I'm freelance-writing about kitchen trends right now, and one of the things my excellent, prompt, articulate and efficient builders have been telling me about is design.
Here's what's happening, and this isn't new but it's accelerating: people are merging the living, family and "hearth" rooms and running them right into the kitchen in an "open" floor plan. The kitchen then picks up the momentum and flows into an eating "area." Not a separate dining room, you understand, which is confining and passe. An area.
Not only that, but kitchens themselves are starting to look less kitchen-like and more like the rest of the space that flows into and through them. Cabinets and even major appliances like refrigerators are starting to be designed to look like "furniture." The merging of the kitchen with the "open" spaces around it thus becomes total in a visual sense.
Before I read Mendelson, I would have listened to these trends without understanding them. Having been newly awakened to the concept of process, however, I heard them with great interest.
One of the signs of chaotic domestic life is the mixing of activities. Leisure and dinner collapse together, for example, as people eat in front of the TV. There's nothing "wrong" with this, but it makes it more difficult to have order because you're in two states at once.
With these "open floor plans" and merged spaces and functions (yes, you can get a built-in flat-screen TV in your kitchen now--"organizing" thinking at work), we can see the collapse of process and order in our home lives. Our spaces can now be everything at once as we do everything at once.
Again, this is not "bad." But it reflects the extinction of an entire category of thinking about what a home is and how to live in it.
Notice also how houses are getting bigger and bigger. We need more and more space to contain ourselves. Why? Partly because we have more and bigger stuff...but partly, I would say, because we've lost control of time (and process). As with organizing, space is all that's left to work with. The house gets bigorexic because it's trying to compensate for being starved of process. If, by contrast, you are sure of what you are doing in each (forgive the anachronism) "room," then the room does not have to be large. Think of all the professional kitchens that are "submarine-size" (as Anthony Bourdain describes the Park Avenue South Les Halles kitchen), yet produce appetizers, mains and desserts for hundreds of people a night. How? Process. The verb-ification of time.
Really how? Housekeeping.
That is what it boils down to. Restaurants, resorts, hospitals, spas, hotels--the "hospitality industry" is the housekeeping industry, the professionalization of the job of the middle class woman.
Housekeeping has fled the home and started a business.
It serves us right, really. Mendelson tells us that housekeeping is a deeply and fundamentally intellectual process. She probably should have said metaphysical, as Anthony Bourdain fearlessly did in regards to cooking (but he has a penis and can get away with it). In any event, she and Bourdain are right. Housekeeping is indeed metaphysical, an art expressed as a science. I'm sure it grew angry at being used as a tool to oppress and disrespect its vestals. To close them away and forget them and trivialize them.
It went on strike. "See how you like it when I'm not there," it said.
We don't. But with it, it took the knowledge of itself, so we can't miss it. We never knew that it was there.
We will fumble onwards, "organizing" and footprinting the space which is all that is left to us, into a future we can only wish was the ceaseless Gatsbian past.
