First we thought about what the kitchen represents today and what could matter more in the future. We envisaged ‘a day in the life’ of a workplace kitchen, and how it could help build and support a community and sense of comradeship within an organisation.

The key points were: the opportunity to engage with the public and demonstrate a company’s values through its communal spaces; providing a varied and engaging working environment, stimulating employees’ engagement and retaining talent; and understanding that people group in social tribes and that sharing food is a powerful means of creating cohesion and communicating values. We then looked at a speculative kitchen design at three scales:

The kitchen as part of the building
We see the kitchen as an integral element surrounding the workplace, a retreat from workplace/workstations and forming an immediately available space with daylight and external access, in contrast to the typical model of placing the kitchen in the centre of the floorplate, deprived of natural light or views out. This ‘buoyancy aid’ kitchen can even be retro-fitted to existing office buildings that typically have single-use floorplates.

The kitchen as an extension of the street
Typical workplace kitchens are not used at all times during the day and are usually quiet, inanimate spaces. This can be changed by engaging with the gig economy. A ground-floor kitchen space could host a market, education events and talks, as well as having guest chefs preparing food for employees and passers-by. If the workplace kitchen could double-up as a restaurant – perhaps selling food to the public for charitable purposes – it could be a great way to communicate an organisation’s values to a wider public.

The kitchen as an integral part of the urban realm and an interface between all buildings
Understanding the powerful potential of the kitchen to bring people together, we took the idea up the scale, as a space to link different areas within the city. Following on, our final board illustrates a ramp linking all the spaces explored in the previous three, showing that the kitchen can be a large-scale communal space bringing together various other places and creating a better connected, cohesive public realm.