Kitchens are shared spaces of encounter. They embrace social differences, and facilitate the circulation of ideas, and practices of care, empathy and hospitality. Throughout history, kitchens have been the subject of designers, architects and artists’s work, engaged in ideas surrounding the value, production and distribution of food and the socio-political aspects of cooking and dining. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s design for the Frankfurt Kitchen (1926) introduced efficiency to domestic labour; Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) is a feminist performance parody of television cooking demonstrations, where kitchen tools become alphabetised and gestures indicate rage and oppression; Carol Goodden, Tina Girouard and Gordon Matta-Clark’s conceptual restaurant FOOD (1972) was a space of encounter for local communities in a gentrifying New York City. More recently, Michael Rakowitz bridged connections between hostility and hospitality in his Enemy Kitchen (2003); while Anna Puigjaner’s Kitchenless Cities (2016) offered a new typology for organising and distributing domestic spaces. In 2020, the Istanbul Design Biennial re-frames the kitchen as a space that is central to design thinking and production, reflecting the specific ecological, economical and geopolitical contexts of today and in years to come.