In 2014, the Office for the Visual Arts of the French Institute in Germany and the Goethe-Institut launched the Perspektive fund for contemporary art and architecture. Since 2023, the fund has organised two competition: a call for entries for visual arts projects and a competition for architectural ideas. The jury for the 2024 edition, entitled ‘Dream Kitchen’, has decided to award three First Prizes.

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The 2024 Perspektive fund’s architectural ideas competition looks at challenges facing contemporary kitchens. ‘What fate for the kitchen in a world where major cities are affected by the housing crisis? At a time when inflation increases the pressure on food prices, and shortages are determining the lives of million people?’ The ‘Dream Kitchen’ competition follows the 2023’s edition, ‘Growing Villages – The future is not Metropolitan’, which invited candidates to imagine the village of today and tomorrow.

Among the 89 entries, the Franco-German jury, made up of architect Sophie Delhay, of Lauriane Gricourt, director of the Abattoirs de Toulouse exhibition centre, of Jan Liesegang, architect and co-founder of raumlaborberlin, and the architects’ collective, designers and artists Mitkunstzentrale (Martina della Valle, Erik Göngrich, Susanne Schröder, Nora Wilhelm), has chosen to award three First Prize, in recognition of ‘their great singularity and excellence in each of their fields’, and two special mentions.

The awards ceremony will take place on Friday 8 November at the Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory at 7pm, with the three winning teams, the jury and the competition organisers. The 10 best projects selected for the competition will be exhibited during the evening.

Discover the winners and special mentions below

Winner « Harry’s Bude as Cuisine Commune, Cuisine Commune as Architektur »
Fanti Baum et Sebastian Klawiter (Francfurt/Munich, Germany).

The jury congratulated the decision to transform the pre-existing space of a church in order to cook and distribute food for the most vulnerable, as well as the commitment of this approach and the symbolic significance linked to the previous function of the site. The project aims to give a permanent structure to an existing and precarious food distribution stand, so that ‘nothing can question its presence anymore’. Not only a food distribution point, the project is also shared kitchen where meals can be prepared once a week, creating social links and opening up the space of the church to the city and its residents.

Winner « Gastrobahn » Yann Motreff (Paris, France)

The project stood out for its originality and the coherence of its approach. It responds to a major challenge: the food insecurity affecting more than 8.5 million people in France and Germany. Based on the idea that 1,760 km of dining tables would need to be built to remedy this problem, the idea of the Gastrobahn was born, a huge highway that would cross the entire width of Germany and France to cook and serve meals.

 

Winner « Soupes Populaires » Camille Rouaud (Uchizy, France)

The jury recognised the relevance of this project, with its take on soup kitchens with a ‘cyberpunk’ twist, by building them in the back of reused ‘coupés’, top-of-the-range cars that are now often banned from use by ecological standards. Camille Rouaud covers the extreme poverty of the soup kitchens with a veneer of luxury, questioning the social inequalities of our time. ‘The project intelligently tackles current ecological issues by transforming these polluting cars into hybrid vehicles, thanks to new LPG technologies, a gas that also has the advantage of being used for cooking.’ The jury also congratulated the way hospitality and community come together in the proposal.

 

Special mentions

The jury also awarded two special mentions: one to the ‘Device’ project by Victoria Fernandez and Zaur Huseyn-Zada for its original integration of the highly topical issue of the growing role of artificial intelligence in our daily lives, and the second to the ‘Fermen-table’ project by Hannah Lisa Ehre and Marlene Theresa Koßmann for its pertinent consideration of food, health and environmental issues for the future of our societies. The idea of combining ‘primitive’ fermented food with the advanced technology required to create the table specially designed for this project anchors it rightly in our times.

« Device », Victoria Fernandez et Zaur Huseyn-Zada

« Fermen-table » Hannah Lisa Ehre, Marlene Theresa Koßmann

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For more information about the competiton and the Perspektive funds, visite their website.