Frankfurt Kitchen - Kitchen Plan

Kitchen Plan

The resulting Frankfurt kitchen was a narrow double-file kitchen measuring 1.9 m by 3.4 m. The kitchen had a separate entrance in one of the short walls, opposite which was the window. Along the left side (as seen from the entrance), the stove was placed, followed by a sliding door connecting the kitchen to the dining and living room. On the right wall were cabinets and the sink, in front of the window a workspace. There was no refrigerator, but a foldable ironing board, visible in the image folded against the left wall.

The narrow layout of the kitchen was not due solely to the space constraints mentioned above, it was equally a conscious design decision in a very Taylorist attempt to minimise the number of steps needed when working in the kitchen. The sliding door also helped minimise the walking distance between the kitchen and the table in the adjacent room.

Dedicated, labelled storage bins for common ingredients such as flour, sugar, rice and others were intended to keep the kitchen tidy and well-organised; the workspace had an integrated, removable "garbage drawer" such that scraps could just be shoved into it while working and the whole thing emptied at once afterwards.

Because conventional kitchen furniture of the time fit neither the new workflows nor the narrow space, the Frankfurt kitchen was installed complete with furniture and major appliances such as the stove, a novelty at that time in Germany. It was the first fitted kitchen. The wooden door and drawer fronts were painted blue because researchers had found that flies avoided blue surfaces. Lihotzky used oak wood for flour containers, because it repelled mealworms, and beech for table tops because beech is resistant to staining, acids, and knifemarks. The seating was a revolving stool on castors for maximum flexibility.