices, classrooms, residential college rooms and
other areas that don’t have kitchens but get used for
food preparation because of the small appliances placed
there. They taped signs with curiosity-arousing messages
like “Outpost Kitchen: More than 3 minutes from a kitchen”
and “This kitchen has no boundaries” to the fridges,
microwaves and other appliances found in their fellow students’
work areas. The goal was to make the students stop and think
about how they have made “surrogate kitchens”
out of their work spaces.

Then Stevens
and Knapp built an outpost kitchen in the School of Architecture’s
student lounge. Using a temporary wall in the lounge, they
constructed cabinet spaces specifically for a microwave
and a coffeemaker and bought the appliances to fill those
spaces. The spaces were strategically placed to confine
“the messy stuff” to one area, Stevens said. In
addition to giving fellow architecture students the convenience
of the appliances, Stevens and Knapp hope their outpost
kitchen also serves as a place for students to gather and
socialize.

Their project
was an assignment for a course titled “Culinary Cultures:
Re-looking Cooking, Redefining Dining,” which focused
on the architectural and design aspects of food culture
in relation to specific sites.

“People
put microwaves in places where they don’t belong,”
Stevens and Knapp wrote in their project display. “It
is this misplacement that interested us. The microwave in
the dorm room or office speaks to a different kind of lifestyle
than the traditional hearth kitchen.”

Maria Nystrom,
the Visiting Cullinan Professor of Architecture at Rice,
taught the course with Alex O’Briant, the Wortham Fellow
of Architecture at Rice. Nystrom, who is from the Lund Institute
of Technology in Sweden, noted that kitchens in the Western
world have been changed by technological developments in
food preparation and fast-paced lifestyles.

“Many kitchens
may not be defined by space at all, but by equipment,”
she said. “Today a lot of food is prepared over great
distances and times, utilizing a combination of industrial,
light commercial or domestic spaces. With this expanded
notion of ‘kitchen,’ seemingly simple questions
like “How is the food prepared and by whom?’ and
‘What is the layout and the spatial organization of
the culinary space?’ become far more challenging.”

With spaceflight,
underwater travel and living on Mars among the possibilities
of the future, Nystrom and O’Briant asked their students
to think about how dining spaces can be adapted to lifestyle
changes.

Victor Murillo,
a graduate student in architecture, observed the various
locations around Rice where students eat and found that
because of hectic schedules, they often have lunch in places
not designed for dining: in the car, on the sofa, on the
stairs and on the floor.

For his project,
Murillo proposed a number of changes that could be made
on the lawn south of Rice Memorial Center — an area
he noticed that students tend to avoid even though it’s
so close to the RMC, where they hang out a lot.

In architectural
and landscape drawings, Murillo added concrete benches on
the lawn that also can serve as tables, raised mounds that
can serve as backdrops to lean against, grassy pods that
can serve as comfortable surfaces for picnics and sidewalks
that curve to form benches.

“The idea
is not to change the behavior of the people,” Murillo
said. “The intention is to improve the space where
people eat.”

And that’s
the point Nystrom is trying to convey to students when they
design space for kitchens of the future.

“Dining
should not be quick and dirty business,” she said.
“It’s something you should enjoy whether you’re
dining in space, in the deep sea on a submarine or on earth.”