A Seat at the Table

A Seat at the Table explores the role of student housing as a site to construct collectivity, using food as a vehicle for students to express culture and identity. The studio uses the kitchen and dining room to transgress states of isolation while simultaneously subverting pre-established social and spatial conditions. The kitchen and dining room act as a radical system that blurs the limits between private and public, domestic and urban and becomes a space for larger political agencies that go beyond cooking and eating.

The collective kitchen and dining hall typology will be the site of experimental investigation into the practice of sharing a meal as a strategic spatial tool to redefine the bounds of identity and collectivity within student housing. The modes of cultivating, preparing and eating food will be interrogated to reveal attitudes and agendas of larger systems. The performative act of eating and sharing a meal, together with the choreographies of food preparation will be used to introduce each other to specificities, tensions and crossovers of culture.