Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s mythical Frankfurt kitchen

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky | galeriefutura.de/

Now that Easter is coming up and we spend our time preparing and consuming foods, Easter bread and cookies, it is a perfect time to examine the exceptional case of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the person who essentially created the forerunner of modern fitted kitchens that facilitate festive dinners, the typology named Frankfurt kitchen.

Frankfurt Kitchen | architecturalreview.com

Margarete "Grete" Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000) was an Austrian architect and communist, active in the Nazi resistance movement during WWII, whose extraordinary fate was to be the first woman to be accepted at Vienna’s Kunstgewerbeschule - today’s University of Applied Arts. Even though the empire had fallen some years ago, conservatism needed a little more time since Lihotzky got into the school only after a reference letter by the famous painter Gustav Klimt, personally prompted by her mother.

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky | heroinas.net

Lihotzky came from a middle-class family, and after being urged by her professor Oskar Strnad to observe how people lived, and subsequently being shocked by the working-class quality of life, she decided she wanted to design for the larger majority of people. Her chance appeared with the New Frankfurt public housing program (1925-1930), directed by Ernst May, where her Frankfurt kitchen was constructed, mass-produced and ended up being reproduced almost ten thousand times until the end of the decade. Then, in public housing programs, the most innovative architects dealt with designing affordable, hygienic housing for the populace, with the residencies belonging to the state - an undertaking that, oddly enough, in the age of overpriced rental housing, doesn’t seem to concern many people.

The kitchen she designs is largely based on Taylorism, meaning that it follows certain rules for serial mass production and aims to be functional and affordable but also convenient. It strove to be a low-cost design that would contribute to efficient labour by following a scientific method. Based on studies that examined the timeframe of certain movements enacted by women within the kitchen area, Lihotzky, following a scientific direction, attempts to reduce unnecessary effort within the kitchen by minimising movements to the least possible. The space, providing a dining cart and surfaces placed strategically for faster and more efficient meal preparation, is transformed into a proper workshop of a true technician, with special places for each ingredient yet the very person who effectively manipulates the space and its tools, namely the woman, is not measured in the same standards.

Frankfurt Kitchen Drawings | architecturalreview.com

Frankfurt Kitchen Plan | pinimg.com

Frankfurt kitchen is a project with several contradictions. As Gwendolen Webster reports, Lihotzky writes that she was pressured to become the face of the Frankfurt kitchen to promote the idea of ​​a kitchen "by women, for women", which sounds like a quite modern advertising campaign. But, even if her actual contribution was less significant than the mythical proportions it has assumed, the Austrian architect was certainly the person who established the Frankfurt kitchen with her public declarations and speech. Another characteristic contradiction of the project concerns the time that this particular typology claims to save. Does it end up serving to emancipate the woman by giving her more time for leisure activities or does it save time so that she can be more efficient at the factory? Or does the sliding door that separates her from the rest of domestic life entrench the woman's role even more firmly in the kitchen?

Frankfurt Kitchen Model | archinect.net

Answering such questions in just a few lines seems naive to say the least, and architecture and design, fortunately, or unfortunately, have limited power in creating or solving such issues of power dynamics in society. The only thing certain is that Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky is a model designer who wants to alleviate human suffering and not use it only as moral capital or to climb the social ladder. Closing with yet another contradiction, the way we cook was forever transformed because of her, even though she herself never cooked.