Frankfurt Kitchen - Motivation and Influences

Motivation and Influences

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

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's design of the kitchen for the Römerstadt thus had to solve the problem of how to build many kitchens, without allowing it to occupy too much of the total space of the apartment. Her design departed from the then common kitchen-cum-living room. The typical worker's household lived in a two-room apartment, in which the kitchen served many functions at once: besides cooking, one dined, lived, bathed, and even slept there, while the second room, intended as the parlour, often was reserved for special occasions such as a rare Sunday dinner. Instead, Schütte-Lihotzky's kitchen was a small separate room, connected to the living room by a sliding door; thus separating the functions of work (cooking etc.) from those of living and relaxing, consistent with her view about life:

Erstens besteht es in Arbeit, und zweitens in Ausruhen, Gesellschaft, Genuß.

"Firstly, it is work, and secondly it is relaxing, company, pleasures."

— Margarethe Schütte-Lihotzky in Schlesisches Heim 8/1921

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 Catharine 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. Improving the ergonomics of the kitchen and rationalising the kitchen work was important to her:

Das Problem, die Arbeit der Hausfrau rationeller zu gestalten, ist fast für alle Schichten der Bevölkerung von gleicher Wichtigkeit. Sowohl die Frauen des Mittelstandes, die vielfach ohne irgendwelche Hilfe im Haus wirtschaften, als auch Frauen des Arbeiterstandes, die häufig noch anderer Berufsarbeit nachgehen müssen, sind so überlastet, daß ihre Überarbeitung auf die Dauer nicht ohne Folgen für die gesamte Volksgesundheit bleiben kann.

"The problem of rationalising the housewife's work is equally important to all classes of the society. Both the middle-class women, who often work without any help in their homes, and also the women of the worker class, who often have to work in other jobs, are overworked to the point that their stress is bound to have serious consequences for public health at large."

— Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in Das neue Frankfurt, 5/1926-1927

This quote succinctly sums up the reasons for the appeal of Taylorism at the time. On the one hand, the trend to rationalise the household was reinforced by the intention to reduce the time spent in (economically speaking) "unproductive" housework, so that women had more time for factory work. On the other hand, emancipatory efforts to improve women's status, also in the home, called for rationalisation to relieve women and enable them to pursue other interests.

Schütte-Lihotzky was strongly inspired by the extremely space-constrained railway dining car kitchens, which she saw as a Taylorist ideal: even though these were very small, two people could prepare and serve the meals for about 100 guests, and then wash and store the dishes.