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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More Bompas

The first thing I notice about the Bompas & Parr studio is the human skull on the conference table. As I await my hosts, two culinary entertainers who’ve made a name for themselves in London with their wacky flavor-based experiments, I take the skull in my hands to determine whether it’s real. It is. A loose tooth falls out into my palm. I panic and put the skull back on the table.

A few minutes later, Sam Bompas whirls into the room. He’s a svelte 32-year-old with a tall puff of blond hair, a playful smile, and a rumbling deep voice. He’s wearing a purple suit over a shirt covered in pineapples, which is actually modest compared to his counterpart’s getup: 33-year-old Harry Parr is sporting a bright long-sleeved shirt covered in McDonald’s characters, including Ronald and Grimace. He says his wife made it for him.

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NYC's food web

Over the past year, Open House New York’s The Final Mile has explored the architecture of New York City’s food system. From the markets of the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center to the food halls of Brooklyn, The Final Mile has explored how the spaces in which food is produced, distributed, and consumed have helped shape the city and our experiences of it.

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Food Better - Harvard

Throughout the academic year, the Harvard community focuses on the food system and how to improve it – how to grow better, eat better, shop better, conserve better . . . how to Food Better. In 2014-15, the Harvard Innovation Lab hosted a year-long Deans' Food System Challenge, in which students from across the university were invited to develop innovative solutions to make our food system more healthy and sustainable. In conjunction with the Challenge, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, Harvard University Dining Services, Food Literacy Project, and Harvard Office for Sustainability opened a community-wide dialogue about how we can Food Better, which included events, field trips and more. These events continue on into the 2015-2016 school year.

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lecture - cheng

How does architecture and design influence our relationship with food?  Join architect Christy Cheng to explore how the catalytic nature of food and drink can be used to redefine architecture and design characteristics.  Does food inspire what our buildings and urban spaces look like? Do we eat the food that is curated by our surroundings?

Christy will discuss her work with the Alimentary Design studios at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and her latest project, the West Louisville Food Port. Alimentary Design explores how the fundamentals of food can be used to redefine architecture and urban design typologies. This field of design examines everything from farming and harvesting to consumers and waste and all the ingredients in between.

Is the future of architecture and urban design appetising?
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Livable Cities

9th Making Cities Liveable Conference 2016
The 9th Making Cities Liveable Conference will be held at the Pullman Melbourne on the Park from the 27-28 June 2016. The Making Cities Liveable Conference supports improving the quality of life in our capitals and major regional cities, focusing on healthy, sustainable, resilient and liveable cities, with discussions on improving the quality of life in our capitals and major regional cities.

2016 Program Topics

The Conference Program will include an extensive range of topics with Keynotes, Concurrent Sessions, Case Studies, Panel Discussions and Poster Presentations. Topics will include:

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Honey and Bunny

How can food designers introduce new behaviors to consumers? How can they move from ideas and projects to actual production? What is the best way introduce daring, paradigm-shifting innovation into the food industry, which is often hesitant to take risks and ends up proposing more of the same, often just in larger quantities? And how can these innovations become part of larger cultural and social visions?

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And HERE

Expos end...

The towers are the heart of the Swiss Pavilion. Visitors will be invited to discover Switzerland – the diversity of products and values which underlie the success of the Swiss approach – by engaging in a fun exploration of the towers. Switzerland wishes to take part in Expo 2015 as  an active, caring and socially responsible stakeholder in the area of food and sustainable development. 

The journey through the towers is guided by this leitmotif, thus prompting visitors to reflect – on the basis of their own personal experience – on the global availability of food and sustainable development throughout the food value chain. Visitors will be free to take away or consume any amount of the products. How much will be left for later visitors – and for how long – will be determined by the consumer behaviour and level of awareness of each visitor.
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Food Cart + Mobility + Social Causes

Geneva-based architect Aurélie Monet Kasisi has designed a mobile stand based on street-food carts to travel around Switzerland as a promotional vehicle for a suicide prevention organisation.

"The mobile units often used to serve food or sell various goods host a small collective experience within the city," she said. "That is exactly what I wanted the mobile stand to generate in Swiss public spaces."

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Milan Food Expo - romantizing food

Policy-makers have shied away from targeting agriculture because food is a personal issue for many citizens; the agricultural lobby in Brussels is very well organised because it’s been around since the early days of European integration; agriculture is also seen by many with romantic eyes.

“We have a very idyllic image of agriculture, but that romantic image no longer exists in many places”, noted Eickhout.

Romantic picture of agriculture
Most of the 14 national pavilions in Milan which this website saw from the inside, had romantic touches which don’t correspond with reality.

Almost three-quarters of the world's poultry products, and half of all pork, were created by industrial sized farming. In the EU, just 5.7 percent of agricultural land in 2012 was used for organic farming.

But the Spanish pavilion, for example, showed scenic videos of a shepherd and his flock, and of families eating together, accompanied by serene music. Spain is “Europe's kitchen garden”, an explanatory text noted.

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Milan Charter

MILAN CHARTER

Past world's fairs have given the world the sewing machine, the Eiffel Tower and ketchup. This one will produce the "Milan Charter," an expert document that seeks to raise awareness about the universal right to a "healthy, safe and sufficient" food supply.

The document seeks commitments from individuals, groups and businesses to ensure food security, decrease food waste and combat hunger and obesity. Pope Francis, who agrees that food is a basic right, is speaking Friday via video at the opening of the Expo.

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Ancient Rome feasts

An informative and richly set of illustrated presentations followed by a discussion with experts on ancient Roman art, architecture and philosophy. Learn about the ways ancient Romans dined, how they enjoyed their food, how they stored and prepared meals from the kitchen to the richly decorated triclinium.

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Taste of Chicago

By the time of the 1893 World's Fair, downtown Chicago was expanding rapidly with major hotels and a large retail shopping district, metal frame office towers, buildings to house the arts, and cable cars and elevated trains. On this one and a half hour walking tour, you will learn how Chicago developed into a world class city. You will see historic buildings from 1893, and learn about the business leaders and architects who "built" Chicago. You will also get to taste food that first made its appearance at the world's fair and is still popular today. Did you know that all beef hot dogs started in Chicago in 1893? Or that sweet treats like Cracker Jack, brownies, and Wrigley Spearmint and Juicy Fruit gum began here? Join us on this fun "see and taste" walking tour. 

This tour includes a full-sized hot dog, caramel corn, and brownie that can be eaten along the way or taken home with you. Beverages are not included, but you may bring your own on the tour. Please note that open beverage containers may not be allowed on all tour stops.
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Bento Boxes and Architecture

"...starting point for a whole exhibition on the dialogue between the ingenious Japanese food containers and architecture. "Obento and Built Space: Japanese Boxed Lunch and Architecture," currently on show at Boston Architectural College (BAC), explores how bento boxes inspire architects and designers to think about "the potential of emptiness, craft, portability, and sustainability."

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Grow Home

"Much work has already gone into UB’s entry. The student designers identify it as a GRoW Home, their acronym representing Garden, Relax or Work. Its unique approach to sustainable urban living here relates to local farming and gardening neighborhood initiatives. GRoW Home residents will replace energy-intensive food production by growing their own fresh, healthy produce.

Here is how the team describes some of the house’s attributes: “In support of food production, GRoW Home features a glass-enclosed solarium that provides ample light for plants during the growing season and passively heats the house in winter. The solarium can be continuously tuned to the appropriate conditions for growing and living. In the summer, operable cloth shades on the roof and southern facades shade and cool while vents and windows allow heat to escape.

“Durability, comfort and efficiency are depicted in the functional layout as well as the chosen materials. GRoW Home features ‘work’ and ‘relax’ boxes with windows that allow natural light to enter and give occupants views to the outdoors and into the solarium. The work box is highly functional and designed to be easily cleaned. The relax box is compact and designed to provide a warm, cozy retreat in colder months.”

Some of the house features include its small but expandable size, a combination of active and passive features providing twice the energy it consumes, an indoor climate tuned by the user and separate areas for growing, working and relaxing.

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Food Studies

The Food Studies Knowledge Community

This knowledge community is brought together around a common interest in exploring new possibilities for sustainable food production and human nutrition. Our aim is to consider the dimensions of a ‘new green revolution’ that will meet our human needs in a more effective, equitable and sustainable way in the twenty-first century. The community interacts through an innovative, annual face-to-face conference, as well as year-round online relationships, a peer reviewed journal, and book series – exploring the affordances of the new digital media. Members of this knowledge community include academics, teachers, administrators, policy makers, and practitioners. 

Conference

The conference is built upon four key features: Internationalism, Interdisciplinarity, Inclusiveness, and Interaction. Conference delegates include leaders in the field as well as emerging artists and scholars,  who travel to the conference from all corners of the globe and represent a broad range of disciplines and perspectives. A variety of presentation options and session types offer delegates multiple opportunities to engage, to discuss key issues in the field, and to build relationships with scholars from other cultures and disciplines.

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food and race

Titled the “Race and Food Justice Panel,” Monday’s lecture examined food and agriculture in terms of their historical and current impacts on the city. The lecture also explored how food helped shaped present racial relationships within the city.

The panel included local activist Oya Amakisi; Kami Pothukuchi, professor of Urban Studies at Wayne State University; and Anthony Hatinger, garden production coordinator for the Central Detroit Christian Community Development Corporation.

Sucher said the panel aimed to look at social justice from a unique lens and to push students to look at race and hunger in Detroit from an angle they might not have thought about before.

“We just really wanted to focus on different areas of food justice,” she said. “Social justice doesn’t just happen one way, you can look at the same problem and have a lot of different solutions for it.”

...Pothukuchi, who was raised in Mumbai, India, employs her work in architecture and community planning to find links between communities and their food systems. Similar to Hatinger, Pothukuchi noted the importance of addressing Detroit’s larger problems including water shutoffs, housing shortages and poor land quality.

“We don’t really plan for food, that thinking is shifting partly due to the work my colleagues and I have done in raising awareness between the links between community planning and food systems and how integral those links are and how many community goals you can advance by intervening in the food system,” she said.

The dialogue brought in the panelists’ backgrounds and their wide array of experiences to help explain barriers to food accessibility within the city.

Hatinger said power-holders like politicians and corporations oppressed residents by controlling the distribution and access to food and thus limiting the resources of the general public. He added that learning about the dynamics of power and giving food resources back to the people is what propels him to do his work with agriculture in the city.

Full Article here:
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From Wal-Mart to Farmers-Mart

Officials in McAllen, Texas, were faced with this problem when their local Walmart shut down. Instead of letting the giant store sit vacant, they did something amazing. They transformed it into the largest single-floor public library in America...including an indoor farmers market...

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landmarks out of sugar

"They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Thanks to food artist Caitlin Levin and her photographer collaborator Henry Hargreaves, imitation in candy is now undisputedly the reigning champion of the most sincere forms of flattery. The duo teamed up to reproduce a number of famous museums using one of the world’s favorite vices: sweets."

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Gingerbread Town

It's Holiday time again. The time of year to build with food! 

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