Shenzhen, China
Installation
2023
Shenzhen, China
Exhibition and Installation
2023
Team: Leyuan Li, Shan Jiang, Xinyu Li, Xiuquan Zhao
Photo Credit: Wenhan Dong
A portmanteau of Balcony and Kitchen, Balchen operates as a novel spatial investigation that intersects the functions of a planter, a kitchen, and a living room (Figures 01-02). Exhibited at the 9th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen, China, it is tasked with investigating the emerging trend of domestic farming in urban territories, speculating on the social and spatial aspects of food as a collective medium and a social act in the articulation of community and society.
Over the past decades, the attention towards fresh, organic food ingredients has promoted the emergence of growing vegetables in domestic spaces, such as rooftops and balconies, and sharing homemade ingredients with neighbors, especially during the pandemic. Due to the enduring lockdown, accompanied by stringent quarantine policies, the limited access to fresh food ingredients and social interactions has altered the inhabitant's quotidian activities related to food, thus challenging the conventional measures to domesticity and collectivity. The introduction of producing and exchanging food in domestic territories not only expands their architectural meanings often dictated by normative building codes, but also foregrounds inhabitants' anxieties concerning the relationships between bodies, environments, and politics. Within this imperative context, Balchen serves as a medium for new modes of domesticity, spawning spatial and social possibilities of everyday life.
As the architectural historian Elizabeth Cromley claims, the relationships between activities around food, including cooking, storing, serving, eating, and disposing, operate as a food axis in the social production of space. Food is theatrical and performative. In the stage where the cleansing, cutting, cooking, and sharing of food concur, a routine of activities doubles as a theatrical site for possible performances and social interactions. In other words, the production and consumption of meals is the production and consumption of social spaces. Drawing upon this assumption, Balchen examines the tools and spaces of food production in defining strategies to develop collective spaces for the community. By facilitating the interplay between farming and sharing food, and between delivering and consuming food, Balchen digs at the entrenched ecological, social, and cultural value of food.
Balchen consists of a series of movable urban furniture that traverses between the interior and exterior, defining a malleable site for divergent agricultural and social events. This series of furniture encompasses tools and spaces in the production and preparation of food, including vegetable growing racks, kitchen worktops, foldable dining tables, chairs, and so forth (Figures 03-12). With endeavors to reduce manufacturing costs while enhancing assembly efficiency, the furniture is made up of modular square tubes and wood panels joined by standardized bolts and L-shaped brackets, which could be easily assembled and disassembled on different sites for food production and social activities. During the four-month lifespan of the installation, we prepared seeds, vegetable seedlings, growing tools, and other maintenance equipment on the exhibition site, inviting visitors to cultivate a wide variety of vegetables in the installation and later take home ripe produce. They were also encouraged to reconfigure these pieces of furniture that render their perceptions of Balchen, reimagining ways of promoting a collaborative, community-oriented method in the process of designing the community space.
To illustrate Balchen’s spatial capacities, a series of speculative drawings are produced to depict different degrees and forms of social interaction in the exterior and interior scenarios, which represents the proliferation of the furniture as the network of a domestic infrastructure that bolsters social and cultural diversities through the medium of food (Figures 16-17). In the exterior, the rooftop is chosen as the imagined site where pieces of furniture are housed within a standardized greenhouse between rooftop equipment and structures. Based on different levels of lockdown, the greenhouses would be operated under different conditions between fully open to fully enclosed. As indicated in one of the renders that represents a compromised, in-between condition, some of the greenhouses are enclosed and demobilized, denoting the ongoing quarantine for certain individuals, whereas some are fully open, indicating the residents are liberated from quarantine constraints. The vegetable shelves are moved out to absorb natural sunlight while dividing the rooftop into divergent zones; cooking tables, chairs, and dining tables are convened together at divergent scales and configurations for different social and cooking parties in the community (Figures 18-19).
In a grand interior, different behaviors of the movable and operable furniture are imagined to break down the tangible, conventional isolation between residential units, forming a continuous food community in the interior that fosters caring and sharing between residents and neighbors (Figures 20-21). These interior components are no longer stabilized, prescribed objects that confine domestic interiors as the isolated, privileged realm of privacy. Instead, performing as vehicles that travel in networks of bodies and environments, these objects operate as the materials that provoke new relationships between individual and collective, producing a new set of social codes and spatial politics that crafts new modes of collectivity and sustainability in the community. As illustrated in the drawings, the invasion of moveable furniture has destabilized domestic spaces by challenging their definitions through the act of planting, sharing, and reorganizing. For instance, a bathroom is no longer merely enclosed by blank walls; it is converted into a shower embedded within an interior garden rendered visible by a party of moveable planters with vegetables; a kitchen is no longer an isolated, individual place for food storage and food making. With the fluid and malleable nature of the furniture, a kitchen is interconnected with other kitchens in the community, where tools, ingredients, and spaces are shared by the collective. Planting, cooking, and eating become forms of social acts that situate the individual within an interconnecting social network bolstered by the domestic infrastructure of care–a self-sufficient and self-driven community that fosters a new form of collective memories around food in domestic territories.
Photo Credit: Wenhan Dong
A portmanteau of Balcony and Kitchen, Balchen operates as a novel spatial investigation that intersects the functions of a planter, a kitchen, and a living room (Figures 01-02). Exhibited at the 9th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen, China, it is tasked with investigating the emerging trend of domestic farming in urban territories, speculating on the social and spatial aspects of food as a collective medium and a social act in the articulation of community and society.
Over the past decades, the attention towards fresh, organic food ingredients has promoted the emergence of growing vegetables in domestic spaces, such as rooftops and balconies, and sharing homemade ingredients with neighbors, especially during the pandemic. Due to the enduring lockdown, accompanied by stringent quarantine policies, the limited access to fresh food ingredients and social interactions has altered the inhabitant's quotidian activities related to food, thus challenging the conventional measures to domesticity and collectivity. The introduction of producing and exchanging food in domestic territories not only expands their architectural meanings often dictated by normative building codes, but also foregrounds inhabitants' anxieties concerning the relationships between bodies, environments, and politics. Within this imperative context, Balchen serves as a medium for new modes of domesticity, spawning spatial and social possibilities of everyday life.
As the architectural historian Elizabeth Cromley claims, the relationships between activities around food, including cooking, storing, serving, eating, and disposing, operate as a food axis in the social production of space. Food is theatrical and performative. In the stage where the cleansing, cutting, cooking, and sharing of food concur, a routine of activities doubles as a theatrical site for possible performances and social interactions. In other words, the production and consumption of meals is the production and consumption of social spaces. Drawing upon this assumption, Balchen examines the tools and spaces of food production in defining strategies to develop collective spaces for the community. By facilitating the interplay between farming and sharing food, and between delivering and consuming food, Balchen digs at the entrenched ecological, social, and cultural value of food.
Balchen consists of a series of movable urban furniture that traverses between the interior and exterior, defining a malleable site for divergent agricultural and social events. This series of furniture encompasses tools and spaces in the production and preparation of food, including vegetable growing racks, kitchen worktops, foldable dining tables, chairs, and so forth (Figures 03-12). With endeavors to reduce manufacturing costs while enhancing assembly efficiency, the furniture is made up of modular square tubes and wood panels joined by standardized bolts and L-shaped brackets, which could be easily assembled and disassembled on different sites for food production and social activities. During the four-month lifespan of the installation, we prepared seeds, vegetable seedlings, growing tools, and other maintenance equipment on the exhibition site, inviting visitors to cultivate a wide variety of vegetables in the installation and later take home ripe produce. They were also encouraged to reconfigure these pieces of furniture that render their perceptions of Balchen, reimagining ways of promoting a collaborative, community-oriented method in the process of designing the community space.
To illustrate Balchen’s spatial capacities, a series of speculative drawings are produced to depict different degrees and forms of social interaction in the exterior and interior scenarios, which represents the proliferation of the furniture as the network of a domestic infrastructure that bolsters social and cultural diversities through the medium of food (Figures 16-17). In the exterior, the rooftop is chosen as the imagined site where pieces of furniture are housed within a standardized greenhouse between rooftop equipment and structures. Based on different levels of lockdown, the greenhouses would be operated under different conditions between fully open to fully enclosed. As indicated in one of the renders that represents a compromised, in-between condition, some of the greenhouses are enclosed and demobilized, denoting the ongoing quarantine for certain individuals, whereas some are fully open, indicating the residents are liberated from quarantine constraints. The vegetable shelves are moved out to absorb natural sunlight while dividing the rooftop into divergent zones; cooking tables, chairs, and dining tables are convened together at divergent scales and configurations for different social and cooking parties in the community (Figures 18-19).
In a grand interior, different behaviors of the movable and operable furniture are imagined to break down the tangible, conventional isolation between residential units, forming a continuous food community in the interior that fosters caring and sharing between residents and neighbors (Figures 20-21). These interior components are no longer stabilized, prescribed objects that confine domestic interiors as the isolated, privileged realm of privacy. Instead, performing as vehicles that travel in networks of bodies and environments, these objects operate as the materials that provoke new relationships between individual and collective, producing a new set of social codes and spatial politics that crafts new modes of collectivity and sustainability in the community. As illustrated in the drawings, the invasion of moveable furniture has destabilized domestic spaces by challenging their definitions through the act of planting, sharing, and reorganizing. For instance, a bathroom is no longer merely enclosed by blank walls; it is converted into a shower embedded within an interior garden rendered visible by a party of moveable planters with vegetables; a kitchen is no longer an isolated, individual place for food storage and food making. With the fluid and malleable nature of the furniture, a kitchen is interconnected with other kitchens in the community, where tools, ingredients, and spaces are shared by the collective. Planting, cooking, and eating become forms of social acts that situate the individual within an interconnecting social network bolstered by the domestic infrastructure of care–a self-sufficient and self-driven community that fosters a new form of collective memories around food in domestic territories.