Häberli, the soul in the kitchen

This year, Alfredo Häberli proposes a kitchen perceived as something to taste, something to smell. An invitation to the senses, if you will, of taste and smell, but also a stimulus for our ‘involuntary’ memory, evoking recollections, fragments of life and moods. On the one hand of today’s growing kitchen sector we have a proliferation of increasingly minimalist, professional-looking designs, where function is often sacrificed in the name of aesthetics, while on the other, new sophisticated appliances in vivid colours are gaining popularity, in defiance of those who believe that they should only ever be white. Then there are those who stop to consider the power of memory, who look to the past to find the heritage and warmth of the ‘kitchen of the memory’ – specifically, a kitchen in Córdoba, Argentina, where the Swiss-Argentine designer used to spend his holidays with his family. With this project/concept (presented first at Eurocucine in Milan this April, and then at Zurich during the exhibition dedicated to the designer himself), the legendary kitchen design firm Schiffini corroborates the idea expressed by one of the company’s key collaborators Vico Magistretti whereby “the defining characteristic of Italian design is working on a conceptual level”. The article continues in Auto & Design no. 173