Call for ideas: Perspektive fund 2024

For its second year, the Perspektive Fund’s ideas competition for architecture invites architects, designers and artists (individually or collectively) from the French and German scenes to share their ideas around a specific theme. The title of the 2024 competition is “DREAM KITCHEN”. Deadline: July 1, 2024.

Of all living spaces, the kitchen presents the most design challenges. There’s cold, boiling, and frozen water, cooktop burners, a refrigerator, a freezer, cutting implements, and food that must not exceed its expiration date. And more or less elaborate and complicated dishes are prepared there as well. An activity that, depending on circumstances, can be a pleasure, a necessity, depressing, essential for family cohesion, or exceedingly convivial on celebratory occasions. The kitchen is also a place of creation, improvisation, and knowledge transfer. It’s where people get together with friends or family to share their own experiences, new techniques, and time-honored recipes. It’s a place of creativity and exchange for gatherings of people and thus a political space where concepts such as community, tradition, culture, and sensibilities play essential roles. Very few architects have experimented with or attempted to redefine its form and functionality.

In 1926, architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed her celebrated “Frankfurt Kitchen”, the first built-in kitchen in history. Occupying less than ten square meters, this functional space featured numerous well-conceived details that offered ample storage area and made working easier. What looks like a great concept at first can seem peculiar and isolating today (you can’t eat in this kitchen and there’s only room for one person). In 1971, Gordon Matta-Clark opened the off-space FOOD in New York. The artist not only created an exhibition space for contemporary art, but also equipped it with a spacious, open, pragmatically designed kitchen, thus creating a place where artists from New York’s SoHo district came together to cook and dine, usually without paying. With the emergence of relational aesthetics—a concept pioneered by Nicolas Bourriaud—in the 1990s (initiated by Rirkrit Tiravanija, later adopted by Ólafur Elíasson and Raumlabor) exhibitions ultimately became convivial places where preparing food and eating together function as a work of art. These examples show us that the kitchen is not limited to three pieces of furniture and a few utensils, but is more about creating a lively and meaningful place for society. And what has become of the kitchen in 2024? At a time when all major cities are experiencing a housing shortage? Where inflation affects food prices more every day? And, not to be overlooked, the questions “who cooks and how?” that are part of normal, everyday life, especially given the fact that today most people work during the day, be it beyond or within the confines of their own four walls, and now that takeout food can be ordered or delivered to your home with any smartphone.

The DREAM KITCHEN ideas competition invites to design the kitchen of the future. Whether small or large, indoor or outdoor, communal or individual, featuring conventional energy sources and food or experimenting with new forms of cooking, anything is possible. The only requirement is that you show imagination and create new forms and uses in designing a kitchen to inspire dreams. Particular attention will be paid to aesthetic ingenuity, but also to how the idea of a social space—a place for facilitating evolving, entertaining, and respectful interpersonal relationships—is realized. But without overlooking the pleasure of putting food on the table!

The three best ideas will be rewarded with the following prizes: 5,000 EUR for first place, 3,000 EUR for second and 2,000 EUR for third. In addition, the ten best ideas will be exhibited at the awards ceremony in Berlin in November 2024.

The jury includes Sophie Delhay (architect, Fr), Lauriane Gricourt (director of Les Abattoirs Museum, Toulouse Fr), Jan Liesegang (architect, co-founder of raumlabor Berlin), MITKUNSTZENTRALE (architects, designers & artists collective, Berlin). 

Supported by the Goethe-Institut e.V., the French Ministry of Culture and the Institut français Paris.