Take your places by Jooyeon Lee, Kaisa Luukkanen and Katharina Schmidt.

Kitchen designers work hard to create cosy and convenient solutions for even the most cramped conditions. A new exhibition presents compact kitchens, both classic and contemporary.

As the saying goes, the kitchen is the heart of the home. But how can a space that is often cramped and cluttered be made to feel functional, homely and pleasing to the eye? Especially in a small city apartment, both practicality and aesthetics are often the first victims of space limitations. Today’s kitchen designers work with very much the same problems that generations of interior architects have brooded over.

The challenge of creating a beautiful and practical kitchen area was posed to a group of 16 spatial and furniture design students at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. They came up with four compact kitchens and three sets of tableware intended to maximise economy of space, energy and materials used.

Cultural diversity

6 Pieces by designers Päivi Niemi and Tuomas Rossi.

The results are now displayed in the Gallery at the Alvar Aalto Museum in Jyväskylä along with a selection of state-of-the art kitchen designs by Alvar and Aino Aalto from the 1930s. Both classic and contemporary compact kitchens show a wealth of ideas that bring convenience to confined cooking spaces.

The 16 students whose works are on display come from various countries. Their divergent cultural backgrounds – Finnish, European and Asian – add variety and colour to the exhibition. They were given the task of carrying out a written and a visual study of the most common kitchen utensils and the ways they’re stored.

One of the main criteria was the most economical use of the materials and the space, coupled with minimal costs. The finished kitchens implement ingenious ideas about flexible furniture and lightweight construction. The tableware sets are also characterised by and emphasis on economy in their simple forms and innovative use of materials.

Simplicity and practicality

As a counterpoint to the fresh young talents on display in the student section, the exhibition also presents a classic functionalist kitchen by one of Finland’s most celebrated architect couples. In 1930 the Minimum Apartment exhibition, linked to the Industrial Design exhibition at the Helsinki Kunsthalle (Helsinki Art Hall), presented Alvar and Aino Aalto’s compact apartment interiors designed for maximum practicality.

The Aalto’s designs included a highly modern kitchen that highlighted simplicity and practicality in a way that was clearly ahead of their time. Contemporary reviews in the Helsingin Sanomat praised the exhibition for its many new ideas, “that have to be taken seriously, including sliding rubbish bins, storage systems for grains and cereals, suspended saucepan shelves, etc.” Some of the revolutionary ideas introduced by the Aaltos are still used in today’s compact kitchens.

Matti Koskinen - HT
Veera Lipasti