As Women Changed, So Did Kitchens

Filed under: Design, etc, Architecture, News & Trends

A new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York explores the twentieth-century transformation of the kitchen.

When you go to defrost a packet of edamame, you probably don't think about the decades of social change and technological advances that went into the design of your kitchen. But the kitchen is constantly changing to reflect different social realities and values of the day.

"The kitchen has always been politicized," says Juliet Kinchin, who recently organized, Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, on view at the Museum of Modern Art. "It has a bearing on these really huge issues about how we want to live. In a world of shrinking resources...it isn't just a matter of the more or less efficient arrangement within one room of the house. [The kitchen] has a bearing on these really big issues: Where our food comes from and what type of food we want."


In designing kitchens, we've had to explore similar questions over time to figure out how to make them functional: How often do we shop? How long do we keep food -- since that's dependent on how much design storage we need. What sources of energy should we choose? Much of this is dependent on a much larger infrastructure than any individual kitchen, and the same was true in the past.

In the beginning of the 20th century the kitchen transitioned from the realm of the servants to part of the main household for a combination of reasons. First, there were new, cleaner forms of energy, like electricity and gas, which made a kitchen more attractive to cook in. Plus, the times were changing. Kinchin says that more women were going to work in factories, rather than rich people's homes. And as less women were trained to be servants, more women had to learn their way around the kitchen.

While hard to imagine now, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several domestic reformers (including Catherine Beecher and Christine Frederick) addressed the servant-less household -- a topic not discussed in proper society at the time. These middle class women were trying to raise the status and visibility of housework, a revolutionary idea at the time. Christine Frederick argued for more rational and efficient layouts of kitchens to reduce the drudgery. She even adapted the principles for Frederick Taylor, an expert in time-motion studies, for her book on household efficiency: The New Housekeeping.

The study of efficiency in the kitchen gained prominence in the years after World War I with Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen. Designed in 1926, this highly efficient kitchen wasn't the first ergonomic cooking space, but it was the first to be produced on a large scale. "[The Frankfurt Kitchens] were at the core of a really ambitious urban modern housing project," says Kinchin. "They were modernizing the whole infrastructure - thinking about how to get in electricity, gas and hot water. How to get these amenities piped into affordable housing: It's a really revolutionary idea that was rethinking how people should live."

Proof that small is beautiful, the Frankfurt Kitchen is very compact with lots of built-in features. Its design was planned to allow people to move easily within it, echoing the idea of "triangle" design that is commonplace in kitchens today. MoMA's exhibit includes a remarkably complete example of the Frankfurt Kitchen, complete with the original gas stove and a slow cooking bow, which cooked food over the duration of a whole day (not unlike a contemporary Crock Pot!). The kitchen's removable aluminum storage bins were industrially produced at the factories that had made ammunition in WWI.

While the kitchen is the woman's realm and the garage is the man's, the development of new technologies in arms, aviation and car design has always tied to the kitchen. "These innovations really become tested in the domestic sphere through the kitchen," says Kinchin. "In that sense the kitchen has really changed the way we relate to technology. It's shaped our tastes." Case in point: The Corning Glass Works' glass pans were developed in response to the shortage of metals during WW II.

In the post-war period of abundance and mass-consumerism, Kinchin says that the kitchen has become a status symbol. Today, the kitchen is a multi-purpose living space, one that is constantly on display. Hence, all the usual talk about Viking ranges, Sub-Zero fridges and the usual kitchen design conundrums.

So, the next time you find yourself considering a remodel, consider the kind of future you hope for and design a kitchen that helps realize those goals. Do you want more solar energy? Do you want fresh, homegrown herbs and vegetables? Do you want to conserve water? These questions are about lifestyle, design -- and politics.


Interested in reading about kitchen design? Check out these posts:
- Make Your Kitchen Comfortable
- Computerized Cabinets: Kitchens of the Future?
- A Budget Kitchen Remodel

And we couldn't talk about kitchens without sending you to our sister site, KitchenDaily!

 

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