Emma Rea from Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington School of Architecture, was a finalist in the Te Kāhui Whaihanga Resene 2020 Student Design Awards for her project 'House as Autobiography: An Architectural Mis-Translation of My Kitchen'.
Project description
In a time and place that felt smaller, slower, more delicate and almost surreal, the kitchen became an enduring source of clarity and life. The rituals that took place there became mechanisms of reconciliation in navigating the introspective and intimate world of lockdown.
Bowls of fruit and bunches of flowers from the garden illustrate abundance and health. The kitchen sink, a reminder of the gentle repetition of washing dishes, giving rhythm and purpose to slower days. Dirty coffee mugs depict remnants of a social life in a socially distanced world.
These moments become unravelled and reconstructed through drawing and making. In the intimacy of the line and the tactility of paper, they re-emerge as imaginations embedded in my kitchen, revealing an entanglement between architecture and drawing.
Judges' citation
This exquisite drawing project is centred around the things that really mattered during lockdown: the fruit bowl, the coffee plunger and cup, the kitchen sink, and the daily rituals became so important at that strange time. But through a process of transferrance and mis-translation, Emma reveals the formal, termporal and theoretical underpinnings that make drawing the foundation of all architecture. This is a slow, contemplative project that takes something as seemingly mundane as a kitchen table and uses it to show us the unreliability of language, etymology, translation and the subjectivity of pencil and paper. We hope Emma keeps using this way of thinking as she grows as an architect.
