COLOGNE - LivingKitchen is an event hosted every two years and co-located event with imm cologne. The 2019 event was designed by Alfredo Häberli and covered everything from world premieres of new kitchen furniture, household appliances and home accessories right through to cooking and trend shows.
Titled Future Kitchen, Häberli's installation featured green-painted shelving, walls and surfaces and gave visitors a visionary perspective on the kitchen in the not-so-distant future, showcasing it as the center of the home but Häberli's vision of the mobility of once fixed appliances such as the cooker and oven migrating from one place to another.
“The request from Koelnmesse was naturally an honour for me," said Alfredo Häberli. "As a designer, I’m always working on developing tomorrow’s kitchen. I deliberately want to elevate my design to a certain level of abstraction because the times in which we are living are moving incredibly fast. I therefore decided to base my design for Future Kitchen on a blend of minimalist architecture and virtual reality. As such, the majority of the kitchen can be seen only virtually in augmented reality.”
The Häberli created a total of eleven kitchen gadgets and appliances for Future Kitchen. By scanning one of the QR codes positioned on the green surfaces, Future Kitchen visitors could discover the designs on a smart device. They included a transparent, horizontal refrigerator, developed by Alfredo Häberli in collaboration with Samsung. The appliance is designed to ensure that all the food and drink stored inside is always visible, thus avoiding unnecessary opening and searching. Häberli proposed that the energy released when the fridge door is opened could be fed into an integrated lower storage area that serves as a warming rack for tableware. A trapezoid-shaped, ultra-thin, portable hotplate, developed by the designer in partnership with Schott Ceran, also featured among the designs. It can be positioned anywhere and has a dual function: it both cooks and keeps meals warm. In Häberli’s vision of tomorrow’s kitchen, the oven can descend from the ceiling when required. His oven is also transparent so that everything going on inside is visible at all times, which reduces heat losses from unnecessary opening of the door. Additional products were developed or integrated with partners including the manufacturers Alias, arwa, Astep, Atelier Pfister, Baltensweiler, Flos, New Tendency and Petersen Tegl. Häberli made resource conservation the key concept on which all the product designs were based.
In the holistic installation of a model home, the kitchen area appeared immediately alongside the entrance. The designer hinted at a garden for crop plants flanking it. But it was the kitchen that occupied a large and prominent position within the installation.
For more information, visit livingkitchen-cologne.com and imm-cologne.com.
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