The Forbes St. kitchen is not finished, but of course it is constantly in use, every day. For example: Nick and Max working together on house dinner.

The food was as good as it looks. (note the spice rack in the background — more or less finished!)

Max talks about plans for a folding desk in his room. (Laptop = recipe source)

secret door projects does NOT recommend: hanging cliplights from the kitchen ceiling, plugged in to extension cords (which are precariously stretched out along the ceiling, above the ceiling fan), that are plugged in turn into a surge protector that is loosely attached to the wall, by the switch of which you can turn the hanging lights on and off. Such a solution must only be implemented on a temporary or “mock-up” basis, and as we know, building codes disallow the use of extension cords in any situation.

HOWEVER such cliplights do give really nice direct illumination to work by, and make said kitchen really warm and cozy, as seen in these somewhat fuzzy pictures — and when we will get around to actually re-doing the lighting in here is anybody’s guess.

I printed a whole bunch of these “kitchen kits” over the past week. The kitchen in question is, of course, the kitchen at Forbes St. — and these were made specifically for the residents of that house to cut apart and put back together as they choose. (The prints will also be a ‘bonus print’ for print series subscribers, and some will be floating around at my show ! in May.) Making a screenprint with parts that you can cut out & paste together (definitely inspired/spurred on by Jung Il Hong & Brian Chippendale’s silkscreen work in this realm, as well as Meredith Stern’s linocuts) was something I’d wanted to do for a long time, and this doesn’t totally fulfill that need, but it’s a start.

It’s also a start in experimenting with how to give people the tools to make drawings, without making them go through 5 years of architecture school training. An architectural drawing is a great way to communicate and transmit information, and even to facilitate a conversation about ideas for space, but access to that medium has always been limited by technology or specialized skills (even in the pre-computer era). How to communicate about design? How to make a tool that people can both use in group discussions, and take back to their rooms and mess around with on their own? How can we have a conversation that will produce a physical artifact that everyone present has had a chance to modify, that can be referred to in the future as evidence of the process or the decision? How to avoid being, once again, the one in the middle of the room holding the only pencil?

So, the kitchen kits are in the classic poster tradition of ‘large expendable multiples’, as well as in the classic dungeons & dragons tradition of ‘a gridded space over which creatures can move and adventures are had, facilitated by the imagination’. After getting done with the printing (and then sleeping) I kind of couldn’t keep my hands off of it and spent yesterday cutting them up & making a couple of different versions of the Forbes kitchen (past, present, possible future). It was a lot of fun. I had had doubts about the grid (which is 6" squares at the 1/2 inch = 1 foot scale), but in the end it functions pretty well as both a ground to denote what is the interior space of the kitchen, and as a instant measurement device: “wait, only 2 feet between this counter and the wall…. that’s not enough for someone to walk through!”, etc. (To all my architecture professors: Yes, it has the scale on it… you can also cut out the graphic scale and use it to measure things on the drawing!)

This, and hopefully more playful, game-like print/building projects to come, are inspired both by game designers like Jane McGonigal (whose work I barely understand but am pretty excited about), and by the book Housing Without Houses, by Nabeel Hamdi.

Here Hamdi talks about trying to make buildings which involve the users in their creation:

If the setting these buildings provided was to be an invitation to users to participate in creating an architecture of cooperation — a concept only primitively explored in the days of flexible buildings — then the size, position, and organization of space and materials would also have to perform in more than technically rational ways. They had to reference the choices available, promoting spontaneity and discovery, albeit within the constraints of the materials and systems employed and the legal and regulatory structure. The architecture of possibilities, in other words, would need to be legible and opportunistic, and yet remain technically rational.

Housing Without Houses, p.73

“Okay, roll the 20-sided die to see how much resistance you get from Code Enforcement….”

The Forbes kids get their hands on the kits this weekend, we’ll see what they do with them…

sticky-paper sheets printed from the same screens will also become coffee-cup stickers for my friend’s travelling espresso machine coffee shop…. yeah!

In September, the wall on the stove-side of the chimney looked like this:

From almost the same point of view, here is Andrew working on patching the old stovepipe holes in the chimney that was within the wall. (Saturday Jan. 5)

Sunday morning, Jan. 6 — the studs have been removed (note the props to L & R of the chimney) and the masonry repairs are complete.

Sunday evening — The new wall/spicerack is in place, Kelly puts in screws to secure it to the ceiling joists.

Sunday night: it is structurally complete — though missing a bunch of smaller shelves.

Kelly & Anna demonstrate the sweet (if slightly tight on the right side) fit of the Forbes St. spice jars on the rack.

Anna, Nik, and Kelly are going to add the rest of the shelves for spices — next weekend we work on dismantling and rebuilding the other bearing wall on the opposite (sink-) side of the chimney.

For two years, I’ve been excited about changing the awkward and hard-to-use layout of the kitchen at the house my friends own in Worcester. Starting this summer, they’ve done a lot of demolition, and now the construction stage of the project is actually starting to happen. It’s super exciting.

The photo above is from September, as the housemates at Forbes St. were working on taking down plaster and moldings around the doors, closets, etc. (Kelly is in the middle of washing dishes.) The picture below is from this past Saturday. You are seeing a lot less plaster, a lot more mess, and part of Andrew working on the chimney. The stud wall in the center of the picture will eventually disappear, being reduced to smaller structural walls that will be part of a ‘box’ surrounding the central chimney.

Briefly, we are combining two rooms that contained (and separated) the kitchen functions into one room, adding more work counter space, and building lots and lots of storage. This past weekend we finally took down some real walls, and built a new real wall. It’s small, but it’s structural. It includes an alcove that will become the most heavy-duty spice rack ever built.

The challenges, which are also the things that (already) make the project awesome and extremely rewarding:

• Instead of having one or two clients, I’m working with 9 to 11 residents/part owners of the house, who all cook and use the kitchen, all are involved in some way in the design process, and all want to help and want to know what’s going on. It can be crazy and frustrating, but in that process of explaining something over and over again, I realize new things or come to new conclusions — and I have that many minds pointing out where something is not going to be right, and contributing that many more awesome ideas to the process.
• We’re not working in the traditional ’stages’ of architectural practice, where once signed off on, a design is hard and expensive to change — instead, things are flexible up till they are nailed in; potentially changeable even after that; and, where possible, are designed to be modified and added on to during the process of occupying and using the kitchen, seeing how it works, bumping into the corners, etc.
• I am leading a loose crew of the people who live in the house in doing the actual building. Some have construction experience, some don’t. Everybody gets a chance to do things. This might take longer than rounding up some more experienced people to come in and do the work after we had finished the drawings, but it means that ideas can get contributed in the middle of building and up to the last minute, and that after the kitchen is ‘finished’, there will be a whole bunch of people living in the house who now know how to use a circular saw, a screw gun, and other tools, and who will be able to fix things around the house, make new things come into existence, and take more initiative in making the space their own.

Basically, it’s a totally revolutionary way to make living spaces, difficult and complicated, incredibly simple, possibly only practicable on a very small scale, but completely fascinating and compelling. I am super excited to have the chance to be involved in this project and this process. I’m writing more, and more in-depth, about the implications of this, and about the specific elements of the process — when that writing is a little bit less rough, it will also be here.