While the warmer weather slowly washes over us, we’re trying to focus our attention on projects that emphasize and showcase the environment. Whether it’s an artist with organic influences, or eco-friendly tech, the goal is ultimately to inspire you to enjoy your natural surroundings. In that respect, we couldn’t resist featuring various components of the Mobile Community Kitchen for Toronto’s Mount Dennis neighborhood. The project statement describes the Mobile Community Kitchen as follows: “arising out of mutual interests in urban agriculture, community engagement and a belief in social value of sharing food, Mount Dennis Community Kitchen has joined forces with Masters of Architecture students at the University of Toronto to design and build a mobile community kitchen for the historic Mount Dennis neighbourhood.”
Assembling a Molecular Architecture documents the entire project, from the conceptual renderings of proposed kitchen elements, through the fabrication process, ending with current photos and videos featuring the collectives deliverables in use. The students actively engaged the public to help create BBQ carts, mobile recycling and refuse containers and a variety of seating options. Materials range from square-section steel for the skeletons, to recycled bicycle parts for mobility as well as lots of folding and retractable wooden surfaces.
“These abstract machines can act as a collective whole, however their orientation and accumulation on a site is more than just the sum of all their parts. When these various mobile units arrive to a site they can immediately be unfoled, stretched or disassembled in several ways so that they can undergo their transformation to form a new machine for social gathering and interaction. The molecularizing of these mobile units are attracted to each other to form molar aggregates of multiple types. Their assembly is not one that is prescribed by the designer; instead, it is left up to the users to determine which units are necessary for the particular community gathering at hand and are able to choose which units are essential to accommodate such an event. Not all the units are needed to create this abstract machine, however, the more units that are used creates further and more complex multiplicities of this abstract social vehicle that revolves itself around various activities of preparing, harvesting, and consuming healthy food.”