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Domestic Otherwise: A labour-enabling kitchen landscape
Name
Yuen Wing Tse
Education degree
Kandidat
Fagfelt
Architecture
Institute
Architecture and Culture
Program
Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability
Year
2026
The project sets its scene in the kitchen to challenge modern domestic realism. By transforming an existing housing block into a food-based domestic infrastructure, it emancipates domesticity from the isolated household through a labour-enabling framework. Here, alternative everyday life is imagined through food preparation, where labour is finally witnessed, celebrated, and appreciated.
In many societies, tasks such as baking, cooking, or washing were not performed entirely within individual homes but relied on shared infrastructures such as communal ovens, laundries, or kitchens. These infrastructures supported daily life while also creating spaces for social interaction.
The project understands domestic labour not merely as biological necessity, but as a condition that structures social relations and political life. When labour is concealed or naturalized, its political dimension is suppressed; when it becomes visible and shared, it opens space for action, negotiation, and agency.
This thesis moves away from the safe middle ground of contemporary housing design by operating across three continuous, interdependent threads that trace the project from social autonomy to tactile architecture.
The first thread spans from The Chosen Home, a line of inquiry that foregrounds the political agency of residents who actively choose mutual reliance and sanctuary outside traditional biological family scripts. This human intent is instantly picked up by the second thread, The Mutating Kitchen, which treats the space of sustenance not as a static, optimized appliance box, but as a loose, migrating spatial container that escapes the private cell and spills into the public corridor. These social and spatial fluidities finally crystallize in the third thread, The Domestic Object, where traditional, manual food-preparation tools are treated as active material instruments. By scaling the physical mechanics of these objects up into the literal architecture of the building—transforming furniture logic into structural threshold walls and centralized corridor islands—the project weaves these lines together, turning a sterile transit artery into a highly articulated, visible landscape of collective care.
This research references research methodology informed by Edwina Attlee’s Strayed Homes: Cultural Histories of the Domestic in Public, where architectural knowledge emerges from presence rather than detached observation.
Fieldwork conducted in Poland and Copenhagen is positioned as witnessing rather than observation. Observation implies distance, objectivity. Witnessing acknowledges presence. I wish to position my work to be attentive, situated, and accountable, resisting analytical distance. The kitchens encountered in this research are not presented as case studies, nor as evidence from which conclusions can be drawn. They are moments of proximity, of overheard conversations and shared air, in which labor, care, and intimacy briefly become perceptible. The kitchen emerges not as a typological object, but as a political threshold — a site where power, care, and visibility are continuously negotiated.
Labour Enabling Manifesto
We reject the ‘home’ as an isolated unit of consumption of life. Current domestic design, under the guise of labour-saving, effectively atomizes us. Our vision is a labour-enabling framework: here, domestic labour is acknowledged as work, it is rendered visible, shared, and celebrated as the expression of human as the producer of life instead of consumer.
The Royal Danish Academy supports the Sustainable Development Goals
Since 2017 the Royal Danish Academy has worked with the Sustainable Development Goals. This is reflected in our research, our teaching and in our students’ projects. This project relates to the following UN goal(-s)
