With space at a premium, imagine
a kitchen without boundaries or barriers, an environment free from conventional
thought and restrictions, a kitchen created to successfully achieve the delicate balance between form and function, reflecting the needs and life style
of the modern homeowner.
The new "kitchen
matrix" allows for maximum usage of space with the focus on utilization
and optimization of the interiors and exposed work areas, allowing the homeowner,
apartment dweller or loft inhabitant to maximize the usage of the space at
hand. Like the Roman God Janus, who could see the past and future at the same time, the modern kitchen
is centered on the duality of purpose and space.
The new approach to kitchen
design is to challenge the way we look at space, so we may better understand
the problem. Modern kitchen design must move away from a one-dimensional
approach to design and to think of the kitchen as a multi-dimensional canvas. The
static, cluttered, restricted and unchanging kitchen of the past must now
evolve into a living stage, a place where it is possible
to create an environment that
alters old beliefs about space and structure and infuse new concepts that
reflect the needs of today’s modern homeowner.
Today’s kitchen has grown far
from its primary function of food preparation to that of “the social center of the
home”, the family, both nuclear as well as tribal, still gathers to share,
rejuvenate and commune together. The walls have come down and this once hidden and isolated
feminine domain has now become apart of a
larger social arena. It serves as
a meeting place, a dinning room, a home-office as well as a place to do
homework or crafts with the kids; it can even serve as a hide away for quite
reflection, or a place to gather for family fun and social entertaining.
In its new domestic role, the
modern kitchen finds itself reflecting a family lifestyle based on the sharing of
traditional roles and functions. The living area embraces the kitchen as a multifunctional
arena, were food is prepared, people talk, homework is finished and where
family and friends sit by a modern hearth to bath in the warmth of community.
Today’s kitchen is open to the
rest of the home, and as such, the kitchen now must function on several levels,
from food preparation to social interaction, from entertainment center to
living-room. More furniture, than cupboards, the modern kitchen must blend seamlessly into
the living areas of the home.
