Erling Hope
DESIGN • MAKE • COLLABORATE
Cooking makes us human. And the kitchen is the essence of the home.
Contemporary Kitchens:
Contemporary kitchens tend toward clean lines, simple geometries, and an accent on the intrinsic qualities of the materials themselves.
Details:
Simplicity, as most any maker of things will know, is never simple. The level of detail, planning and labor that results, in the end, in flush planes, in continuous lines, in simple geometric forms, is almost impossible to tally. Compared to more traditional or ornate forms, the work is often hidden or disguised.
Traditional and Transitional Kitchens:
Cooking shaped our evolution into the creature we are now. It changed our anatomy and formed the foundation of everything we now call ‘culture’. “Cooking is what makes the human diet ‘human,’ and the most logical explanation for the advances in brain and body size over our ape ancestors” Richard Wrangham writes. “It’s hard to imagine the leap to Homo erectus without cooking’s nutritional benefits.” —“Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human”
The kitchen is also the most liturgical or ceremonial room in the house. We take in living plants and dead animals, anoint them with oils and dress them with rare spices as we prepare to commit them to the flames, and add their life-giving energies to our own. Daily rituals of life and death, of restoration and fellowship happen here, in the room that makes us human.