werk, bauen + wohnen 11-2024
Reflecting at the Dining Table
Living / dining is a somewhat generic and diffuse pair of terms that almost every architect has used in a floor plan some time or other. Often the largest and most important room in an apartment is devoted to meeting a basic human need: the ingestion of food. This, however, involves far more than just satisfying hunger. The dining table is the meeting place of the apartment; plans are made there, stories are told, friendships strengthened, people play, work, fight, laugh there. Cooking something, drinking a glass of wine, sitting down at a table together, discussing God and the world until late in the night, this is cultural practice.
But not everyone enjoys cooking and certainly not everyone likes to cook together with others. Although in this country cooperative apartment buildings are among the most widely published architecture projects and regularly attract interest from abroad, living collectively is far from being the rule. A look at the website of the Federal Statistical Office shows: around twothirds of households in Switzerland consist of one or two people. The most common (and consequently the most popular?) way of living is still the small household.
All the same, there is much that speaks in favour of communal living. Sharing spaces makes living more affordable and, through the reduced floor area per person, also more ecological. It can help combat loneliness (from which, incidentally, it is not only the elderly who suffer) and helps to distribute the work of caring among more people.
Since our last issue about collective housing (wbw 9 – 2022 Building Community) innumerable exciting projects have been built in Switzerland and abroad. Time to stock again. What do the spaces where community takes place look like today? What does this ominous term living / dining actually signify? The communal kitchen is an ingredient that is regularly found in the recipes for successful collective living. It is the pivotal point of several quite different housing constellations. A look at history shows that it is also always the reflection of a society and of the way in which roles are attributed.— Jasmin Kunst