For the Chicago Architecture Biennial we designed a vast collective platform, a stage for actions between the civic and the domestic scales, where to enact and participate in new collective rituals. Part kitchen, part garden, part playground, we imagine the platform as a civic surface, where different activities inform and subvert each other.

Inhabiting one of the city’s vacant lots, open day and night, we imagine it as a place to cultivate and curate, where to cook, play, eat, harvest, and explore among people, herbs, wild plants, and birds.

As a modular, cast object, we think of the platform as a place to be touched, smelled, cultivated, embedding in its very matter elements of its context. Unrolled as a long, “petrified” carpet/kitchen, we think of collective barbecues, cooking classes, and games to be played on its surface, outdoors, within a public pocket, a stage for domestic and collective rituals, open to visitors and neighbors.