Fact File
Programme: Kitchen installation
Location: Venice, Italy
Year: 2016
Design Team: Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries with Wenchian Shi, Kai Want, and Teodora Cirjan.
Kitchen Advisor: Michiel Van Malenstein
Lighting Advisor: Viabizzuno - Kurt Bruggeman
Production Manufacture Team: Pyrasied - SiedKooistra, Wietze van der Meer, Mahmoud Halimi, Femke Bakker, Gerben de Boer, Floris Lantink.
Movie: Huub Laurens, Mels van Zutphen, Fairsound, Charly van Rest
Chef: Louis Meisen
Curator Team: Beijing Center for the Arts - Weng Ling, Zhang Yan, Liu Shuo, He Jie, Zhao Yifeng, Hu Mingxin.
Sponsorship: Chengdu Media Group
Images: Martin Rijpstra, MVRDV
MVRDV designed a fully transparent kitchen as part of a satellite event for the Venice Biennale. The installation takes the typical modern day modular kitchen and looks at progressing the typology to improving the culinary experience and challenging the immense, yet generic, kitchen industry. The Infinity Kitchen wants to make better cuisine, better food preparation practices and it wants to raise awareness of the processes that go on inside a kitchen. How much food do we have hidden away? How much waste has really been created? Is the kitchen as clean as we like to think it is? But it also wants to do one main thing: celebrate food and cooking.
Transparent surfaces, shelves, cupboards, taps, and utensils come together to give a new insight into food production, storage, and the processes that go on in kitchens. Instead of hiding both the ugly and beautiful sides of food preparation, the Infinity Kitchen exposes all in a way to give more control to the user who can now monitor everything. MVRDV’s design aims to act as a showcase to test the individual elements in the kitchen, and to showcase how, through their invisibility, the entire kitchen catalogue functions.
“The Kitchen Home Project is an initiative which looks to imagine the next step of our living environments, taking the accepted norms of today and pushing these to find new and better solutions,” says MVRDV co-founder Winy Maas.
MVRDV’s similar projects include the Crystal Houses, a traditional façade built entirely from glass in Amsterdam, and an office with all glass interiors, furniture and equipment in Hong Kong.
