Architects: JXY Studio, Office for Roundtable
Area: 12 m²
Year: 2024
Photographs: Leyuan Li
Lead Architects: Leyuan Li, Jiaxun Xu, Yue Xu
Category: Temporary Installations
Design Team: Brandon Wunder, Xinyu Li, Shan Jiang, Efklides Tzimapitis, Ignis Zhang
Clients: HK Design Trust
Program: Pavilion, Temporary Installation
Collaborators: FEI Arts
City: Guangzhou
Country: China
Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen pavilion by Office for Roundtable and JXY Studio in Guangzhou, China, integrates a greenhouse, outdoor kitchen, and living room into a flexible, modular structure designed for collective engagement with food, land, and urban life. Set within an urban garden, it explores how food can become a spatial and social medium, shaping new forms of domesticity and community. Built with angle steel and polycarbonate sheets, the pavilion employs adjustable cables to stabilize panels at different heights. It supports soil remediation using mobile planting pots and circulates rainwater filtered from a rooftop reservoir for gardening and cooking. By integrating growing, preparing, and sharing food, the pavilion creates a place where activity, environment, and species coexist, forming a spatial system rooted in care and collectivity.
Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen is a pavilion located within an urban garden in Guangzhou, China. This architectural structure merges the functions of a greenhouse, outdoor kitchen, and living room, using food as a conceptual and spatial medium to encourage agricultural and social interaction. It proposes alternative modes of domestic life and collective engagement that reconsider the complex relationship between the body, land, and urban context.
The pavilion consists of modular elements that emphasize its structural simplicity and visual lightness. Built mainly with angle steel and polycarbonate sheets, the structure is stabilized by adjustable cables that allow the panels to be set at varying heights. Its temporary and flexible nature supports spatial reconfiguration through movable, functional components such as planting racks, kitchen counters, and folding tables, all fabricated from the same materials. The relationship between natural elements and constructed forms remains fluid, influencing the pavilion’s function. When closed, it operates as a greenhouse, capturing seasonal changes through its translucent skin; when open, it becomes an outdoor living area that promotes shared, everyday interactions.
The pavilion creates a microclimate that supports both plant cultivation and human use. Contaminated soil from the nearby urban farm is remediated in portable pots, which are used for growing plants and encouraging community exchange. Rainwater collected and filtered through an overhead metal reservoir is reused within the structure for gardening and cooking. Design strategies such as panel gaps promote passive cooling and light penetration, ensuring airflow and solar exposure suitable for plant growth and visitor comfort. These spatial tactics help establish a shared environment where people and other species coexist.
Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen functions as a spatial expression of food, introducing new social norms and spatial dynamics. By connecting the processes of growing, preparing, delivering, consuming, and sharing food, the pavilion becomes a communal space where daily activities unfold against a backdrop of trees, wildlife, and soft light, gradually merging into the calm of the surrounding natural environment as the day ends.
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Project Location
Address: Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
Location is for general reference and may represent a city or country, not necessarily a precise address.
