LogFAQs > #984452950

Roachmeat posted...

This is from someone who once joked that houses should be cheaper for people who were never going to use their kitchen anyway.

It's funny - a while back it became a thing in real estate that houses with dining rooms were becoming less desirable because we as a culture were slowly phasing out the idea of eating shared meals in a specific formal setting in favor of just eating off a coffee table in front of the TV or something similar. So people didn't want to pay for a room they were never going to use.

Maybe we'll eventually reach a point where we start to phase out kitchens entirely because no one wants to cook, with more emphasis put on getting takeout or using delivery order services. Or just settling for a hot plate and a microwave to do the majority of your cooking (possibly even a "kitchenette" space, the way some hotels have).

Isaac Asimov actually wrote about a similar concept back in his robot novels in the 1950's - he basically had humans living in hivelike megacities, with individual apartments but communal kitchens shared by multiple apartments/families (sort of like how some college dorms work). Basically imagine an apartment building where everyone gets their own bedroom, but their "living room" space is a shared common room, and their kitchen/dining area is a shared kitchen or cafeteria space.