ARCHIVE

THE UNIVERSAL KITCHEN

Where:
The RISD Museum, 224 Benefit Street, in the first-floor gallery of the Farago Wing

When:
Summer, 1999

About the exhibition:
In 1993, a team of RISD students and faculty in Industrial Design and Interior Architecture began one of the most ambitious academic projects in the School’s history: to recreate the kitchen, an everyday icon of poor design. In an innovative partnership between academia and industry, more than 100 students in architecture, interior architecture and industrial design set out to question 50-year-old assumptions about how kitchens are used.

Led by project directors Jane Langmuir, Peter Wooding, and the late Marc Harrison, the team began with research. Making a succession of dinners together in typical kitchens, the students documented the processes of bending, stooping, reaching, and lifting -- routine kitchen tasks that force people to compensate for weak design in uncomfortable ways. The resulting time/motion studies demonstrate that, due to inefficiencies in kitchen design, the preparation of even a simple dinner requires more than 400 separate steps. The project’s goal, to rethink the kitchen environment and help as many potential users as possible to function independently, resulted in the Universal Kitchen.

The Universal Kitchen is actually two full-scale prototype kitchens -- "Min" and "Max" -- that are conceived as "kits of parts," with interchangeable modular components for refrigeration, cooking, water delivery, and storage. Each component is meant to be custom selected and arranged, so that heights and depths can be manually or automatically adjusted to that highly personal, but absolutely crucial "comfort zone." Visitors to the exhibition will experience the innovative design of an everyday space through such inventions as continuous wet surfaces, pop-up dishwashers, countertop waste channels, toe-kick suction, misting bays, steaming bays, retractable burners and more. All of these elements take into account the need to conserve human energy and natural resources and make a kitchen to accommodate people of all ages and physical abilities.

The Universal Kitchen was first exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in the 1998-99 exhibition Unlimited by Design.

The following generously supported RISD’s 5-year development of the Universal Kitchen project: Malcolm and Elizabeth Chace; KGK Foundation Trust; Worrell Fund; Dow Plastics; Broan-A Division of Nortek; International Paper-Decorative Products Division; Schott Corporation, Technical Glass Division; Masco Corporation; Monarch Industries, Inc.; Notch Design Group; Jutras Woodworking; Item Products, Inc.; SUSPA Inc.; Häfele America Co.; Illumination Concepts; Lightollier; Fulcrum Product Development; Normand Methot Woodworking; Thomas O’Brien Woodworking; and Drama Lighting Inc.