The Frankfurt Kitchen of 1928, Designed by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky
A Frankfurt Kitchen as installed in the late 1920s, now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. Every measurement in it came from time-and-motion study of housework: a galley barely two metres wide, fitted so that one woman working alone could reach everything without walking.
Some ten thousand of these kitchens went into Frankfurt's new municipal housing between 1926 and 1930. The design assumed a specific household — one worker, no servant, wage labour outside the home for the husband — and built that assumption into cabinetry. It made cooking measurably faster and it also sealed the kitchen off from the living room, ending the shared room where families had eaten, worked and sat. The efficiency and the isolation were the same decision. See the transformation of domestic space in postwar Europe.
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