1ST PRICE EX AEQUO – HARRY’S BUDE AS CUISINE COMMUNE, CUISINE COMMUNE AS ARCHITECTURE

The Stuttgart Cuisine Commune is literally founded with what falls from the sky, in multiple ways:

Firstly, there is Harry’s Bude, a temporary food-sharing station that provides people with food. Organizing this supply system is hard work, carried out by many. But for a brief moment, we want to say: Harry and his people provide food that falls from the sky.

Secondly, there is the porous stone that has broken off from the building and plunged to the ground, in front of which Harry’s precarious architecture has been installed: St. Mary’s Church. All these stones have succumbed to gravity and lost their cohesion, have been broken, shattered, fallen, crashed—

Thirdly, there are the unique glazed roof tiles, which are handcrafted and fired by a crafts-women in the south of Stuttgart, and almost nowhere else, and in French are named the same as a piece of cheese: La Brique.

This is the starting point of our idea of the Stuttgart Cuisine Commune; these three conceptual components: La Caillou + Le Ciel + La Brique.

The most important thing: to develop an architecture for Harry’s Bude that integrates into this place, embeds into the walls, connects with the stones, in such a way that nothing could call it into question. At the same time, creating the possibility not only to distribute food but also to have enough space, storage, cooling, and action space to run a Cuisine Commune and cooking together once a week. It is the dream of a generous, open, and pragmatic place.

The stones remind us of Walter Benjamin’s concept of porosity, which we want to apply to the situation of Harry’s temporary booth and the church as an institution. The design “Harry’s Bude as Cuisine Commune – Cuisine Commune as Architecture” aims to make the church building permeable, accessible, open, and receptive to its immediate surroundings: Harry’s Bude and the Österreichischen Platz. It’s about incorporating moments of porosity into solid structures and thinking of architecture as an intervening practice: a gesture of opening, sharing, simultaneity, and assembly. Precisely because something is manifested in our design, it remains crucial not to lose sight of what characterizes the booth and Benjamin’s concept: “one avoids the stamped, no situation appears as it is, thought of forever, no form asserts its ‘this way and no other.’ Because nothing is finalized and completed.”

The Stuttgart Cuisine Commune creates permeability for various action spaces, thinking of the kitchen as an open space and workshop, where co-productive processes create a lively place. This means, in practice – where, with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “the planners are still part of the plan” – “inventing the means in a joint experiment, that in every kitchen […], in every corridor, on every park bench […], launches the coming of life forms […].” That is the dream: to test communal action – as a kitchen – at this place.