In 1926, Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky designed a kitchen for public housing complexes in Frankfurt.
With gunmetal gray cabinets reminiscent of a laboratory, the Frankfurt Kitchen looks drab by today's standards. But it's an archetype for the modern kitchen.
Consider the amenities: a built-in plate rack above the dish drainer; five rows of metal bins for dry goods feature spouts for easy pouring; a trash drawer concealed in a desktop. By taking time to study the way women used kitchens, Schutte-Lihotzky revolutionized the room's design.
The Frankfurt Kitchen is the centerpiece of "Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen," which runs through March 14 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibit, which incorporates everything from a brown paper sack to Andy Warhol's Brillo Box, looks at the ways kitchen technology and design have shaped our culture.
We talked with Juliet Kinchin, curator in MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design, about the Frankfurt Kitchen and how advances in the kitchen have reverberated beyond pantry doors, from gender politics to Cold War clashes and beyond.
QWhy was the Frankfurt Kitchen so remarkable?
AThe Frankfurt Kitchen was the very core of a wide-ranging vision to design around modern ways of living and to make technological advances and modern thinking in architecture really accessible. The whole ethos of the Frankfurt Kitchen was about thrift and healthy ways of living, which extended from new ideas about nutrition, keeping food fresh and being able to keep dirt and vermin at bay. These things have a very contemporary resonance.
QHow do you plan an exhibit about a space that people know so well?
AWe had to go way beyond the kitchen itself. It wasn't just about design skill or reorganization: It had a bearing on how food comes into our homes; how we relate to food; how we relate to women's work in the home, women's creativity and how it's valued. We wanted to draw out the very political nature of debates around kitchens and the way that kitchens act as this interface in understanding of modern technologies. In many cases, new materials and technologies are filtered initially through kitchens.
QHow are kitchens political?
ABecause it's a site where we form such profound social relationships and connections with family and friends, it has a resonance that can be manipulated politically for good and bad reasons. It's one way of selling modernization — whether it's FDR's New Deal programs here in the states in the Depression years or the Frankfurt modernization project. When it came to Cold War politics, the confrontation between communism and capitalism — it's no wonder that so much of it was fitted around views of the kitchen.
Q"Counter Space" is such a clever name; how is the kitchen tied up in counterculture?
AThe exhibit tries to address some of the critical debates around both the modernist, rather straitjacket kitchens of (the) '20s and '30s and the consumerist dream kitchens of (the) '50s onwards. Branded goods and gadgets mean it becomes a cultural currency, and that's really what attracted many of the pop artists like Andy Warhol. The kitchen was the site for many feminist artists in the 1970s to launch a critique of how women are represented. You have performance artists who … take art back into the kitchen. Photographers address social inequalities that underlie this apparently universal language of the modern kitchen.
QMany objects in the exhibit are beautiful. Why are designers attracted to the kitchen?
AI think it makes us feel better about spending money on design objects if we can appreciate their function. But also, the way we plan our houses now, the kitchen is often a social and family space at the core of the home.
As soon as the kitchen becomes visible, it attracts greater expenditure and becomes more susceptible to the pressures of style. And it is attractive working with well-balanced, beautifully made, robust kitchen utensils. I remember for years working with a really tinny, useless egg poacher (that) scalded my hands and was difficult to clean. And then one day I just had enough and got a really expensive one, and it just gives me joy.