Mexican home appliances company Mabe, recently invited 9 top Mexican design & architecture firms to develop kitchen concepts to showcase their new product lines for kitchen. For the challenge Mabe also invited 9 local kitchen manufacturers to build their prototypes. AGENT was invited to take part of the project and came up with the Rehilete concept.
Rehilete is the Spanish word for Pin Wheel. The Rehilete concept is based on the idea of understanding the kitchen as a cycle and utilizes 5 products of the GE Profile line (which is represented and distributed by Mabe in Mexico).
AGENT’s concept contains 4 stations (or “wings”), which are intended to have dedicated functions, as part of the kitchen cycle: compost/harvest, preparing, cooking, eating.
The premise, is that beyond looking at the actions of preparing, cooking, eating and waste management as separated events (sometimes even happening at different zones of the house), these have to be understood as interdependent stages of a larger cycle. The idea is also to shorten the gap between food and its origin, bringing a compost/harvest station to the same room where food is prepared, cooked and eaten.
The cycle includes 5 phases: 1) growing and harvesting vegetables and herbs, 2) preparing, 3) Cooking, 4) Eating, and finally 5) reintegrating organic residuals to the compost bin (which later becomes fertilized dirt to seed again). The sinks, having the most recurrent function in all stages, are located at the center of the island.
To accentuate the different functions of each cycle phase, the 4 stations are designed with the most appropriate materials and temperature according to their function (wood for the eating station, Corian for the preparation & compost/harvest stations, and stainless steel for the cooking station). The stations also include storage space and units for the elements required on each phase.
As opposed to a regular kitchen that uses the walls to allocate all the storage and worki
