Broadcast:
Anna Puigjaner

Towards a Diffuse House

A lecture by Anna Puigjaner with material from her forthcoming book Kitchenless City.

After the American Civil War (1860-65), in a moment of deep social crisis, cities like New York started to be filled with apartment houses that lacked of kitchens and had collective domestic services and spaces instead. These kitchenless projects, allowed the displacement of some domestic elements, habitually fitted inside the limits of the house, towards the public space, turning the house into a diffuse entity. Home values are always in permanent mutation, and those which deal with the kitchen are precisely the most capable of radically changing preset gender roles and domestic labor structures, still today.