The Frankfurt Kitchen

5 min readOct 11, 2016

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Image courtesy of MoMA’s Counter Space exhibition, 2011

We take a lot for granted in contemporary kitchen design and layout, not giving much thought as to why things are as they are. Instead, we are more pre-occupied by appliance choice, tile selections and colour palettes. How might we innovate kitchens according to our current lifestyles?

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was asked to do just that. Already pushing boundaries by becoming Austria’s first female architect, her design sensibilities were well documented. In the 1920s, she was asked by city architect of the day, Ernst May, to redesign the kitchen area for a number of social housing projects in the pipeline.

Kitchen’s before Schütte-Lihotzky were a different affair. Often, they were one of the biggest rooms in the house, doubling as the dining room, sometimes living and bedroom also. The kitchen sink was often cast iron (hence the colloquialism to the kitchen sink, as it was synonymous for its heaviness and difficulty to move), requiring water to be brought in via buckets. Stoves were also another heavy item, freestanding and wood-fired. It was common that houses were purchased with only the sink and maybe the stove as the only furniture/joinery items in the kitchen.

Schütte-Lihotzky begun to learn about Taylorism — the idea of organisation management in industrial processes, brought about by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the US. Once his learnings were translated to German, Schütte-Lihotzky applied it to her work.

There were a number of key contextual drivers that contributed to the design of the Frankfurt kitchen:

millions needing rehousing after WW1
migration shift from the country to the city as work was found in factories
a government that placed social housing at the forefront of their mission
electricity becoming common in housing
early modernist movement began

In this context, Schütte-Lihotzky used a classic Taylorist form of research — time-motion studies — to provide data that helped her design process; a human-centred design approach perhaps. This involved her to watch countless women using kitchens as she monitored them with a stopwatch, assessing their movements and time. In doing so, she rationalised each part of the kitchen into its smallest necessities. Some interesting innovations she proposed:

Frankfurt kitchen replica, from Apartment Therapy

shrinking the size of the kitchen; the intention was to reduce it to its functionality of cooking, and taking the dining space out of it. It was also in response to public housing requirements to deliver as many dwellings as possible at cost
all counter tops to be the same height — sitting height, so that the cook shouldn’t need to stand up all the time
kitchens made for one person only
spice rack above the stove for easy reach

above bench cupboards for additional storage
a series of in-built aluminium storage containers for various staples, marked as such
a lift-up door that acts as a garbage chute, accessible from the hallway for disposal
pull-out benches for additional workspace to be retracted when unused

“I built the prototype of a 1.9m x 3.4m kitchen, and I measured with a stopwatch how long it took to do certain tasks,” she said towards the end of her life. “It has been helping women to save time for years.” — Schütte-Lihotzky

Of course, it has not come without its criticisms, namely the isolation of the housewife to kitchen duties, separate from the main social centres of the home. Interestingly, one of the original reasons for placing emphasis on kitchen design in housing was to raise the awareness of housework as a valid form of work. This initial motivation has now changed to repress women as the social context has also changed.

The Ginnheim-Höhenblick housing estate, Frankfurt, 1928. Image from MoMA

Further criticisms is the inability for more than one person to occupy the space, the inflexibility of dedicated storage containers, the proximity of reach for children, plus other technical aspects. Interestingly again, Schütte-Lihotzky said that she “had never cooked a meal in her life…(yet had) spent weeks watching what other women did in the kitchen as they prepared dinner for their families.”

The fascinating part of this story for me is her research methodology. She shadowed women and studied them in a rational and measured way, then applied this to countless drafts of kitchen designs. The fundamental shift of how cooking was done in the home was groundbreaking and changed how people related to each other socially. Whilst it may have had its downfalls, it has revolutionised kitchen design far beyond any recent innovations, and for this, credit must be given.

Schütte-Lihotzky has been known to say that she designed it as an architect, not as a housewife, and for this reason, acknowledges its extreme design focus. The trick as architects is to be aware of how we approach spatial design, whilst maintaining empathy with the end user of how the space may actually be used.

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References:

The Frankfurt Kitchen

Written by Esther Sugihto