Saturday, April 12, 2008

PROJECT STATEMENT

Arising out of mutual interests in urban agriculture, community engagement and a belief in social value of sharing food, Mount Dennis Community Kitchen has joined forces with Masters of Architecture students at the University of Toronto to design and build a mobile community kitchen for the historic Mount Dennis neighbourhood.

This is the first collaboration of this type between the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design and a community organization. Professor Adrian Blackwell introduced the course entitled “Assembling a Molecular Architecture” in early January. Since then, 13 students have established contacts with Evergreen, and most closely with the Mount Dennis Community Kitchen, regularly attending meetings and meals with drawings and models in tow.

While it is unusual for a burgeoning community group to receive weekly architectural presentations, it is equally unusual for architectural students to have to interact with a real client in the form of a working community organization – and then deliver the project at full scale. This new dynamic has produced an architecture of mobility and variability based in the social realities of Toronto. The final design includes three mobile carts calibrated to the activities and site conditions of Mount Dennis and fabricated with emphasis on the durability of recovered materials.

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