T. Cooking Workshop

Situation Calle Boteros, Sevilla
Area 59 m2
Year 2018

Architects
Sol89. María González & Juanjo López de la Cruz

Collaborators
Elena González & Rosa Gallardo, architects

Collaborators
Cristóbal Galocha

Client
ConTenedor Cultural SL

Construction Company
Construcciones Alejandro Fdez. Carbonero

Table
Hombre de madera y Nicholas Chandler

Photography
Fernando Alda

A kitchen is a good workshop: the home of the hands; the center or ring of all energies. Nowhere else do the hands feel more at ease, more incited to make and remake.

Ángel González referring to A. Calder’s kitchen-workshop.
Painting without having a clue, 2007.

 

The task at hand is to design a cooking workshop to experiment with potential recipes and conduct gastronomy courses, oil and wine tastings… The space for diners and the chef instructor must converge into a single educational area; the rest of the layout is merely a lobby, a reception, an office, a restroom, and ample storage. The concept of a cooking workshop alludes to a communal activity where cooking is revealed to a group of people, no longer a hidden process but an unveiled action where the chef, the true officiant of this ceremony, discloses the secret to the attendees. This condition of shared action evokes a congregational liturgy that, combined with the centrality conferred by the existing cast-iron pillar in the small venue, suggests the creation of a space revolving around the act of cooking. We propose a place coiled around the shaft that polarizes the space, emphasizing its centrality through multiple circular and concentric geometries emanating from it as the ultimate expression of a meeting space.

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Through a curved ash wood screen, centered around the pillar, the core space of the gastronomic workshop is defined, reserving the intermediate space emerged between the convex face of the circumference and the boundaries of the venue for the necessary small rooms. This offers a clear reading of the space where the serving uses are displaced to the margins and integrated into the curved geometry, avoiding the proliferation of elements that cloud the comprehension of a reduced place like this. As it ascends, the curved face of the screen dematerializes at its upper level, leaving only the battens that support it, escaped towards the central pillar, thus constructing a structure that allows recreating an enveloping atmosphere that also veils the installations and reinforcements of the existing structure.

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Philosopher Gustavo Bueno held that the table is “the floor of the hands,” an anthropological consequence of our evolution that needed to provide a support to manuality once the hands were freed from their motor function. The table is an elevated floor. Thus, the diners’ table embraces the cast-iron pillar, overseen by the chef’s countertop, filled with instruments and materials like that of a sculptor. Its height can change to accommodate the acts of cooking and eating. It has been built with woods from the streets of Seville: orange, robinia, cypress, melia, olive, and grevillea, some species of American origin, recovered after the annual pruning or after being defeated by the wind. Screen and table furnish the space; it is more of an installed architecture than a built one, where the relationship with the existing support is more of opposition than interaction, shading the materiality of the same but without veiling or exposing it excessively. It will also be a reversible intervention, which can be moved at any moment, having contributed another layer to the memory of this place but without perpetuating itself.

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