Concerning the life of houses. Another way of being flexible
Article by Javier Mozas published in a+t 13 Housing and Flexibility II
March 21, 2016
Christopher Cole. The Ultimate Doll's House Book. Dorling Kindersley Limited, London, 1994
“In this room (...), Mrs Moreau decided to install her kitchen. The decorator Henry Fleury conceived an avant-garde design for her and began to proclaim that it would be the prototype of the twenty-first century kitchen: a culinary laboratory one generation ahead of its time, provided with the most sophisticated technical improvements, equipped with microwave ovens, invisible hotplates, remote-controlled household robots capable of carrying out complex programmes of preparation and cooking. (...)
Mrs Moreau’s cook, a stout woman from Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy, answering to the name of Gertrude, was not fooled by those vulgar contrivances and told the lady of the house without further ado that she would not cook anything in such a kitchen, in which nothing was in the right place and nothing worked in the way she was familiar with. She demanded a real cooker with gas burners, a cast iron fryer, a wooden block and especially a junk room where she could put empty bottles, the cheese baskets, boxes of fruit, sacks of potatoes, bowls for washing vegetables and the wire basket for draining the salad...”
Text extracted from the article "Concerning the life of houses. Another way of being flexible" by Javier Mozas, published in a+t 13 Housing and Flexibility II.
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