Anna Puigjaner / MAIO: Unworlding CUBEX

Louis-Herman De Koninck’s iconic CUBEX kitchen system started to be commercialized in 1931 widespreading modern cooking principles in Belgium for decades. Based on a functional 60cm modular system, its layout promoted efficiency and hygienic principles all the while reinforcing gendered constructs. Architecture—and domestic spaces in particular—have historically contributed to promoting and perpetuating biased social models around care practices. Unworlding CUBEX critically revisits the original design, speculating on new potential forms of kinship and domestic labour. Through a series of plug-in prototypes, MAIO proposes a re-composition of the linear CUBEX modules into an intersectional kitchen; in other words: a shift from the normative “housewife” laboratory to an open space that acknowledges the multiplicity of bodies and their interdependencies.

Some plug-in prototypes allow to transgress the unipersonal occupancy character of the CUBEX kitchen, defining complex configurations for collective care, while others, turn the private kitchen into a public infrastructure. Others celebrate the diversity of bodies dismantling normativity or define openings for an overlap of usages beyond cooking. 

After artist Vincent Meessen, architect Anna Puigjaner (MAIO) is the second researcher to re-exhibit CIVA’s collections through the program of Research in Residence, following her research Kitchenless City, where the elimination of the kitchen from the house allows for the domestication of the urban sphere. Research in Residence renegotiates the terrain between the often hermetic sphere of architecture collections and their public exposure. The program promotes approaches beyond mono-historical perspectives and is a platform for researchers working in residence since 2022.

MAIO is an architectural office based in Barcelona which work, linked to feminist studies, focuses on the design of domesticities capable of dismantling social biases. MAIO’s work includes the 40 Social Housing Units Building in Sant Feliu de Llobregat and Urban Kitchen in Barcelona and has been exhibited at MoMA, New York, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, Royal Academy, London, Art Institute of Chicago and Storefront for Art and Architecture. 

Anna Puigjaner is the cofounder of MAIO in Barcelona and has been teaching at GSAPP Columbia University in New York. Since 2023 she is a Professor of Architecture and Care at ETH Zurich.

Artistic director: Nikolaus Hirsch
Secretary general: Jeremy Uhr  
Curators: Francis Carpentier, Nikolaus Hirsch
Press: Guilliana Venlet, g.venlet@civa.brussels