Aarhus Open City Kitchen Part 1 Project 2012 Mathias Bæktoft BentzenSiv Bottcher Aarhus School of Architecture | Denmark The Public City Kitchen offers the possibility for 100 people to prepare and eat food together with both locals and visitors in the centre of Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark. Social gatherings in Denmark more than often include an invitation to someone’s home. The public display of our social behavior is therefore restricted as it relies on the privacy and intimacy of our homes and only includes people we already feel attached to. Even though the Danes do go out to eat, go to the cinema and also enjoy the city parks there is nothing unifying in these events. We are only together with the people we have already decided to be together with. Public places that do allow for social display are often times places related to practical events like buying our food - you might even invite a close friend to do your groceries with you. As a result a local supermarket in Aarhus, Føtex, has been voted the best dating place two years in a row now. Through the action of eating, as a basic need that exists across age and culture, the City Kitchen proposes an alternative to and an extension of our private kitchens in our private homes. It suggests the extraction of a private event from our homes and into the public of our city. Here both visitors and locals can make domestic culture and behavior more visible to the public and might help the understanding of our surroundings. Situated in a decaying courtyard next to a variety of city events the proposal relies on a methodic investigation in opening up and redrawing the courtyard, enabling an architecture that activate, legitimize and visualize the public use of the courtyard. Working with the cinematic camera, commonly used for documenting in relation to architecture, we both represent the context, through a randomized scripting of the camera's operations, and interpret this into a redrawing of the courtyard as a new set of spaces that can be paired with our city kitchen. Mathias Bæktoft BentzenSiv Bottcher Tutor(s)