1 minute read
The Kitchen
“Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed without these ‘objects’ and a few others in equally high favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy.”
I remember how the sunlight filtered through our kitchen window, making visible the vapour particles of my mum’s fresh 12 o’clock café con leche. We usually sit here, with the kitchen as the hearth of our home. It invites us in to cook, laugh, feast, debate, discuss, gossip, negotiate. I also remember how 25 years ago, the kitchen was a bare shell, waiting for us to inhabit it. It asked us to fill its walls with shelves, family cookbooks, spices from our grandmothers, that new coffee machine, breadcrumbs, all those inherited plates and teaspoons that always go missing. 25 years later, when I look at our kitchen, I do not look at its walls for intimacy. I look at my mum’s overly scribbled calendar, where she has marked “dentist appointment on Tuesday at three”.
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There is an unbreakable bond between intimacy and personal identity through the inhabitation of domestic space. One can say a house becomes a home when one or a series of people move in. The interior may be more or less inviting to inhabitation. However, it still responds to the archaic attributes of the primitive shelter. Once inhabited, architecture is transformed into a celebration of our own social and psychological life. The sense of comfort and safety that comes with a home’s intimacy lies in the synergy between the architectural envelope which protect us from the exterior elements and the warmth of the pillows that we rest our heads on. In this sense, architecture becomes a mediator, an observant of the secrecy of everyday life and endless possibilities of human habitat2.
Laura Toledo-Martin Architect
1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Penguin Books Ltd, 2014, London), 99-100.
2 Juhani Pallasmaa, Identity, Intimacy and Domicile, Notes on the phenomenology of home (Arkkitekthi - Finnish Architectural Review 1/1994).
TYPOLOGY: INTIMATE OBJECTS
Eachcontributorwasaskedtophotographapersonalobject.
School - Office
Participant
Each wall holds stories, Confiding in the next cell along. Pleas into the dark, Footsteps too far, too late.
Observer
You crave open space, The ideal surveillance state. The cubicles here no doubt, Will hear them cry the same.
