KEW-TCHEN
 

A community built as part garden, part kitchen where the primary purpose is to bring the community together to grow, store, prepare and enjoy local foods in a welcoming and festive atmosphere that plays with the existing elements of the KEW asylum.

 

The Kew kitchen garden was used as the main driving feature for this project in terms of projecting it to the bigger community.  This was due to historically the kitchen gardens being an important place within the asylum that provided food for the inhabitants and staff. Hence, the projects intent is to preserve and celebrate the kitchen gardens whilst breaking down the negative connotations of the Asylum through a series of east-west garden and building striations – informed by Stan Allen’s ‘Field Conditions’, these striations set up the main framework for this project.

 

The gardens not only act as open space stretching across the masterplan, but also as improved gathering spaces for the community to meet and engage with one another in an outdoor environment. The main program of the community facility is the central community kitchen garden, where striations from the gardens start to interweave and overlap to create a relationship between the garden, kitchen, and table – as well as a blending of ground and building. The intent is for the community to be surrounded by garden, while connecting with each other through the cooking and sharing of food.

Link to folio