The fictional mega-real estate featured in the sci-fi film The Kitchen was designed to “turn the concept of dystopia on its head,” said director Kibwe Tavares, co-founder of VFX studio Factory Fifteen.
The Netflix release tells the story of Izzy and Benji, played by actors Cain Robinson and Jedediah Bannerman, who are residents of London’s last remaining public housing estate, The Kitchen.
The film is set in 2044, where entire cities are being turned into private developments.
Tavares co-directed the film with actor Daniel Kaluuya, and the late Factory Fifteen co-founder Jonathan Gales served as creative lead for the film’s impressive visual effects.
In an interview with Dezeen, Tavares said the ambition behind The Kitchen was to “create the last bastion of everything that makes London London”.
The complex is plagued by water restrictions, drone surveillance and regular police raids. Still, there’s a strong sense of community that contrasts with the new Buena Vida developments, which are also featured in this film and are portrayed as bland and soulless.
“I was trying to show the richness of culture and life in these places,” Tavares explained.
“I wanted to flip the idea of dystopia on its head,” he added. “Is a dystopia here, or is it in this more sophisticated version of London?”
The architecture of The Kitchen is a mix of both reality and imagination, created by “bolting” together several buildings.
The main building is Les Damiers, a huge 1970s Brutalist mansion in La Défense, Paris, which appears to have been transplanted to a site in south-east London.
It comes with a cylindrical tower block designed by Gales with an internal atrium inspired by Johannesburg’s Ponte City Tower.
At street level, expansive street markets take cues from locations in London, such as Ridley Road Street Market in Dalston, east London. The set was built in the 1950s at the former London Electricity Board headquarters in east London.
Paul Nichols, who co-founded Factory Fifteen with Tavares and Gales, said the design evolved from a detailed 10-year world-building process.
This detail-oriented approach reflects the trio’s backgrounds, having met while studying architecture at the Bartlett in London.
Before his tragic death in December 2022, Gales produced a highly detailed series of conceptual visualizations that would define “The Kitchen” as the anchor of the film’s narrative.
“It’s very rare to develop this kind of artwork early on,” Nichols says. “But we like to put together huge lookbooks because we think there are benefits to this process.”
“John was right by my side from the beginning, developing sketches and concepts,” Tavares added.
“He created this visual bible that explained how the entire world works together in different realms and timelines. That became the basis for the project.”
In this timeline, the story is set six years before the completion of a citywide construction plan called Vision 2050. The plan would see council housing sold to property developers with the promise of a cleaner, safer London.
The Factory Fifteen lookbook explains how The Kitchen complex was built to temporarily house the residents of the collapsed tower. But as other properties in London are demolished, it becomes the only option for low-income residents in the city.
Tavares said the concept was heavily inspired by Torre David, a half-built office building in Venezuela that was taken over by squatters after being abandoned by its owners.
“It’s this idea of appropriation, where people build their own spaces within spaces,” he says.
“You can see it as a slum, but when you look at the pictures it feels warm and cozy,” he continued. “I see people just taking what they can get to make a place for themselves.”
Mr Tavares links this to his personal experience in social housing, particularly the south London housing estate where his mother has lived for the past 20 years.
He describes the sense of disconnect between how outsiders perceive the estate and the sense of community experienced by those who live there.
“Without the support of my ‘village,’ my family would not have been able to raise me to be the person I am today. Both my siblings and I struggle to find our feet easily. It could have been just another statistic for young black boys,” he said. He said.
Other aspects of the worldbuilding design were developed as a result of the lookbook.
Key locations include the flat where Benjy lives at the beginning of the film, filmed on the half-demolished Robin Hood Gardens housing estate in east London, and the railway line that forms the border between the city center and London. Includes “The Boundary”. Beyond the de facto ghetto.
Production designer Nathan Parker worked closely with Gales to bring his visuals and mood to the set.
These include Life After Life, an Apple Store-inspired funeral parlor where the deceased are turned into fertilizer for plants, and the Rotunda, the interior of The Kitchen’s cylindrical tower.
Nichols draws parallels to The Kitchen and Factory Fifteen’s earlier work, particularly Tavares’s Robots of Brixton, which made its media debut on Dezeen, and Gales’ Megalomania.
“Robots of Brixton” is about displacement, whereas “Megalomania” is about the idea of a city that is forever being built. “The Kitchen” clearly shows both. ” he said.
“This building will be one of the last remnants of a society that resists capitalist development.”