Anna Puigjaner

Few spaces of the home are as coveted as the kitchen. But this architect is showing the way out of these wasteful private cooking boxes toward more efficient “shared” alternatives.

- Samuel Medina

“First of all,” says Anna Puigjaner, to clear the air, “I love to cook.” Not a particularly startling admission, but Puigjaner, a young architect and researcher living in Barcelona, has just been enumerating the virtues of kitchenless homes. Her sales pitch for communal cooking is framed by a recitation of social ills. Americans waste 30 percent, or the equivalent of $48 billion, of consumable food annually. We spend half our waking lives cleaning our homes, and kitchens take up a lot of that time. Meanwhile, the growing elderly population has few socialization outlets, and the young, employed or not, suffer from intense alienation. Centralizing food preparation within residential buildings is a sensible way, she says, to address all these problems.

She is well aware of how contentious she sounds: “The kitchen is the most provocative part of the house. It has been used as a political tool for a long time, to the point that nowadays we can’t accept living without a kitchen.”

Still, the notion of a kitchenless middle-class home is nearly as old in America as industrialization itself. From the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, feminists, often with the help of architects, envisioned houses and apartments lacking all the equipment necessary for food preparation—counter space, sinks, larders—and compensating for it with centralized cooking and housekeeping facilities. These were to be staffed by professionals, thereby freeing women from unending, uninteresting housework. “It was actually normal to hire a professional cook to cook for you, because they thought that a professional cook would know how to better source and prepare nutritious ingredients,” Puigjaner explains. “You see how our mentality has completely changed!”