Infinity Kitchen

MVRDV designs transparent Infinity Kitchen to make food healthier and sexier


Venice Architecture Biennale 2016: Dutch office MVRDV has designed a completely see-through glass kitchen that aims to inspire a "more healthy, if not sexy" approach to food (+ slideshow).

Making its debut at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Infinity Kitchen has been proposed as a way of improving the cooking process by drawing greater attention to food choice, preparation and waste.

Each of the units and shelves is transparent, as well as the tap, sink area and worktops.

"If we imagine everything is transparent, clear and clean, doesn't it mean that the only thing that is colourful and visible is our food?" said the firm's co-founder Winy Maas.

"Doesn't it then imply that we are encouraged to love the food, in that way, and that maybe it even becomes more healthy, if not sexy?"

MVRDV hopes that the transparent elements will expose all aspects of the kitchen's function and processes, highlighting people's food choices as well as less attractive aspects like waste storage and disposal.

"The Infinity Kitchen wants to make better cuisine, better food preparation practices and it wants to raise awareness for the one room that we all rely so heavily on, and the processes that go on inside of it," said MVRDV.

"How much food do we have hidden away? How much waste is really being created? Is the kitchen really as clean as we like to think it is? But [the Infinity Kitchen] also wants to do one main thing: celebrate food and cooking."

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ReGen Village

It's no secret that today's aggressive agricultural techniques can take a heavy toll on the environment, both on the land used for crops and livestock, and in the surrounding atmosphere.

But a new vision of a more sustainable 'integrated neighbourhood' community is being implemented in the Netherlands, with the first of a series of high-tech farm villages set to be completed next year. The project, being built just outside of Amsterdam, is the brainchild of California-based developer ReGen Villages, and after its pilot community is finished in 2017, the company plans to bring the concept to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Germany.

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Milan Expo

"The World Expo is once again upon us. Last time it was Shanghai's turn, now Milan plays host to the gargantuan global trade fair.

The original master-planners, a team that included Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, walked out in 2011 after their vision for a new typology of the Expo, one based on content rather than the individualist (and often propagandist) architecture of national pavilions, was rejected by the organisers."

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camp kitchen

"With local government now actively acknowledging the existence of this slum thanks to the kitchen project, and the new water tap part of the government budget for public facilities, a new and unconventional process has started in Terras da Costa. There are now requests for new facilities— a playground, a library—which have to be managed democratically.

There will be plenty of work ahead, and following through with it is what makes the Terras da Costa kitchen an unusually inclusive architectural project. “We wanted to break down the walls of invisibility here,” Saraiva says. “Now, there is a lot to do.”
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Growing on a Bridge

The Cloud Collective has installed an algae cultivation system on a highway overpass in Geneva, Switzerland, as a demonstration of the role urban settings can play in the production of food and plants.

Designed as part of the garden festival Genève: Villes et Champs, the ‘Culture Urbaine’ installation is made up of a closed system of transparent tubes connected to the exterior of the bridge.

Algae are cultivated inside the tubes, grown using only sunlight and C02.

The algae can be used to filter air, as combustible biomass or even as raw material for different cosmetic and alimentary products.

A steel structure running vertical to the bridge holds the system’s pumps, filters and solar panels and provides a written description of the project for pedestrians and cyclists.

The Cloud Collective hopes that the installation prompts future practices of reinterpreting existing infrastructures for the production of food and biomass.

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