OFFSEA: Kitchenshrine & Dogcomfort

The Architecture of Everyday Situations. A spatial laboratory in Brighton.          Architects Anuschka Kutz and Andrea Benze, founders of offsea (office for socially engaged architecture) combine an intensive laboratory with an interactive architectural show in this exhibition of their ongoing research into how architecture might be derived from everyday situations, habits and rituals. The exhibition is intended as an interactive testing ground, where “architectural” artefacts and spaces can be explored, tested and interrogated, built and rebuilt and where ideas will be gathered as well as presented. Visitors are invited to contribute to and engage in our research into everyday space, and leave behind traces of their thoughts and ideas.

The exhibition is based upon the critical question as to whether architecture designed for dwelling represents and respects human needs/desires. Conventional dwelling space is foremost created as a container, filled with words such as bedroom, lounge, kitchen etc. Offsea would argue that this often bypasses ‘everyday’ situations, habits, passions and desires, excluding less normative activities, removing the occupier from the “space-making act” and so restricting the scope to explore more complex overlays of conditions for living that are less rigidly defined. Kitchen-shrine and dog-comfort explores this problematic by asking: What happens when people dwell? Could one generate space from situations, habits, passions and rituals as they occur in everyday life? 

Kutz and Benze have developed a series of means to explore these questions that include very personal views on the relationship between individuals and their private space as well as playful and interactive methods to generate space and architecture from specific everyday situations. Customized not individualised is the perspective that they have adopted examined in architectural terms.  The project integrates a conceptual statement with an interactive architectural proposal, its key aim being to generate architectural spaces through social practice. Situated between art installation, interactive research, architectural proposition and social investigation, offsea forensically examines everyday life to generate knowledge with which to create architecture. 

The exhibition was supported with a Faculty Research Support Fund for New and Emerging Researchers, University of Brighton, Faculty of Arts & Architecture.

Additional information: 

OFFSEA (Office for Socially Engaged Architecture)

OFFSEA is a collaboration between London and Berlin engaging in projects between architecture, social critique and art. Andrea Benze and Anuschka Kutz, who founded OFFSEA in 2002, form the core of this otherwise open and cross-disciplinary network. OFFSEA reflects and manipulates the urban fabric.  We are specifically interested in examining personal and individually lived space and relating this investigation back to more complex networks and systems influencing the urban condition.  We use imagination, routine and individual preferences of personal lives to explore the interrelationship between the built and imagined.

Andrea Benze studied Architecture at TU Darmstadt, Germany and at the Bartlett University College London, where she graduated. She is one of the founders of “Berlin Salon”, a group organising public debates about architecture and theory in Berlin, featuring also at the Documenta 10 in Kassel. She taught at the Technical University of Berlin and at FH Joaneum in Graz and has been acting as invited critic and lecturer in Austria, England, Sweden and Germany. Presently she is writing a PhD on Informal Social Spaces in the former East German Industrial Region of Bitterfeld. She has collaborated with Anuschka Kutz in teaching, research and practice since 1998.

Anuschka Kutz studied Architecture in Moscow and Berlin and History of Modern Architecture at the Bartlett, UCL, London. She has won several prizes and her work has been published and exhibited. She has taught architectural design at the Technical University of Berlin, London Metropolitan University, Kingston University and is currently lecturing at the University of Brighton. She is based in London where she works as an architect and academic. Her research interest focuses on the relationship between everyday urban and personal space, and conventional and non-conventional space. 

Offsea: lectures, prizes, publications

1st prize Europan 7, international architectural competition with 

The Postponed Meeting of Neufert, Tessenow and Buster Keaton. Situationism 2003. 

Exhibitions: Europan 7 Austria, Results Show in Salzburg; Europan 7, 

Café Moskau Berlin Januar 2004; Architekturzentrum Vorarlberg, October 2004.

Publications: Publication in Bauwelt 15 – 16 2004; Architektur und Bauforum No. 20, Feb. 2004; Wettbewerbe Architekturjournal 235 / 236, Maerz / April 2004; University of Brighton Faculty Research Newsletter Spring 2004; Die Presse / Spectrum, Samstag 15. Mai 2004; Europan 7 Suburban Challenge, Europan Deutschland; Europan 7 European Result, Edt. Silvie Chirat, Europan Europe Paris, 2004;

Guest lecturers: Europan 7 Conference, Athens, May 2004; guest lecture Offsea works, Kingston University, January 2004; guest lecture Permutations of the single detached house, FH Joaneum, October 2004.

2004/2005 Invited guest lecturers at FH Joaneum, Graz, October 2004 to February 2005, Design seminar Permutations of the single detached house.

Exhibition Permutation of the single detached house, speakers at the Europan  

Symposion in Graz. 

Publication in Parametro 257, Le Architettrici. Published on xarch.at

Faculty Research Support Fund for Kitchenshrine and Dogcomfort. The Architecture of Everyday Situations. A spatial laboratory in Brighton. University of Brighton.