Sketch for Flower Kitchen

This sketch shows the first ideas for an extraordinary kitchen designed by the British architect John Prizeman in 1972. The kitchen detaches itself from the house and moves around the garden on rails. Shaped like a flower, it rotates on its axis and its windows open like petals as it follows the sun. Prizeman’s clever choice of drawing materials helps to convey this narrative. The smooth tracing paper becomes the garden and the kitchen whizzes across the surface as effortlessly as his felt-tip pen. The flower kitchen reflects both the ‘flower power’ culture of the period and the decorative style of early Victorian conservatories. A kitchen based on this design was manufactured as a one-off project by the American company Westinghouse Domestic Appliances.