Students design and build kitchens in accommodation for Ukrainian refugees
Countless Ukrainian refugees have since arrived in Weimar, many of whom are being housed privately in shared accommodation, with families or in holiday homes. The town of Weimar has also made accommodation available to refugees. The move into this accommodation was delayed, however, due to the overly long delivery times for furniture, whereby the problem was particularly acute for fitted kitchens.
The Weimar architecture students Franka Fetzer, Hannah Essigkrug and Niklas Hengelhaupt as well as Ina Baumholzer, who is studying social work at Jena University of Applied Sciences, took the initiative themselves and joined forces with the Weimar Foreigners’ Advisory Council and the specialist service for migration and integration of the central-west Thuringian chapter of the AWO association: together with more than 160 students from all faculties as well as countless volunteers, they fitted 40 kitchens during the summer semester 2022 as part of their Bauhaus.Module to enable Ukrainian refugees to move into long-term accommodation as soon as possible.
Minimalist, functional and chic: in consultation with the town of Weimar, building instructions were prepared for the kitchen modules in advance, which the students then used as a guide when building the kitchens. Once the kits had been pre-cut and drilled in the wood workshop at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, countless kitchen modules were created during three weekend construction workshops in the »Alte Feuerwache«. The kitchens should above all be easy to build and repair. The offcuts were also used during subsequent creative days to make further creative furnishings from the leftover wood.
The Bauhaus.Module takes its name of »K70« from the original idea of keeping the material costs to just 70 euros per provisional kitchen that the students initially wanted to build to bridge the long delivery times. The town of Weimar rapidly commissioned the students to build kitchens that could instead be used for longer periods though and increased the project budget to 160 euros per kitchen. And so it was that a wooden rack with a sink and tap was created for each kitchen in the past few months. The town of Weimar has additionally provided a cooker and refrigerator for each kitchen.
Beside the practical seminar sessions, which took the form of weekend construction workshops and creative days supervised by Prof. Dr. Frank Eckardt (Professor for Urban Studies and Social Research) and Professor Verena von Beckerath (Professor for Design and Housing), the Bauhaus.Module also included a series of lectures during which various different stakeholders from Weimar spoke on the subject of migration and flight.
What began with eight prototypes in the summer semester 2022 has now increased fivefold and is to also be continued beyond the academic semester. It has yet to be decided exactly how the cooperation between the town of Weimar and the numerous local stakeholders will in future look though.
