The kitchen and the contemporary city

(Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Michela Barzi

After the First World War, women began to gain access to technical training and professions in the field of design. However, female students enrolled at the Bauhaus in Germany and the Vchutemas in Russia, which had admitted women since their opening in 1919 and 1920, tended to be relegated to furniture and textiles classes. In this context of initial recognition of female designers, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, one of the first women to practise architecture in Austria, and Lotte Stam-Beese, one of the few female architecture students at the Bauhaus, emerged. After graduating in 1918, Schütte-Lihotzky designed in Vienna some of the housing projects for the working class. In 1926, she developed the famous Frankfurt kitchen concept, now considered the foundation of the modern kitchen. Schütte-Lihotzky’s work was part of the Siedlugen that Ernst May was building around the city on the river Main. In the 1930s, Schütte-Lihotzky and Stam-Beese both found themselves employed in the Soviet Union, the former in Moscow and the latter in Kharkiv, as part of May's team that was designing the new socialist cities. The move to the Netherlands would make Stam-Beese one of the leading figures in the reconstruction of Rotterdam. From that point on, her work was entirely devoted to the construction of the contemporary city. The concept of the kitchen as a component of an urban environment suitable for an industrial society (machiniste, as Le Corbusier put it) continued after WWII. The need to furnish the housing prototype that was to be part of Le Corbusier's ideal of the contemporary city was the premise for the modular kitchen design that Charlotte Perriand, his long-time collaborator, developed for the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille. Perriand graduated in 1925 from the Union centrale des arts décoratifs and built an independent career as a furniture designer. Schütte-Lihotzky, Stam-Beese and Perriand marked a significant step forward in women's contribution to the field of design professions. Their work was part of the totalitarian design idea of the built environment – from houses to cities – which, according to Le Corbusier, descended from the plan dictateur. The modular kitchens designed, almost thirty years apart, by Schütte-Lihotzky and Perriand were part of the rational process that separated the domestic environment from the productive one, thus becoming a sort of contradiction: a productive environment within a domestic one.

The rational housekeeping

Bruno Taut, designer of some of the most significant public housing developments in the Berlin region, conceived, in 1924,  the kitchen as a place for food production, which had to adapt to some techniques for rationalising the process. Taut cites the studies of the American theorist Christine Frederick on the furniture arrangement to optimize the movements of those working in the kitchen, a sort of application of Taylorist principles to housekeeping. The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management, which Frederick published in 1914 and was translated into German in 1921, like Lillian Gilbreth's contemporary studies on the efficiency of women's work in the kitchen, had an undeniable impact on the design of new housing modules, which defined a standard for modern architecture.