M 9:30 a.m.– 12:00 p.m.
Anderson Hall, Room 230
Act I: Beyond the kitchen
The kitchen has long been understood as a functional territory within the domestic landscape. This seminar reimagines the kitchen as a living archive —a site where spatial practices, such as cooking, eating, cleaning, and gathering, continuously
produce and mediate relationships between bodies, identity, land, and labor. From the intimacy of preparing food on a cutting board to the complexity of global food systems, students will map how food operates as a spatial medium and the
kitchen as a territory of negotiation: between visibility/invisibility, care/control, and nourishment/extraction.
Elaborating from the concept of counterspace, the seminar explores the kitchen as a space of cultural identity, ecological systems, sensory intimacy, and spatial politics. Through the lens of phenomenology, political ecology, feminist geography,
vernacular studies, and postcolonial theory, we will answer: How does the kitchen operate as a counterspace? How is space consumed? Who authors it, who labors in it, and who is denied access? What does it mean to design a
kitchen—or a meal—as an architectural and territorial act?
The seminar will prepare students to theorize and design with the idea of spatial justice, contributing to the foundation for the Spring Watkin Studio (Counterspace Act II)