Institution of Dining

One of the most striking manifestations of human sociality is ‘commensality’: humans tend to eat together or, to eat in groups. The dining table contributed to the derivation of the term “commensality” in the 14th Century, originating from the Latin commensalis [‘com’ for together and ‘mensa’ meaning table], “togetherness arising out of the fact that we eat at one table” [1]. The dining table represents, as no other piece of furniture can, the family as a whole.

In 2015, a survey of 5000 British people was carried out showing that one in four people eat their meal alone. 78 per cent said that they rarely or never invite friends or family over at mealtimes. There is a loss of the collective dining experience even though our environment is built around it. Outside the home, Londoners are eating out more than ever before and at lower prices fueling an explosion in the number of restaurants opening. 7.7 billion meals are eaten out a year in the UK, or 128 meals per person. This is for a variety of reasons, many of which are due to the changing nature of daily life in Britain. These include changes in family make-up; more women out at work rather than running the home; the pace of modern life leading to increased work hours, inevitably ending in the lack of time available for ‘family dining’; the growth in ready meals; a continuing reduction in cooking knowledge from generation to generation; and lastly, the availability of a vibrant and varied restaurant industry.

In Japan, where 1 in 10 elementary and junior high students eat dinner alone despite living with family, the rising number of solo dining has meant new words such as Koshoku [eating alone] have been coined. Many restaurants cater for solo diners with smaller tables and dividers separating individual seats, an extreme that London has not yet reached.

This has restricted commensality, eating together can contribute to regular meal times, and social development can be fostered through human relations in the process of having meals together.

Although London has not yet started to design its own solo dining restaurants, new technological communication media are changing the notion of private space within the home. The emergence of television has shifted family life from the eat-in kitchen, where people would sit across from one another in the evening, toward the side table, where family members sit next to one another and look in the same direction. Developers of some new London apartment blocks, aimed at young professionals, say they will only install tiny “galley” style kitchens because so few meals are prepared at home. However, it is still necessary in the London Housing Design Guide to include space for the dining table, within kitchen dining areas, with specified table sizes.

In fact, the kitchen and dining space is seen to be so significant to a house, that for the UK census, a household is defined as either one person living alone or a group of people living at the same address who share cooking facilities, share a living space, or a dining area. The dining room and kitchen is still a key factor to the collection of population data. What would happen to the census if the kitchen and dining area was removed in its entirety from the home?

Current trends in housing developments result in an imposed lifestyle resulting from architectural form, rather than the other way around. The way in which we create housing drastically needs to be reframed to address how we live in the present day, rather than let traditional expectations of home dictate future developments. ‘Standardisation of housing units led, in turn, to the standardisation of families that inhabited them…housing became a training disciplining device for standardising families.’ [2]

The Kitchenless City On the verge of the 20th Century, cities like New York were full of apartment houses that lacked a kitchen. Instead, these apartments were supplied with domestic services which included collective kitchens, dining rooms, centralized vacuum systems, nurseries, shared maids and more. Between 1901 and 1929, this housing typology went through different variations, and this residential typology worked as a semi-public facility for social transformation. The history of this kitchenless typology dates to the economic depression that followed the American Civil War [1860-65] when, due to the pressure of scarce land and housing stock, most American cities needed to build apartment houses for middle class tenants who needed to cut down on their housing expenses. These apartments eliminated the kitchen, combining the European apartment

type with the American hotel typology,

formerly called Family Hotels.

Kitchenless housing typologies were

also prevalent in Europe, particuarly in

Sweden where there were several cohousing

self work models. One of the first

was Hemgarden Centralkok [Stockholm

1905], 60 bourgeois apartments were deprived of

the kitchen, the maids room and some storage space.

Instead, a central kitchen and bakery were placed in

the basement. Three meals a day could be ordered via

an internal telephone network. These were sent to the

flats through food lifts on each side of the staircases.

After the meal, china and cutlery were sent back to

the basement for cleaning. During the 1970s -80s, the

idea of communal living developed at an explosive rate,

as young people started to live in smaller communes.

This alternative living movement challenged the

nuclear family ideal. In Prastgardshagen [Stockholm

1983], the residents acted as partners to a housing

company during the planning and design process,

helping redesign the home. In agreement with the

association, apartments were reduced by 10 per cent

of their required space standards, whilst at the same

time increasing shared common space. Thus, kitchens

were not provided with space for a dining table,

however rentable dining tables were organised on the

ground floor.

At the end of the 19th Century, a public debate took

place in some European cities about the need of the

growing middle class to find solutions to the problem

of hiring domestic servants at an affordable price. One

idea that came up was to ‘collectivize the maid’, by

producing urban residential complexes where many

households could share meal production. They were

called ‘Einkuchenhaus’ (one-kitchen buildings), in

contrast to the ‘multi-kitchen housing’ that dominated

house production.

During the twentieth century, this model was

politicized by the Russians copying it as a system

of social housing, and became loaded with political

meaning. A collective kitchen became associated

with communism. The governing principle of

these houses was still the same as the New York

kitchenless apartments; to collectivise all the areas

that corresponded to collective functions. Reading,

cooking, raising children, sport - all are functions

removed from the traditional apartment and

relocated in a collective volume, hosting communal

kindergartens, kitchens, libraries and gymnasiums.

An example of which is Narkomfin in Moscow [1928].

In the 21st Century, the nuclear family is dissolving,

the dining table has become an office desk, and people

are lonelier than ever before. With these cultural

shifts, does the institution of housing need to be

reviewed to fit with new societal norms?


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