Kitchenshrine & Dogcomfort
The Architecture of Everyday Situations. A spatial laboratory in Brighton.


University of Brighton Gallery
Grand Parade, Brighton BN2 OJY
11 - 28 January 2006

“Kitchenshrine & Dogcomfort” is both an intensive laboratory and an interactive architectural show. The project exhibits part of our ongoing research into how architecture might be derived from everyday situations, habits and rituals. The project is based upon the critical question as to whether architecture designed for dwelling represents and respects human needs/desires. Conventional dwelling space is foremost created as a container, filled with words such as bedroom, lounge, kitchen etc. We argue that this often bypasses ‘everyday’ situations, habits, passions and desires, excluding less normative activities, removing the occupier from the “space-making act” and so restricting the scope to explore more complex overlays of conditions for living that are less rigidly defined. Kitchenshrine and dogcomfort explores this problematic by asking: What happens when people dwell? Could one generate space from situations, habits, passions and rituals as they occur in everyday life?

For the exhibition laboratory we developed a series of means to explore these questions. A video installation shows very personal accounts of private space, rituals and habits. Three abstracted live installations give a hint as to how an architecture deriving from specific everyday situations, which are then abstracted to generate customised but not individualised spatial elements, might look. A large puzzle and wallpaper that can be played with introduces the idea of creating dwellings by combining various spatial elements to new layouts. A large-scale architectural model visualises the idea of a house that is in constant transformation.

The exhibition laboratory is a testing ground, where “architectural” artefacts and spaces can be explored, tested and interrogated, built and rebuilt and where ideas will be gathered and collected. The project integrates a conceptual statement with an interactive architectural proposal, its key aim being to generate architectural spaces through social practice. Situated between art installations, interactive research, architectural proposition and social investigation we seek to forensically examine everyday life habits and routines to create a field of knowledge from which architecture can then be generated. The exhibition is envisaged as a continuous project, travelling to various places.

Supported by a Faculty Research Support Fund, Faculty of Arts & Architecture. University of Brighton. Video in collaboration with Gisela Kraus from Little Sparrow TV productions.