Frankfurter Küche - Frankfurt kitchen

The Frankfurt kitchen was a milestone in domestic architecture, considered the fore-runner of modern built-in kitchens, for it realised for the first time a kitchen built after a unified concept, designed to enable efficient work and to be built at low costs. It was designed in 1926 by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky for the social housing project Römerstadt in Frankfurt, Germany of architect Ernst May. Some 10,000 units were built in the late 1920s in Frankfurt.

German cities after the end of World War I were plagued by a serious housing shortage. Various social housing projects were realised in the 1920s to increase the number of rental apartments. These large-scale projects had to provide affordable apartments for a great number of typically worker's families and thus were subject to tight budget constraints. As a consequence, the apartments designed were quite comfortable but not exactly spacious, and so the architects sought to reduce costs by applying one design for large numbers of apartments.

Schütte-Lihotzky's design was strongly influenced by the ideas of Taylorism, which was en vogue at the beginning of the 20th century. Started by Catherine Beecher in the middle of the 19th century and reinforced by Christine Frederick's publications in the 1910s, the growing trend that called for viewing household work as a true profession had the logical consequence that the industrial optimisation pioneered by Taylorism spilled over into the domestic area. Frederick's The New Housekeeping, which argued for rationalising the work in the kitchen using a Taylorist approach, had been translated into German under the title Die rationelle Haushaltsführung in 1922. These ideas were received well in Germany and Austria and formed the base of German architect Erna Meyer's work and were also instrumental in Schütte-Lihotzky's design of the Frankfurt kitchen. She did detailed time-motion studies to determine how long each processing step in the kitchen took, re-designed and optimised workflows, and planned her kitchen design such that it should optimally support these workflows.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_kitchen

part of "Modernism: Designing a New World"