Kitchen Dreams

By optimising workflow, dispensing with an additional dining area in the kitchen, and efficiently planning the cabinets (shared side walls, no rear walls, and a continuous countertop work surface), the kitchen could be kept to a minimum size. The successive procedural steps were now organised in a sequence, so that it was no longer necessary to keep walking from one side of the kitchen to the other. Now the woman merely had to turn around, grasp the storage bin with the flour or the salt, and simply add a measured portion into the boiling saucepan in front of her. She could then conveniently place it on the so-called Kochkiste (cooking box) next to the stove or – even more refined – stored in this isolated Kochkiste in order to serve the ready cooked meal directly to the table in the evening, after all the work was done. That was how the architect thought about the ideal movement patterns in a kitchen.
 

How the Frankfurt kitchen was really used and how, after refrigerators and the like became prevalent, it was later modified or adapted by its users were investigated and documented in the 1980s by the architectural historian Jonas Geist and the cultural scientist Joachim Krausse in a wonderful series of films, in which Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and contemporary witnesses also have their say. “For many people it was not easy to imagine how to move around in there. It is, after all, so small; that was the main objection. Bear in mind: the houses in those days had kitchens-cum-living rooms, and you could move around easily in them. In the Frankfurt kitchen, everything was strictly arranged according to workflows. And people had to get used to that.” ^[2]

Lectures, publications, and exhibitions revealed the advantages of the new Frankfurt kitchen to the public and aroused attention abroad. In 1936 Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s kitchen design was included in Ernst Neufert’s “Bauentwurfslehre” (Architects’ Data) and in this standard work, spread throughout the world. As the forerunner of today’s built-in kitchen, it pointed the way with a unified design and sequentially coordinated functions – even though its elements could neither be combined at will nor adapted to different kitchens, as is commonly done today.

The question remains: how would Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky conceive and optimise a kitchen according to today’s needs, in light of delivery services, convenience foods, Thermomix devices and other sundry kitchen appliances? It would undoubtedly not be a laboratory for work, which is how she had once described her kitchen. Just recently, Gerhard Matzig observed that while the kitchens of today are getting increasingly bigger, they are used less and less for cooking. ^[3] We make reference here with a wink to his sharp-tongued scrutiny of today’s dream kitchens.