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Klaus Spechtenhauser (ed.

The Kitchen
Life World, Usage, Perspectives

Birkhuser Publishers for Architecture


Basel Boston Berlin

Translation into English: Bill Martin with Laura Bruce


Design: Klaus Spechtenhauser
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress,
Washington D.C., USA.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part
of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways,
and storage in data bases.
For any kind of use permission of the copyright owner must be obtained.
This book is also available in the original German language edition
(ISBN 3-7643-7280-X/987-3-7643-7280-4).
2006 Birkhuser Publishers for Architecture, P.O. Box 133,
CH-4010 Basel, Switzerland.
www.birkhauser.ch
Part of Springer Science+Business Media Publishing Group.
Printed on acid-free paper produced of chlorine-free pulp. TCF
Printed in Germany
ISBN-10: 3-7643-7281-8
ISBN-13: 978-3-7643-7281-1
987654321

Contents

Klaus Spechtenhauser

Foreword

Johanna Rolshoven

The Kitchen: Terra Incognita


An Introduction

Alice Vollenweider

17

We Should Be Happy That Kitchens Are Still Getting Built At All

Michelle Corrodi

21

On the Kitchen and Vulgar Odors


The Path to a New Domestic Architecture Between the Mid-Nineteenth Century
and the Second World War

Klaus Spechtenhauser

45

Refrigerators, Kitchen Islands, and Other Cult Objects


Kitchens from the Second World War to Today

Gert Khler

75

The Kitchen Today. And a Little Bit Yesterday. And Tomorrow, Too,
Of Course.
On Kitchen Styles and Lifestyles

Christina Sonderegger

95

Between Progress and Idling: The Standard Kitchen


Notes on the Development of Swiss Kitchen Norms

Brigitte Kesselring

113

From Restrictive Norms to Greater Freedom


Kitchen Planning Today

Marion von Osten

131

Ghostly Silence
The Unemployed Kitchen

Ren Ammann

149

To Table! To Table?

157

Select Bibliography

159

Illustration Credits, Acknowledgments

Klaus Spechtenhauser

Die praktische Kche [The practical kitchen]


exhibition, Gewerbemuseum Basel
[Basel Museum of Arts and Crafts],
9 February16 March 1930: Cupboard in
one of the exhibited kitchens.

Foreword

Dwelling is more popular than ever. Whether in exhibits, scholarly


studies, trend-conscious lifestyle magazines, or easily consumable
coffee-table books, the complex factors informing humanitys condition in its lived environment have become the object of diverse
and increasingly intense investigations.
The new book series Living Concepts intervenes at the juncture
of aseptic coffee-table book and academic publication. Selected
topics from the field of dwelling are presented with concision and
scholarly rigor and in an appealing format. Along with supplying an
informative foundation for a given thematic, Living Concepts introduces current trends, scrutinizes received notions, and hopes to
provide impetus for future developments and all of this once or
twice yearly in both German and English.
Living Concepts is published by the ETH Wohnforum, an
interdisciplinary research group housed in the Faculty of Architecture of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.
By investigating the interplay and tensions between humans, society,
and built space, the group mediates between theory and practice.
With Living Concepts, the ETH Wohnforum aims to set a course
informed by cultural studies, to document insights provided by the
social sciences, and to provide a platform for a critical coming-toterms with the side effects of modernity.
It is no accident that this first volume is dedicated to the kitchen.
The kitchen has always been the navel of the home; and cultural and
social changes are vividly reflected in it. The kitchen is where everyday undertakings and weekend amusements, mysterious essences
and intimate longings, creative ambitions and the fashions of the day
congeal in an exciting mlange. More on all these aspects in the following pages!
Many thanks to all those who contributed to the success of
this project, above all to the authors themselves and to the many
institutions and companies for graciously providing images. We
are especially grateful to Birkhuser Publishers for taking on this
venture and to all the sponsors without whose financial engagement this first volume of Living Concepts would never have come
to be.

Johanna Rolshoven

The Kitchen: Terra Incognita


An Introduction

Kitchens are having a boom. Increasingly, attention is being paid not


only to kitchen design and furniture, but to the kitchens social
function as a space for food preparation and other everyday activities, as a space for both socializing and retreat between necessity
and leisure, functionality and pleasure.
The kitchen, it would seem, has tapped the pulse of the times.
In our late modern era, in which the layering of various times and
spaces has led to the constant overburdening of everyday life, researchers into everyday culture have noticed an increase in individual strategies for maintaining security, and philosophers have diagnosed the retreat of the individual into the pre-political sphere of
the oikos.1 Kitchen designers Sergio Tarducci and Riccardo Vincenzetti agree: their objective is to create a traditional hearth for
the third millenium, a hearth for the family to gather around.2
This book may well be an attempt to resist trends antagonistic
to the kitchen, identified here by the brilliant private detective of
kitchen imagery, Marion von Osten. When an architect or designer
defines the hearth as the heart of the home3 and sees the kitchen
of the future as a hub for our emotions,4 then we would like to
believe him or her. Increasingly over the last few years the architect
and/or designer has come to be seen as a late modern hero, a protagonist of publicity, as the homo universalis, uniting in a single person
rationality and creativity, artistic talent, technical know-how, reliability, and financial success.5

Valencia 1952, photograph Elliott Erwitt.

Everything and the Kitchen Sink


The pulse of the times happily coincides with the utility of purpose
promised to us by advertising: in an information society characterized by the reduction of real jobs, the kitchen, too, has become
subject to scientific rationalization. This was already the case with
the study of nutrition and housework, as well as with the design
of kitchen space and furniture, as both Brigitte Kesselring and
Christina Sonderegger convincingly show in their respective essays.
Similarly, not only have sensations of pleasure and happiness lately
been embedded in scientific discourse, specifically that of a utilitarian-economical cast. Advertising strategy, too, is being pursued from
the vantage point of science. Everywhere there is talk of the intelligence of new kitchen technology; and todays copywriters deploy
phrases like ergonomics, functionality, and form, well-thought9

12 The kitchen as a site for inspiring ambience, poetic images, intense discussions,
everyday work, conspiratory meetings,
and, finally, as a place for creating delicious
meals . . .

out allocation of space, and advanced processual understanding.6


Even construction materials are presented as reflecting a sophisticated attitude to culinary science.7
The coarse distinctions8 in our society also get manifested in
kitchen design: those who dont keep up tend to be more conservative. Women, for example. The marketing pledge directed at them
reflects the ideal of a leisure society in which the kitchen as a space
for spending free time is taken for granted. Bauknecht, a company
that in the 1960s claimed to know what women want, now,
at the beginning of the twenty-first century, tells its prospective
customers to live today thus granting to women the irrelevance
of housework. Because sometimes nothing is less important than
a few grass stains. Bauknecht washing-machines will take care
of it.9
The Kitchen Table as a Force of Production
We have far less scientific information about the actual conditions
of life in the kitchen than we might like to think. Everyday kitchen
culture has developed largely independently of architectural plans or
of the attractive, glossy images provided by kitchen manufacturers.
The architects model has, it would seem, played a very small role
in how dwelling has evolved.10 Even identical kitchen furniture installed by the thousands in one residential development after an10

other looks astonishingly different after only a short time. The


British theorist of technology and consumption Daniel Miller has
argued that the study of consumption should be more firmly anchored in the anthropology of domestic space.11 Serial production of
modern things, including the fitted kitchen, has never precluded the
diversification of appropriation and use; on the contrary, it even
provokes and enforces it.12
Having apparently eluded the realm of necessity, the kitchen has
nevertheless remained a workshop, a desirable space for productive
activity, in short, a living space.13 The kitchen table is where writers often produce their best works, where vacuum cleaners, inner
tubes, even moped motors get repaired, where underwear gets
ironed and fluorescent-tube sculptures are soldered together, where
Christmas gifts are wrapped and combat rifles swabbed clean. Its
where we write birthday cards and letters of condolence, paint
Easter eggs and make ceramics, put bandages on wounds, and, of
course, where we prepare the food that sustains us and serve it on a
daily basis, and often repeatedly throughout the day, no matter
whether were irritated or in good spirits. It is where sandwiches are
made, sauces stirred, vegetables sliced, potatoes peeled, where pan
steaks are tenderized and chocolate is grated, where we dice and
mince and knead and fold, and wipe up, of course, and wipe away.
Whether its stuffing tomatoes, preparing fondue, mixing plaster,
writing a poem, translating an article, doing homework, or doing
taxes all of these activities find support in and on the kitchen table.
A whole society can be transformed in a kitchen, the productive
forces of a culture organized. The kitchen table is where both the
Prague Spring and the peace movement were conceived, and where
every four years the winning goal of the World Cup gets kicked at
least for the average spectator.
The world of kitchen culture merely confirms what is true for
life worlds in general, i.e. that lifes political economy is far more
influential on the psychology of habit than is human biology a
reliable catch-all concept that takes the blame for so much that is in
fact culturally determined. According to a relationalist superstition,
to which existentialists have since subscribed, domestic space is an
essential human need. But this notion simply ignores so much else
that is important. The global majority of nomadic and homeless
peoples indicates that dwelling is a cultural form, one that in
wealthy industrial nations has been pursued to the point of exaggeration. The essential needs are somewhere else. Dwelling is a fact of
culture, not nature.
Kitchen Culture as a Civilizing Process
The cultural development of modernity can be described as the
increasingly rationalized organization of everyday life, the most
prominent theater of which is the home.14 As elsewhere, the key
period here is the nineteenth century. The multifunctionality of
pre-modern living spaces was replaced then by a modern industrial
distribution of tasks. From now on, work and regeneration i.e.
cooking, eating, socializing, sleeping, and hygiene were to occupy
different spaces, in keeping with the values of the ascendant bourgeoisie. Taylorist efficiency made its entrance in no place more visibly than in the kitchen. The Swedish ethnologist Orvar Lfgren has
called the kitchen a cultural battlefield, for here, at the symbolic
11

3 The man directs, the woman cooks:


cooking show at the 2005 Swissbau in
Basel.

navel of the home, the transformation of values from the old to the
new was particularly evident.
It was the nineteenth century, as well, that saw the kitchen unmistakably and emphatically assigned to the woman as her personal
realm. The construction, or rather invention, of this femina domestica was a necessary counterpart to the new, bourgeois homo
oeconomicus the ascendant species of the industrial society that
was helping to seal class distinctions in terms of both economy and
habitus.
The twentieth-century evolution of the kitchen is described in
this volume by Michelle Corrodi and Klaus Spechtenhauser as a
process of accommodating the kitchen to social transformation.
This development ending, for now, with the happy coexistence
in the kitchen of today can hardly be seen as linear. But one thing
is clear: the more the man is freed from the economic imperative to
work, the more leisure becomes a space for self-projection. It would
seem that the kitchens time as that desolate space on the margins
of domestic life15 is finally over. Its way to becoming a theater
(Lfgren) for the homo domesticus appears to be a logically predetermined development.
This late modern episode in the civilizing process has taken place
in stages. Mans path has been a rocky one, and one for which
women initially showed little solidarity or comprehension: beginning with making a sandwich all on his own and inserting a forlorn
frozen pizza clumsily, and not always without hitting the floor
first into a successfully preheated oven, to actually using scissors
to open a stubborn bag of frozen french fries and preparing
spaghetti for the children for lunch, all the way to lovingly composing a three-course meal on the weekend a feat that folklorist
Carola Lipp has called a milestone in the civilization of the industrialized man.16
You Wanted an Oven, Now You Have a Hobby.17
Modern sociologists of leisure have painstakingly determined that
this world of leisure and consumption is governed by the same
principles that rule the world of work; but this does not necessarily
follow for all features of everyday life, and the reverse is even less
true. We would, for example, be taking such deregulation too literally were we to try translating into the world of work the kitchens
physical condition following the preparation of that three-course
meal on the weekend.
Irony is a natural last defense for the woman in her rearguard
action. She has witnessed the world to which she was beholden for
decades being monopolized with increasing competence and innovativeness and with the support of technical and aesthetic armaments. Gone are the times when modern kitchen construction was a
matter, and hence a weapon, for men when the little lady was
provided with tiny fitted kitchens with ridiculously low sinks and
countertops that gave any normal-sized woman painful back problems. Now that more men are cooking and finding their way into
the kitchen, kitchens have acquired more generous proportions and
are designed as open kitchen/living spaces, thus relieving their users
of the high degree of body control that was necessary for survival in
the earlier, smaller kitchens.

12

45 Impending transformation from


femina domestica to femina oeconomica? Images of kitchen & woman
introduced with market-oriented savvy in
the mid-1950s and 2005 respectively.

Brave New Kitchen


From now on, the luxurious high-tech kitchen will inhabit an intelligent, wirelessly networked home. Along with Gerd Selle we can
define it in good conscience as the classroom of a second modernity18 in which the man who cooks strikes the tone.19 We have
never seen as many men in the catalogues of kitchen manufacturers
as we do today. There they are, cleaning the vegetables and checking
on cooking times. Intelligent and beautifully designed technology draws men to things like Mieles Compact Class or Navitronic
Touch Control systems and has guaranteed the triumph of the electronic steamer, as Brigitte Kesselring shows in her contribution. As
ethnographer Hilde Malcomess reports from the 2005 Cuisinale in
Cologne, the biannual kitchen furniture fair: until a few years ago
kitchen manufacturers were still basing their plans on the mysterious triangle of sink, stove, and refrigerator. Now, completely different forces are at work. The classic triangle has lost its function, and a
new concept of communication, cooking, and living has come to the
fore one that puts the hearth in the center of the dwelling space
and of technological progress.20
The new kitchens look high-grade and expensive, but their
designs at least according to the advertisements signify an emotional experience: the life of the senses and sophistication. Only the
mean-hearted, Malcomesss commentary suggests, would see in current trends in kitchen design a parallel to the oikos of the traditional
eat-in kitchen, whose bad air was once expunged with such revolutionary fervor from the so-called Frankfurt kitchen,21 and that
has remained with us in the form of an obstinate throw-back, the
ecological kitchen, 22 the communual living biotope of the 1970s
and 1980s.
Conditions for effecting the long-overdue cultural transformation of the species femina domestica into femina oeconomica
look rather good, judging from the visuals. But we should be careful. History teaches us restraint. As a rule, after any initial thrust
forward most social developments swing back to a less anxiety-ridden median; and things are no different with gender relations in the
kitchen. Following the iconographic burst of advertising euphoria
about the man in the kitchen, we find ourselves now, in mid-2005,
back at go. At least in the kitchens in Swiss magazine Ideales
Heim [Ideal home]. Here, the women are in charge or no one is. For

13

6 Progress and design for the woman


at home. Men have always known best
what women want (Elektra-Technovision
by Hasso Gehrmann, 196870).

instance, Maya Gafner of Geroldswil, in an advertisement for


Mrgeli kitchens, enthuses: Mine is the prettiest!23 But even she
doesnt really seem to want to cook anymore, or know how to, as
Gert Khler and Alice Vollenweider confirm in their perceptive
contributions to this volume.
The form and the man himself, as designer, still predominate:
his portrait appears at the lower edges of each image of the various
kitchens and so gets worked into the sales pitch. A closer reading
of the copy, of descriptors like seems lighter than air and has the
allure of all new materials,24 leads one to wonder if our society
can really distinguish between the kitchen, with its exhilarating
contours,25 and its proud female owner. The fact that the metric dimensions of an average Swiss kitchen in the postwar period hardly
differ, at least in numerals, from the ideal dimensions of a Brigitte
Bardot or Claudia Cardinale is an index for the persistence of those
technologies of the self resulting from the architectural technologies of society that Marion von Osten analyzes here.
Still, we have little reason to be anxious. Designers, planners, and
architects are merely executors of the economic reason of an era;26
their influence on how living spaces actually get used remains much
less than it was feared to be. The development from blueprint to instructions for use in the life world is something that happened a long
time ago anyway. Nevertheless, much remains to be done. Differentiating the ways that various social and gender groups make use of
living space is an important task, one that researchers of technical
and social engineering and planning should undertake only in interdisciplinary collaboration ideally over a spread of finger foods on
an eat-in kitchen table, as Ren Ammann suggests in his contribution and under a cloud of life-world-inspiring kitchen fumes that,
reassuringly, no new technology seems able to dispel.

14

1 Bernhard Waldenfels, Heimat in der Fremde, in Bundeszentrale fr politische Bildung, ed. Heimat. Analysen, Themen, Perspektiven (Bonn, 1990): 109121; 117.
2 Mirko Beetschen, Kitchen Stories, Ideales Heim 2 (February 2005): 102114; 103.
3 Kitchen designer Alberto Colonello, cited in ibid., 110.
4 Ibid., 104.
5 Anneke Bokern, Gutaussehende Allesknner. Architekten als Werbetrger in einer
Rotterdamer Ausstellung, Neue Zrcher Zeitung 89 (18 April 2004): 23.
6 Bulthaup advertisement, Ideales Heim 2 (February 2005): 3.
7 Suter-Inox advertisement, ibid., 47.
8 Martin Scharfe, Die groben Unterschiede: Not und Sinnesorganisation: Zur historisch-geselleschaftlichen Relativitt des Geniessens beim Essen, in Tbinger
Beitrge zur Volkskultur, ed. Utz Jeggle et al. (Tbingen: Tbinger Vereinigung fr
Volkskunde, 1986): 1328.
9 At least that was what a 2004 German television commercial promised.
10 Joost Meuwissen, Darstellung des Wohnens, in Lebenslandschaften: Zuknftiges
Wohnen im Schnittpunkt zwischen privat und ffentlich, ed. Peter Dllmann and
Robert Temel (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002): 2630; 26.
11 Daniel Miller, Appropriating the State on the Council Estate, MAN 23 (1988):
353372.
12 See Martine Sgalen and Christian Bromberger, Lobjet moderne: de la production
srielle la diversit des usages, Ethnologie franaise 26, 1 (1996): 516.
13 Arclinea advertisement, Ideales Heim 10 (October 2004): 61.
14 Orvar Lfgren, The Sweetness of Home: Trautes Heim, in Ehe, Liebe, Tod. Studien zur Geschichte des Alltags, ed. Peter Borscheid and Hans J. Teuteberg (Mnster:
Coppenrath, 1983): 8096.
15 Elisabeth Katschnig-Fasch, Wohnen Aspekte zu einer volkskundlich/kulturanalytischen Erforschung der Alltagskultur, Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen
Gesellschaft in Wien 121 (1991): 5968; 64.
16 Carola Lipp, Der industrialisierte Mensch: Zum Wandel historischer Erfahrung
und wissenschaftlicher Deutungsmuster, in Der industrialisierte Mensch, ed. Michael
Dauskardt and Helge Gerndt (Hagen: Westflisches Freilichtmuseum, 1993): 1743; 28.
17 Siemens advertisement, Ideales Heim 2 (Feb 2005), 5.
18 Gerd Selle, Innen und aussen Wohnen als Daseinsentwurf zwischen Einschlieung und erzwungener Hoffnung in Dllman and Temel, Lebenslandschaften,
209228; 221.
19 Hilde Malcomess, Kochen ist mnnlich, Rheinischer Merkur 2, 20 January 2005.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 See Michael Andritzky, Der elektrische und der kologische Haushalt zwei
Szenarien, in Oikos Von der Feuerstelle zur Mikrowelle. Haushalt und Wohnen im
Wandel, ed. Michael Andritzky (Giessen: Anabas, 1992): 450452; 452.
23 Mrgeli advertisement, Ideales Heim 2 (February 2005), 115.
24 Bulthaup advertisement, ibid., 3.
25 Corian advertisement, ibid., 50.
26 Selle, Innen und aussen, 216.

15

Alice Vollenweider

We Should Be Happy That Kitchens


Are Still Getting Built At All

As long as we continue to think about building kitchens, all is not


lost, and old-fashioned devotees of the traditional dinner table can
continue to look forward to leaving a stressful morning of work for
a warm mid-afternoon meal with the family followed by a brief
siesta. As long as the children are not being fed at daycare or in the
school lunchroom, while their parents satisfy their hunger in the
cafeteria at work or polish off a sandwich at their desks. Today
hardly anyone knows why church bells ring at eleven in the morning: to remind housewives that it is time to start cooking.
Those who can afford it order the lunch menu in finer restaurants, while others prefer to dine in fast food establishments, where
they can have their choice of pad thai, shwarma, hamburgers, sushi,
etc. The health-conscious among them opt for the salad or fruit and
granola in a plastic bowl. Barbara says that eating a big mid-day
meal is a waste of time. Even Manuel, who works at home, is terrorized by deadlines and makes do with cheese and bread and maybe a
couple of pears and an apple. Claudia eats half a container of yogurt
and a whole graham cracker. Others are satisfied with a glass of Protiline, the protein-rich nutritional supplement with life-enhancing
minerals and vitamins and an enticing banana flavor.
Even those who eat lunch at home can easily do so without a
kitchen. A microwave in the hallway is enough to heat up a package
of Dorade la provenale in just minutes, and its still based on a
recipe by Paul Bocuse. What more could one wish for? In the
evenings, shops are open until eight, gas stations until midnight. In
many places you can get anything you want. And if all else fails, you
can always call the local pizza joint and have your favorite pie delivered by moped in less than thirty minutes.
Its no surprise that shops for household wares have disappeared in almost all central European cities. Their countless useful
or superfluous appliances no longer find users. Cookbooks of all
sorts, on the other hand, are in demand. As are television chefs
who laugh and smile throughout the day on all channels and never
make a mistake. Their task is less to teach viewers how to cook
than to console women who no longer cook and demonstrate to
them, in time-lapse, how easy it can be. But when, motivated by
Jamie Oliver and other stars, they cheerfully set about to grill a
meal of green asparagus and no one ends up liking it, they return,
disappointed, to their trusty packaged soups and fish sticks,
17

with a pre-washed and pre-mixed salad tossed directly out of the


plastic bag.
The produce vendor morosely remarks that people no longer
know how to cook, no longer know what to do with the various
sorts of artichokes or the tart radicchio di treviso she offers; even her
delicate French shallots are merely eyed suspiciously then passed
over. The thrifty neighborhood butcher no longer earns his money
by dint of the quality of the meat he sells, but by the affordable
lunch menu he offers, which can be gotten as take-away or eaten
right there in the shop.
People are clearly no longer as proficient at cooking as they used
to be, but never has so much been said and written about food.
There are, nevertheless, numerous individual gourmets and groups
of ambitious lay chefs, who passionately talk about Spanish artichokes with beef marrow and terrine de fois gras de canard and cannot agree on what the best variety of Scottish oyster is.
Architects took this epochal transformation in eating and cooking
habits seriously, and in the eighties they made the kitchen an autonomous space. No longer is the kitchen the domestic center of the
home, where smells of coffee, fresh bread, beef bouillon, asparagus,
or fresh strawberry preserves waft through the air depending on the
time of day. Instead, the kitchen has been incorporated into the living and dining space, making for a single, larger, and more expansive
room. Which is not to everyones taste, however. Gabriela, for example, wouldnt mind being able to close the door, firstly because
ventilation technology still is not that advanced, and secondly because she doesnt want everyone in the kitchen with her. When she
cooks for guests, she needs to concentrate and have her own space.
For example, when checking to see if the pasta is ready, she usually
throws a noodle against the wall, in true neapolitan manner; if it
sticks, then its al dente and ready to serve.
It must be said, however, that almost any kitchen is only as good
as the chef cooking in it. Whether spacious or cramped, integrated
into the dwelling or cut off from it, the kitchens structure is determined by the cook. Her or his experience, values, and imagination
condition how it is furnished. Good cooks dont grow on trees, nor
are they made in cooking courses or by reading cookbooks. What is
important is that one take pleasure in eating, be curious, enjoy asking questions, and be able to concentrate and work meticulously.
Useful tools include the Flscher Kochbuch [Flscher Cookbook]
and the Basler Kochschule [Basel Cooking Course], both of them
reliable guides that explain how to make mayonnaise without a hitch,
cook schnitzel for more than two, or whip up a tasty sorrel pure.
All without having to spend a fortune on technology, with just two
or three well-sharpened knives and a hand blender for the pure. All
the other gadgetry is unnecessary, all the various kitchen appliances,
mixing and grating machines, electric bread-slicers, meat-grinders,
and can-openers. If you can do without a deep freezer because you
do not like frozen foods, you can just as easily do without a microwave oven. And who needs an electronically automated kitchen
system? Any cook worth his or her salt knows best when a meal is
ready or needs to fry or steam or boil longer.
The truly fascinating thing about cooking, what makes it such a
wonderful and unique experience, is the intensity with which it en18

gages our senses as we shop for and prepare wholesome, natural


products. This has less to do with their freshness per se: one should
recognize how the aroma of basil and peppers and eggplant changes
and becomes fuller and more intense with age. Everything is in flux,
and a good cook responds to the quality of her ingredients in the
here and now. In the spring, she softens the peppers as-yet unmatured
tartness by adding a teaspoon of sugar. By late summer, it is no
longer necessary. Hence it is also impossible to indicate the measure
of a recipes ingredients down to the ounce. A good cook needs room
to maneuver in order to be precise. How ridiculous to indicate eight
leaves of basil, when the leaves themselves can be of entirely different
sizes. Not to mention the variable aroma of this delightful herb.
The Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, who considered himself an
enthusiastic amateur chef, once told me something very true and
beautiful about the art of cooking. He sometimes cooked, he said,
merely to pass the time on a long afternoon, preparing for instance a
Tuscan ribollita, which took a fair while. The white beans need to be
boiled, and the vegetable and herbs finely minced. The hard bread
has to be cut rather laboriously into thin slices. Hours would pass.
He would light a cigarette, have a sip of wine, listen to music, chat,
and the melancholy would disperse. Cooking is actually a kind of
Zen for the average person. And any man or woman can learn the
skills necessary to practice it. And at the end, instead of nothingness,
you have a tasty vegetable stew.

Michelle Corrodi

On the Kitchen and Vulgar Odors


The Path to a New Domestic Architecture Between the Mid-Nineteenth Century
and the Second World War

Rationalizing the work process can never


be learned too early: kitchen pass-through
in the Weber House, Mnnedorf, Canton
of Zurich (1932/33, Werner M. Moser).

The Kitchen as Necessary Evil: The Nineteenth-Century Bourgeois


Household
According to the nineteenth-century bourgeois ideal of femininity,
the function of a housewife was nothing less than to be the soul of
the household.1 Due to her natural qualifications, it was up to
her to create a happy home, a hearth of well-being geared entirely
toward the husbands recuperation from work. The home, by contrast, was to be as free of work as possible, at least on the surface.
The demonstration of female leisure and expensive self-display were
important elements in the bourgeoisies need to document its status.2
The outside world was not supposed to notice anything of the
womans activities; and the woman was supposed to keep her hands
clean. The presence of at least one maid was proof to the public
that the lady of the house had no need to work.
Another reason lay in the ideal of a family community based on
love rather than benefit, one in which the womans activity was
considered an act of love.3 The contradiction between the domestic
assiduousness ascribed to the housewife by virtue of her gender and
the fact that she was at the same time not supposed to work, was
covered up by a subterfuge: housework was defined as the work of
love. Even when the work was considerable, it was to remain invisible, especially to the man, despite the fact that its product was intended for him. Countless how-to manuals for house mothers
counsel the novice housewife on how and when to work in order to
provide her husband with a clean, tidy, and comfortable home. The
housewife was de facto in charge of her own, clearly defined area of
responsibility, the commander-in-chief of the internal oikos. Relevant literature frequently portrays her as the tireless custodian of
the hearth. In reality, necessary work was generally delegated to the
maid or the cook.
In this context, the kitchen was by and large excluded from the
upper middle class familys sphere of thinking and acting. As a work
area, the kitchen was considered an unavoidable, but secondary
component of the house.4 This subordinate status was reflected in
floor plans as well. The kitchen generally was assigned a peripheral
place, as far as possible from those spaces where the family lived and
socialized kitchen odors were considered vulgar. Architects thus
positioned the kitchen in accordance with the occupants practical
and symbolic needs.5 In urban, upper middle class households, the
21

kitchen was where food was prepared and the servants spent their
time. It was the dining room where the food got served and consumed.
Far into the twentieth century, a typical kitchen in an upper middle class apartment or villa was furnished with a sink trough permanently installed near the window and a free-standing stove with a
stovepipe and multiple burners that was heated by coal or wood.6
The walls were lined with rows of detached shelving units generally cabinets that could be locked where the entire arsenal of cooking utensils was stored. Lastly, the kitchen always included a table,
an indispensable surface for working.
Bound to the domestic sphere of influence, the lady of the
house was responsible for organizing the household according to
the latest scientific insights into hygiene and nutrition.7 However,
as her agency was regulated by precisely defined rules within a
closed system of practices, the daily preparation of meals and management of the household presented considerable demands. This
led to an increase in the work load due to the rapidly dwindling
number of domestic servants around the turn of the century. For
some overwhelmed housewives, hysteria was the only way to
break out of the role so rigidly assigned to them, as concerned
economists, psychologists, doctors, and architects of the time
determined. Their efforts were directed one by one against every-

1 Stadtpark-Hof, Vienna III (1907/08, Emil


Mader): floor plan, top floor. Typical floor
plan of an imperial-era apartment building
at the edge of a block, with representative
street faade and plain faade to courtyard.
A central corridor runs between analogous
apartments. Living rooms are oriented to
the street; less important rooms like bedrooms, bath, wc, and kitchen face the
courtyard.
2 Patrician kitchen in the Villa an der Halde,
Zurich-Enge (1906, Friedrich Wehrli).

22

thing they considered pathological about dwelling. Especial


attention was given to the housewifes body, which was to be
protected from becoming fatigued. Either fatigue or an overtaxed
physical constitution were put to blame when a housewife demonstrated typical symptoms like irritability, temper, or fainting
spells.8 Preventive strategies focused on the reduction of housework and optimal efficiency: fatigue was ascribed not least to antiquated organization of the home and to poorly equipped working
areas.
The Discovery of the Kitchen
Although the onset of the new century did not see immediate
changes in kitchen design, the everyday structures of bourgois domestic architecture were nevertheless called into question by the life
reform movement, womens suffrage, and the youth movement. Art
Nouveau, the English country-house style, and the arts and crafts
movement all shook up the conventional aesthetic.9 All of life was to
be permeated with authentic art, and this went for the otherwise
forsaken kitchen, too. Both the Art Nouveau, movements ideal of
the total work of art and the attempts to reform domestic architecture were intended to contribute to a revaluation of kitchen space,
whose relative revaluation from the perspective of architecture was
being pursued by various means.10
A few kitchens designed for upper-middle-class clients around
1900 register their architects intentions to integrate kitchen furniture into an overarching dcor scheme.11 More attention was now
being paid to the shape of individual elements and their arrangement
in conjunction with each other. Artistic composition was thus foregrounded in the furnishing of the kitchen, as is illustrated quite
vividly by the 1901 kitchen designed by Peter Behrens for his own
house in the Darmstadt artists colony Mathildenhhe. Here, curved

35 Kitchen in the Behrens House,


Mathildenhhe Artists Colony, Darmstadt
(1901, Peter Behrens): cross section; two
views. Whether the curved form of the
ledge supports, the rounded edges of the
open shelves, or the oval cut-outs in the
cabinet doors everything conforms to the
leitmotif of the curve.

23

forms dominate throughout the space. Even though Behrens followed the bourgeois tradition of having the kitchen on the ground
floor, he nevertheless included the kitchen in his concept for the
entire house. Another example is the kitchen of the Villa Kurz
in Knorr [Jgerndorf], Czech Republic, designed in 1902/03 by
Leopold Bauer. Here, the clearly outlined forms and contours of the
furniture combine into an ensemble that is subject to the primacy
of the square. The practical ordering of individual pieces of furniture
in a row along the wall, together with their sober monochromatic
color, give the room a cool, almost sterile atmosphere. This was in
keeping with the widespread concern, advanced by the hygiene
movement, for cleanliness in the kitchen. Similarly, the compact furnishings in the kitchen of the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, designed in
1905 to 1911 by Josef Hoffman, are made up of individual cabinets
that conform exactly to the original layout.
Kitchen as Nucleus: The Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Household
For the majority of the population, even smaller and simpler versions of the bourgeois dwelling were unaffordable. Working class
apartments generally comprised two rooms with at most a small, additional closet. In order to pay the rent, occupants were often forced

6 Kitchen in the Villa Franz Kurz, Krnov


[Jgerndorf], Czech Republic (1902/03,
Leopold Bauer; destroyed). Entirely
committed to hygiene: not only the floor is
tiled, but the walls are tiled halfway up as
well in white, so that dirt will be easier to
see. The entire back wall is taken up by an
enormous built-in cupboard where pots
and pans are kept protected from smoke
and grease.
7 Kitchen in the Palais Stoclet, Brussels
(190511, Josef Hoffmann). Although
the U-shaped facilities are partially equipped with work surfaces, the middle of the
room is still occupied by a traditional large
work table. As in Leopold Bauers kitchen,
the floor is tiled in a black-and-white
chessboard pattern; the walls are tiled all
the way to the ceiling.

24

to take in extra lodgers with whom they would share their mattresses in shifts.12
The kitchen in a workers tenement was located generally in the
entry area of the apartment and was used by the occupants as a
multifunctional living area. Measuring 130160 sq. ft., this area was
where daily life took place, where the occupants ate, worked,
washed, and in some cases slept. Condemned by doctors and social
reformers, these often unfit dwellings were characterized by inefficient stoves and smoky air: the kitchen stove was the only source
of heat and was used equally for cooking and for heating.13 In
the middle of the kitchen there was generally a table that served
both as a workspace and for the preparation and consumption
of meals. This was the real center of the apartment. In the absence
of a parlor, the kitchen was made into a more liveable space
through various means and features. In contrast to the white-lacquered kitchen furniture of the bourgeois household, here wooden
furniture either painted brown or left unpainted was preferred.

8 Mrzbogen Development, workers


housing for the Gebr. Bhler & Co. steel
plant, Kapfenberg, Austria (190005,
Hans Frauneder): floor plan (1:400).
9 The working-class live-in kitchen as a
living space for all (Dortmund, 1917).

A tablecloth for the table, a quilt for the sofa, embroidered cotton
runners for the shelves all gave the room a comfortable ambience.
Furniture and appliances were arranged in accordance with this
principle rather than practical criteria such as work routine.
Cooking was at the center of everyday domestic life, but had to
be fit in with the work schedule at the factory.14 More and more
women saw themselves forced to work in factories just to make sure
the family had enough to eat every day. Food preparation thus took
place under the pressure of time constraints, which frequently led to
serious nutritional problems. Living conditions among the lower
classes thus became an object of general concern, not least because
the maintenance of workers health had economic consequences for
the state. Working-class women were often reproached by doctors
and social reformers for cooking badly and uneconomically: inefficient management of the household was blamed for the poor
25

10 The exemplary proletarian woman:


the wife of Swiss Communist Wilhelm Willi
at the stove, in her hand an issue of the
German Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ)
with Ernst Thlmann on the cover (early
1930s).

physical health of many families.15 Some social reformers even held


the view that the solution to the work problem could be found in
the working womens cooking pot.16 Their anger was directed
primarily against the excessive alcohol consumption by heads of
families, which would deplete a good part of a familys budget. One
way out, they felt, would be to improve living conditions, thus
keeping the husband away from the tavern and from the circles of
Social Democrats to be found there.
The demand for healthy living was accompanied by another
area of critique, that of deficient hygiene. Particularly galling to
social reformers was the fact that in working-class households the
kitchen was used not only as a living area but also for sleeping. The
public battle for order, hygiene, and cleanliness went on well into
the twentieth century. For the proletarian woman, it was a daily battle on two fronts. Ccoordinating her work in the home with her
work for income was an enormous burden that was generally not
without consequences for the household itself. Architectural reforms of domestic space were thus accompanied by an awareness
that the womans double burden needed to be counteracted.
While this double burden had been a problem for working
class households since the middle of the nineteenth century, it was
only at the end of the century that upper-middle-class households
were affected by it. The general economic situation and decreasing
incomes accompanied by changing expectations made it increasingly necessary to manage the housework without a maid. With
expanded occupational possibilities and regulated working hours,
young women were able to support themselves in other fields.
The necessity of economizing housework was considered an
important matter for the bourgeois class anyway, and was the
basis of rationalization attempts like those that occurred in the
twenties.17
Reorganization of the Household at the Beginning of the
Twentieth Century
Following the First World War, economic and social relations
underwent a fundamental transformation. The experiences of war,
mass unemployment, economic depression, and housing shortages,
as well as the breakup of the extended family, which had begun
with industrialization, and the emancipation of women, all required
new forms of coexistence and habitation. One of the most urgent
problems was that of building homes. Architects were confronted
for the first time with the challenge of creating mass housing, a task
that they at first attempted in smaller areas with housing estates and
row houses. In reaction to the breakdown of political and social
systems, an intensive debate about prevailing injustices took place
in architecture circles. Architects considered how these new circumstances could be accommodated architecturally. The focus of
their concern was the working class. But a critique of typical bourgeois lifestyles and dwelling habits likewise led to the rejection of
old housing forms as outmoded. A substantial reconception seemed
necessary.
It was equally necessary, in the aftermath of the nineteenth
centurys restrictive notion of femininity, that roles for women
reflect these new circumstances. The lady of the house was now
the housewife. Soon the term rationalization became an all-im26

11 Housewife in the kitchen, 1920s.


Until the beginning of the 20th century,
the stove had a special status in every kitchen. As a wood- or coal-burning block
oven, it was accessible from at least three
sides. This concept was retained by the
new, similarly large-format gas cooking
apparatuses. These models, which were
introduced into kitchens after the turn of
the century and superseded the older
ovens, were accepted only gradually as women had to dispel the prejudice that food
cooked on them would taste of gas.

portant concept; given the absence of servants and the double burden of the gainfully employed housewife, timesaving took on an
increasingly vital role. Instead of delegating work, housewives now
had to find ways of executing it more economically and efficiently,
which would lead to the compatibility of job and household. The
kitchen as the work world of the housewife came under increasing
scrutiny.
After 1900, a series of politically active women began making
the effectivization and collectivization of housework a public
issue.18 The progressive wing of the womens movement essentially
demanded a liberation from housework.19 The most radical of
their initiatives was directed at the dissolution of private households in favor of collective households, the so-called one kitchen
house,20 where the housework of individual apartments was
pooled in a central administration unit. Well into the twenties in
Germany, Austria, and Switzerland a number of specific projects
were established that involved different service facilities depending
on the target group. Nevertheless, the one-kitchen house was not
very successful in proving its relevance for home building. The
ideal of a communal kitchen arrangment may have been a popular
idea among bourgeois intellectuals (the housewife has more time
for useful housework and for raising her children21), but did not
yield the anticipated success. Opponents of the one-kitchen house
were afraid that it would have adverse effects on familial cohesion
and on taste, inasmuch as the housewife was no longer cooking
meals with her familys particular taste buds in mind.22 The onekitchen house ended up failing not least due to interpersonal strife
and the varying material circumstances of the families occupying a
given house.23
Rationalization: The Womans Liberation
The reform movement for the one-kitchen house died out in the
middle of the twenties. In place of a centralized economy of households, the rationalization of the small, private household now became the goal. People wanted to exhaust the possibilities promised
by the increased technologization of the home. One specific aim was
to improve the kitchens spatial arrangement through a cost-effective
reorganization of the floor plan. This reinvention of the womans
everyday work setting resulted directly from rationalization efforts
taking place in the United States. There, the translation of Taylorist
work methods to the home entailed new principles of saving (time,
energy, space, and money), which were to bring with them the
hoped-for easement of work. Following this American model, architects of the New Building movement of the twenties integrated
measures such as more efficient handles, reduced distances, and
timesaving appliances into their designs.
Household rationalization originated in the United States in
conjunction with the so-called servant question. According to the
American social worker Catherine Beecher, the employment of
servants was irreconcilable with the democratic principle of equality. She understood the kitchen as a workplace and called for the
cooperation of all family members as well as improved organization of space and working conditions. Beecher saw perfect working conditions for a housewife manifested in the functionally minimized galleys of Mississippi steamboats, and in 1869 she designed
28

an ideal kitchen based on that model. In her proposal, Beecher


integrated the most important areas of activity into larger functional units.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, another American,
Christine Frederick, set about analyzing work methods in the
kitchen analogously with those on the conveyor belt. Her 1913
book The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management, in which she tackled issues of household rationalization,
was translated into German in 1921 by Irene Witte. The ideas expressed in the book fell on fertile ground in architecture circles. For
example, in his 1924 guidebook Die neue Wohnung: die Frau als
Schpferin [The new home: the woman as creator], Bruno Taut
took Fredericks work-saving principles as an occasion to badmouth womens penchant for knickknacks. He called for a practical, modern interior dcor and asked women to destroy all the
gewgaws, rubbish, and superfluities24 among their household
effects.
One of the most prominent representatives of these rationalization efforts was the Munich economist Dr. Erna Meyer, whose book
Der neue Haushalt [The new household] was a bestseller. If housework, viewed as unproductive, had largely gone ignored in the
past, Meyers equation of the kitchen with the factory (the smallest
factory in the world) was meant to promote the ideological appreciation of the work that housewives did. She viewed housework as a
relevant factor for the national economy; and in countless articles
she tirelessly pointed to its economic significance.25 This was motivated not so much by the hoped-for physical easement of the housewife as by the idea that an integrated rationalization of all material
housework would make the housewife free for her own, immaterial tasks. Meyer demonstrated that hysteria and bad temper were
symptoms of an unsatisfied domestic need, i.e. a sign of a poorly
organized workplace.26 The new household, where the woman
would be the creative master of her duties rather than their slave,
required not only new quarters, but an inner reorientation of the
woman herself, which was linked to being appropriately educated.
This last was spelled out by Meyer in ten precepts, in which she did
not neglect to mention even the importance of correct posture and
methodically conducted physical exercise.
Kitchen as Hot Topic: The Development of the Work Kitchen
Practically all well-known architects of the time designed kitchens,
for alongside designing housing estates and housing, the world of
the housewife provided the avant-garde of architecture a suitable
1213 Kitchen designed by Catherine
Beecher, 1869. Floor plan; preparation and
cleaning areas. Beecher reorganized the
work process: the three pertinent fields,
storage, preparation, and cleaning, were
organized according to sequence. Due to
the heat formation, the stove was quartered in a separate room.

29

14 Erna Meyer, Der Neue Haushalt


[The new household], 1926. No more
time-consuming busywork! This housewife
is on her way to a new life, free of unnecessary work.

area of activity.27 Furthermore, New Building architects found in the


suffrage movement comrades-in-arms in their battle for housing reform. The kitchen was seen as a modern task for the architect, and
that no doubt had to do with the technological euphoria of the time.
Another reason why so much fuss was made about kitchens was
that the practical, unadorned designs required of modern architects
were often appraised as cold by untrained eyes, and their implementation in the living room or bedroom met with resistance. Not
so in the kitchen. Here, the reorganization and mechanization of the
life world was generally accepted. The new spirit could be demonstrated in the kitchenette, and that made the kitchen the bridgehead
of modernity in home building.28
Authentic everyday needs, discerned by following motion diagrams of occupants, were supposed to be the point of departure for
designing the new home. Dwelling was broken down into existential necessities like sleeping, cooking, eating, and washing; and the
design of the floor plan was undertaken following the formula of
one room = one function. Economizing movement naturally led
to the idea of the compact kitchen. Nevertheless, arguments for
streamlined, energy- and work-saving paths or for practical furniture could not disguise the fact that cost pressures made it necessary to curtail floor plans. One group of New Building architects
advocated outfitting the subsistence home designed for the masses
with a work kitchen conceived for the smallest possible floor
space a novum in working class households of the twenties. An
early example of this was Anton Brenners housing machine
kitchen (1924/25), which was designed for a Vienna municipal
housing block and at 41 sq. ft. was rather cramped. Its scrupulous
design already expressed ideas that a few years later would help
Margarete Schtte-Lihotzkys Frankfurt Kitchen achieve its
breakthrough.
What was new was the architects concern for future occupants
and their needs, or in Bruno Tauts words, the architect has the
idea, the housewife puts it into action. Most architects found
themselves on shaky ground when conceiving of the home as the
womans workplace, and they relied on the expertise of housewives. Erna Meyer had argued repeatedly in her writings for the
systematic collaboration of architect and housewife.29 An example of such collaboration was the 1927 Die Wohnung [The

The kitchen as the bridgehead of


modernity:
15 Reform cupboard by Poggenpohl,
1928.
16 Round stove by Siemens, 1920s.

30

1718 Apartment House, Rauchfangkehrergasse, Vienna (1924/25, Anton


Brenner). View of the kitchen; floor plan.
Brenners tightly organized living machine was described in 1927 in the Deutsche Bauzeitung as the most radical of
Viennas experimental apartment houses.
A key factor in this was its tiny, 32-sq.-ft.
kitchen.

home] exhibition at the Weissenhof in Stuttgart organized by the


German Werkbund, whose directors had arranged beforehand to
involve housewives. Topics such as The Kitchen and Housework were to be treated intensively, and the resulting design ideas
exhibited. Erna Meyer, who had taken upon herself the role of
advisor to the architects and composed guidelines for designing
kitchens in the Weissenhofsiedlung buildings, nonetheless found
only the kitchen designed by Dutch architect J. J. P. Oud to be
impressive.30
Erna Meyer herself was to have the opportunity at the Stuttgart
exhibition to realize her ideas for functional kitchen furniture. On
display in the exhibition hall was the Stuttgart Kitchenette developed by her and Hilde Zimmermann a kitchen niche that featured
standardized, mobile elements that could be put to a variety of
uses.31 In contrast to the built-in kitchen, it had the advantage of being customizable to different room sizes. Its L-shaped arrangement
concentrated the work process on two sides of the room; the other
two sides were free except for a pass-through to the living room.
A floor space of 93 sq. ft. allowed for two persons to occupy the
room, so that a mother and daughter could work together or a small
child be cared for.
The most forceful proposal, which was quite extreme in the
degree and determination with which it organized workflow and
in its minimization of space, went down in New Building history
as the Frankfurt Kitchen. Designed by Viennese architect Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky, it successfully combined stove, sink,
cabinets, and counter space into a compact arrangement that far
surpassed comparable designs in terms of reachability and ergonomics. The development of this kitchen was carried out on
behalf of the New Frankfurt social housing program, for which
the citys Chief Building Surveyor, Ernst May, had retained the
services of the young Austrian architect and entrusted her with the
basic design of a standard kitchen.32 For her preliminary design,
the realization of which occurred in a number of forms due to the
multitude of building types, Schtte-Lihotzky took for her model
the kitchens of the railway dining car company Mitropa. One
substantial impulse, that of viewing the kitchen as an instrument of
occupational psychology, came from Christine Fredericks aforementioned book. Although Frederick had extensively analyzed

broom
closet

anteroom

landing

living room

bedroom

WC

alcove

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

kitchen

gas meter, electric meter


clothesrack
waste disposal
coal box
Murphy bed, folded up by day
Murphy bed, pulled down
at night
7. night table, connect both parts
of the screen

31

8. two-part screen
9. rod with blind, closes the
bed alcove
10. tile oven
11. built-in cupboard
12. double bed for married
couple
13. kitchen table, with cabinet
below

14. gas oven


15. warm and cold rinsing basin
with drip counter below
16. sink
17. drip counter while washing dishes
18. washing counter
19. sprinkler
20. flowers

lady

bath

gentleman

children
alcove

living room

dining room

kitchen

hall

SPK

1920 The experimental Am Horn House,


Weimar (1923, Georg Muche and Benita
Koch-Otte). View of kitchen; floor plan
(1:200). As a product of rational design, this kitchen displays all of the qualities of a modern kitchen. The L-shaped
form is conceived as a unity with a continuous working surface and integrated gas
stove. The functional staggering of kitchen,
dining-room, and nursery allows the housewife to keep the children in view while
working.

WC

guest room

WF

workflow in the kitchen, many questions about floor plan design


remained to be answered. Schtte-Lihotzky now closed this gap
by translating into the floor plan both physiological principles and
her own experiences in experimental housing design. The most
famous version of the kitchen generally considered to be the
Frankfurt Kitchen was displayed in the Stuttgart exhibition
hall: a narrow, lengthy floor layout with a surface area of only
70 sq. ft. This fitted kitchen was planned to the centimeter as a
work space, pure and simple, and captivated exhibition-goers with
its good proportions, harmonious distribution of cubes, light
incidence, and hues.
Contrary to the rather myopic, commonly held view that rational and ideological motives were what led to the construction of
this simple work kitchen in Frankfurt, the real motive was duress
born of necessity. No doubt alternatives were considered, but
Schtte-Lihotzkys preferred solution, an eat-in kitchen adjacent
to the living room, could not be constructed for economic reasons.33 The Frankfurt Kitchen nevertheless introduced into
working class households principles that previously were reserved
only for bourgeois households: the separation of the kitchen from
life in the form of a work kitchen, and its accouterment with
built-in furniture.
Schtte-Lihotzkys rationalized fitted-kitchen design was to
have a strong and long-lasting influence, with exhibitions especially the Stuttgart exhibition at Weissenhof representing an
important medium for its circulation. Further shows dedicated to
the kitchen or the household followed, such as the New Kitchen
exhibition, which was organized in Berlin at the end of the twenties
by Der Ring, a consortium of architects. According to the organizer,
Hugo Hring, financial pressures made it necessary to restrict the
exhibitions topic to extreme reductions of floor space, hence its
focus on the question How small can a kitchen be?34 A similar
line was taken in the 1930 exhibition The Practical Kitchen at the
Gewerbemuseum Basel [Basel Museum for Arts and Crafts]. In its
catalogue, Erna Meyer assured readers that in the future, we shall
continue to see kitchens getting smaller.35 The reasons for this, she
32

2.5

5m

2123 Row house by J. J. P. Oud in the


Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart (1927).
View of kitchen and living/eating area;
floor plan (1:100).
24 Stuttgart Kitchenette in the exhibition
hall of the Werkbund Exhibition Die Wohnung [The home], Stuttgart-Weissenhof
(1927), Erna Meyer, Hilde Zimmermann, and
Building Inspector Keuerleben). By and for
women: The Stuttgart Kitchenette with
swiveling stool, patented ironing table, and
pantry cupboard with pull-out middle section
for setting up a household office.

33

25 Margarete Schtte-Lihotzkys Frankfurt Kitchen: The kitchen for the household without household help. Presented as
a model kitchen at the 1927 Neuzeitliche
Haushalt, [Modern household] exhibition
in Frankfurt am Main. View (left). This
model kitchen, commonly regarded as the
Frankfurt Kitchen, was exhibited the
same year at the Stuttgart Werkbund exhibition at the Weissenhof and garnered an
incredible response.

26 Mitropa dining car kitchen, for housewives, a particularly edifying example of


ergonomics and reachability (Margarete
Schtte-Lihotzky).

27 Floor plan Frankfurt Kitchen.


The long shape measures 6.1 x 11.3 ft.,
the smallest area possible, which was calculated by measuring movement paths and
closely studying work processes. (1 stove,
2 counter, 3 cooking box, 4 fold-out ironing
board, 5 storage cupboard, 6 swivel work
stool, 7 table, 8 waste disposal, 9 dishrack,
10 sink, 11 storage drawers, 12 crockery
cupboard, 13 rubbish and broom closet,
14 heater, 15 pull-out counters).

felt, lay in the shift in nutritional habits to finished products, which


made it unnecessary to stock large supplies. The fact that women
had jobs also played a role, inasmuch as this forced more and more
people to have their main meal outside the home. By way of demonstrating that even greater minimization was possible, Basel architects
created a number of model kitchens with very small floor plans.
The smallest of these, Rudolf Preiswerks Kitchen No. 4, measured
only 37 sq. ft. (!).
Live-In Kitchen or Work Kitchen?
With regard to the necessary floor plan reform that accompanied
public housing projects and the dissolution of traditional forms of
housing, opinions differed not least on the form and placement of
the kitchen. Alongside representatives of the New Building, who
generally favored a functional working kitchen with minimal floor
space, there were also more moderate groups adhering to the traditional solution of a multifunctional live-in kitchen for workingclass households.36 It seems this view was a bit more realistic with
regard to actual habits. Debates about the right type of kitchen
not only took place in light of economic calculations, there was
also the issue of how to implement certain social ideals architecturally. For those who favored the working kitchen, hygiene and
cleanliness were the highest priority, which in their eyes made it

28 View to the working area and sink with


overhead dishrack; to the right a supply
cabinet with aluminum drawers designed
by Harrer. At times criticized for being
over-rationalized, this arrangement fostered a radical reorientation of work habits
and was often used wrongly.
29 View to the stove. Designed down to
the last detail with hygiene and ergonomics
in mind: all built-in furniture were set on
rounded concrete plinths that facilitated
cleaning the floor underneath.

35

30 Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky (1897


2000) in front of her Frankfurt home
(photograph taken end of the 1920s).

vital to separate functions, specifically to demarcate the kitchen as


an autonomous work area. In contrast to the old, primitive livein kitchen, it was thought that by implementing a need-oriented
work kitchen, a more modern, and therefore superior, form of
dwelling would be attained. A similar view was expressed by one
contemporary commentator in the Deutsche Bauzeitung: Let us
consider what profit our domestic life has had from this new
building. With it, the technologization of life infiltrates into the
home of the individual. The kitchen becomes both a laboratory
and an engine room . . .. Gone is the cozy sedateness of past
kitchens, where the mother, expecting and raising children, ran a
tight ship. Working in the new household laboratory is doubtless
more hygienic and affords the woman more time and energy for
higher activities. No longer are her movements defined by housework, but by gymnastics and sports, which are clearly much
healthier and foster both energy and beauty.37 Despite its modern
valorization as operations management, kitchen work remained an
inferior occupation that was not supposed to have too high a status
in everyday life. Sensory qualities like smell were another disturbance to the cult of utility.
Adolf Loos, a proponent of the pragmatic live-in kitchen solution, turned the tables on everyone. In his opinion, the exclusion
of kitchen work was a consequence of a deficient culinary culture
and had something to do with the (bad!) quality of cooking. In his

Die praktische Kche [The practical kitchen] exhibition, Gewerbemuseum Basel


[Basel Museum of Arts and Crafts],
9 February 16 March 1930.
31 Poster designed by Helene HaasbauerWallrath
32 Rudolf Preiswerks 38 sq. ft. Kitchen
No. 4. the mitropa dining-car kitchen . . .
suggests to us that we have a long way to
go before we discover the minimal kitchen
floor plan for the home (Rudolf Preiswerk).

36

chest
kitchen

entry area

WC

dining room

seating

Werkbundsiedlung Neubhl, Zurich-Wollishofen (19281932).


33 Floor plan, Type C row house residence
(1:200). Typical New Building floor plan.
With the break-up of the habitation process into individual functions, large, multifunctional spaces like the kitchen disappear, replaced by a smaller version of the
bourgeois working kitchen. This was to be
as isolated as possible, since the living
room as the familys core and primary
activity area was not to be disturbed by
food preparation functions.
34 Kitchen in Type A row house residence
(almost identical to Type C).
35 Linking the kitchen and the living/dining area by way of a pass-through built
into the kitchen cabinets. In this way, the
kitchen door can remain shut. A typical
functional detail of the New Building,
captured here by Sigfried Giedion.

pungent articles, he spoke against ergonomic rationalization and


argued instead for the live-in kitchen, i. e. a living room with a
hearth in it, precisely so that in more genteel households the
cooks would have an audience to watch them.38 Loos not only favored the experiential advantages this would have for the family,
he also emphasized the benefit it would have for the housewife,
who thus would be more firmly integrated in family life.39 His
concept stood in stark contrast to the Frankfurt Kitchen model
of his former colleague Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky, which with
its cramped dimensions was not particularly suited to spending
time in. What could have moved Schtte-Lihotzky, who in Vienna
had once advocated live-in kitchens together with Loos, to change
her views? The truth is that even then, in Vienna, the decision to
promote the live-in kitchen had less to do with ideal motives than
with purely practical ones. The preference for the live-in kitchen
was based on the enforced frugality with heating material following the First World War, which foreclosed fueling multiple stoves
or heating more than one room. With the introduction of gas
heating, as was the case in Frankfurt, this argument lost its validity, since the heat from a gas stove was not enough to keep a
room, let alone a family, warm. Looking back, Schtte-Lihotzky
explains her decision for this or that model by the different problems presented by the respective housing situations in Vienna and
Frankfurt. The consolidation of cooking, eating, and living saved
space and costs and, inasmuch as no separate living room was
planned, was appropriate for the Viennese settlement movement.
The overriding goal there was to provide low-income families and
individuals with roofs over their heads. In Frankfurt, however,
the goal was to provide an example of modern living with the
most progressive means available in the twenties. Schtte-Lihotzky
herself saw the functional separation of living and cooking as a
superior form of dwelling.40
A Light Alternative: The Eat-In Kitchen
The intended users of the minimalist work kitchens so popular in
reform-minded architecture circles came to accept them either only
gradually or not at all. Many had problems with the austere practicality and were loathe to give up their sideboards and heavy furniture. Many tenants showed remarkable resistance to the so-called
37

counter

improvements and refused to give up their habit of eating in the


kitchen. This made architects even more determined in their enlightenment efforts, not least by designing physical restrictions that
would limit what users could do with the space on their own and
force conformity to more cultured norms. Adolf Behne even
spoke of putting occupants through a diet of habitation.41
However, even in the ranks of the reformers, the simple work
kitchen was not without its detractors. Its biggest disadvantage,
according to these critics, was that it made it difficult to look after
children while cooking. Erna Meyer objected to the fact that in these
cramped rooms there was only enough space for one person, which
meant leaving a door open in order to keep the children in sight and
in reach; but this then obviated the advantage of limiting cooking
smells to the kitchen. Hence, Meyer proposed a living room with a
separable kitchenette and ample ventilation and drafted a floor plan
for the Munich Kitchen, which she designed together with Hanna
Lv and Walther Schmidt for a 1928 housing development experiment executed by the Cooperative Building Association of the
Bavarian Post and Telegraph Union in Munich.42 Conceived in contrast to the Frankfurt Kitchen, the Munich Kitchen was designed
not for cooking but for eating, and thus represented a further devel-

live-in kitchen

cupboard sewing table cupboard

3637 Type 7 Core (1923, Margarete


Schtte-Lihotzky, in the Office of the Austrian Association of Allotment and Leisure
Gardens [VSK]), constructed 1:1 in September 1923 at the 5th Viennese Exhibition of Allotments, Leisure Gardens, and
Residential Building on the Rathausplatz in
Vienna; floor plan; view.
38 Draft for working-class row houses,
Type 1 (October/November 1920, Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky); perspectival view of
the kitchen.

38

opment of the traditional regional live-in kitchen without its hygienic shortcomings. Major criticisms of the Frankfurt and
Stuttgart Kitchens were taken into account. The Munich Kitchen
thus had a glass wall dividing its 65 sq. ft. cooking area from the 205
sq. ft. living area, permitting the mother to watch her children playing in the living room. The square composition was an improvement
on the narrow rectangle of the Frankfurt Kitchen, as were the
variable shelving inside the cabinets and the free-standing sink,
which allowed one to work while sitting.
In general, all of the kitchens designed by modernist architects
originated in similar ideas, the same ones that informed the Frankfurt Kitchen. All of them are equally guilty of functionalism, if in
varying degrees.43 The same went for the Munich Kitchen: despite
its conceptual differences and the fact that it came the closest of any
of these models to the live-in kitchen, it was not a live-in kitchen
in the traditional sense. Rather, it was an attempt to present the
ideas of a new domestic architecture that of the functional work
kitchen in a light version, thus making them palatable to a
broader public.
Implementing a Successful Model
Nevertheless, none of the examples mentioned here came even close
to having the reception that the Frankfurt Kitchen had. Even today,
no attempt at coverage in dealing with the topic of the kitchen can
afford to leave it out. The enormous popularity and practical success
that the Frankfurt Kitchen enjoyed still cannot be explained solely
by the density of its installations. It was installed in more than ten
thousand apartments in Frankfurt. But in comparison to the housing
achievements of larger cities like Vienna, Berlin, and Hamburg
where at least until the Second World War modern housing projects
availed themselves primarily of more established types of kitchen
this was a negligible number.
No, the reasons for the continued implementation of Margarete
Schtte-Lihotzkys working kitchen can be more easily discerned in
the larger social context. On the one hand, rationalization of the
private household was in keeping with the times although in terms
of type of room, furniture, and unity of purpose, the Frankfurt
Kitchen was a novum. On the other hand, it had to doing with extenuating circumstances that endowed the city of Frankfurt with a
special role and that were in large measure tied to the forceful personality of Ernst May. May, who was in the unique political position
of unifying the municipal offices of Chief Building Inspector and
Building Surveyor in one person, had for obvious reasons a relatively free hand in implementing his modern vision. Mays fame
together with Frankfurts role as the city of early modernism a
reputation it had begun to gain in the twenties and consolidated
following the Second World War doubtless played a part in Mays
efficient use of the media.44 The Frankfurt Kitchen, energetically
propagandized through newspaper articles, radio reports, and even
documentary films, met with interest both at home and abroad.
By the time of its presentation it had already garnered considerable
fame and established itself as a perfect example of rationalized
kitchen dcor.

39

At least since the sixties, however, the live-in kitchen has become
more prominent again. With growing prosperity and mounting
demands manifested in the increased living space per capita the
point is no longer merely to cover needs but to create surplus value.

live-in kitchen

closet

3941 The Munich Kitchen (1928,


Erna Meyer, Hanna Lv, Walther Schmidt)
in the experimental settlement of the
Bavarian Post and Telegraph Union, Munich; isometric projection; view; apartment
floor plan (1 : 400).

room

live-in kitchen

room

room

room

The minimized working kitchen that was deemed necessary at the


beginning of the twentieth century is now increasingly less desirable. Today the differences between working, eat-in, and live-in
kitchens are no longer a question of class solidarity or the pocketbook, but of individual preferences and the possibility of their
actualization in a given overall context.45

40

1 Hans Jrgen Teuteberg, Von der Hausmutter zur Hausfrau: Kchenarbeit im


18./19. Jahrhundert in der zeitgenssischen Hauswirtschaftsliteratur, in Die Revolution am Esstisch. Neue Studien zur Nahrungskultur im 19./20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans
Jrgen Teuteberg (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004): 101128; 108.
2 Adelheid von Saldern, Im Hause, zu Hause: Wohnen im Spannungsfeld von
Gegebenheiten und Aneignungen, in Geschichte des Wohnens, vol. 3, 18001918. Das
brgerliche Zeitalter, ed. Jrgen Reulecke (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1997):
145332; 187.
3 Kirstin Schlegel-Matthies, Liebe geht durch den Magen: Mahlzeit und Familienglck im Strom der Zeit. Geht die alte Husliche Tischgemeinschaft zu Ende? in
Teuteberg, Die Revolution am Esstisch, 148161; 150.
4 Ruth Hanisch and Mechthild Widrich, Architektur der Kche: Zur Umwertung
eines Wirtschaftsraums in der europischen Architektur des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, in Die Kche: Zur Kulturgeschichte eines architektonischen, sozialen und imaginativen Raums, ed. Elfie Miklautz, Herbert Lachmayer, and Reinhard Eisendle
(Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Bhlau, 1999): 1747; 18.
5 Ibid., 1819.
6 Von Saldern, Im Hause, zu Hause, in Miklautz et al., Die Kche, 184.
7 Schlegel-Matthies, Liebe geht durch den Magen, 149.
8 See Sabine Pollak, Interieurs, in Architektur & BauForum 32, no. 6 (1999):
124131; 124.
9 Von Saldern, Im Hause, zu Hause, 190.
10 See Hanisch and Widrich, Architektur der Kche, 20.
11 Ibid.
12 Elisabeth Leicht-Eckhardt, Ausstattungsvarianten und Nutzungsformen von
Kchen vom achtzehnten Jahrhundert bis heute, in Miklautz et al., Die Kche,
161206; 179.
13 See von Saldern, Im Hause, zu Hause, 195.
14 Ibid., 204205.
15 Peter Lesniczak, Derbe buerliche Kost und feine stdtische Kche. Zur Verbrgerlichung der Ernhrungsgewohnheiten zwischen 18801930, in Teuteberg,
Die Revolution am Esstisch, 129147; 140.
16 Ibid.
17 See Ingeborg Beer, Architektur fr den Alltag. Vom sozialen und frauenorientierten
Anspruch der Siedlungsarchitektur der zwanziger Jahre (Berlin: Schelzky & Jeep,
1994): 86.
18 Edeltraud Haselsteiner, Frauentrume Kchen(t)rume, Architektur & Bauforum 33, no. 3 (2000): 132139; 134.
19 Kristiana Hartmann, Alltagskultur, Alltagsleben, Wohnkultur, in Geschichte
des Wohnens, vol. 4. 19181945. Reform Reakton Zerstrung (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Verlags-Anstalt, 1996): 183301; 271.
20 See here Gnther Uhlig, Kollektivmodell Einkchenhaus. Wohnreform und
Architekturdebatte zwischen Frauenbewegung und Funktionalismus 19001933
(Giessen: Anabas, 1981).
21 Stefan Doernberg, Das Einkchenhausproblem, Bauwelt 2, no. 15 (1910): 17.
22 Schlegel-Matthies, Liebe geht durch den Magen, 156.
23 See Grete Lihotzky, Rationalisierung im Haushalt, Das Neue Frankfurt 1
(19261927): 120123; 120.
24 Bruno Taut, Die neue Wohnung Die Frau als Schpferin (Leipzig: Klinkhardt &
Biermann, 1924): 10.
25 See for example Erna Meyer, Wohnungsbau und Hausfhrung, Der Baumeister
25, no. 6, supplement (June 1927): B89B95. In her writings Meyer consistently refers
to the economic significance for the state of the smallest factory, the household
economy, which, having a volume of almost two thirds of the national wealth, was
clearly important for the whole.
26 Ibid., 8990.
27 Beer, Architektur fr den Alltag, 96.
28 Gnter Uhlig, Die Modernisierung von Raum und Gert, in Oikos Von der
Feuerstelle zur Mikrowelle. Haushalt und Wohnen im Wandel, ed. Michael Andritzky
(Giessen: Anabas, 1992): 9395; 94.
29 See e.g. Meyer, Wohnungsbau und Hausfhrung, B90.
30 Erna Meyer, Das Kchenproblem auf der Werkbundausstellung, Die Form 2, no.
10 (1927): 299307; 304 ff.
31 Ibid., 300302.
32 Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky, Warum ich Architektin wurde (Salzburg: Residenz,
2004), 130. On her collaboration with Ernst May, see Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky,
Meine Arbeit mit Ernst May in Frankfurt a.M. und Moskau, Bauwelt 77, no. 28
(1986): 10511054.

41

33 Ibid., 128, 131.


34 Huge Hring, Ausstellung Die Neue Kche, Der Baumeister 27, no. 2, supplement (February 1929): B33B36; B33.
35 Erna Meyer, Die Elemente des Kchengrundrisses, in Die praktische Kche,
ed. Gewerbemuseum Basel, exhibition catalogue (Basel: Bhm, 1930):16.
36 Briefly, there were in principle were four options for kitchen design: live-in, eat-in,
working, or kitchenette. See Beer, Architektur fr den Alltag, 116.
37 Gustav Langen, Neues Bauen. Gedanken auf der Werkbundausstellung
Die Wohnung, Stuttgart, zur Zeit der Tagung fr wirtschaftliches Bauen, Deutsche
Bauzeitung 61, no. 88 (2 November 1927): 721727; 726.
38 See Fedor Roth, Adolf Loos und die Idee des konomischen (Vienna: Deuticke,
1995), 195.
39 See Adolf Loos, Wohnen lernen, in Adolf Loos. Smtliche Schriften in zwei
Bnden, ed. Franz Glck, Vol. 1 (Vienna and Munich: Herold, 1962): 383387.
40 Schtte-Lihotzky, Warum ich Architektin wurde, 100.
41 Habitation is a human necessity, and it is through it that man will become healthy;
a diet of habitation will thus be prescribed for him in precise detail. (Adolf Behne,
Dammerstock, Die Form 5, no. 6 (1930): 163166; 164.
42 See Lore Kramer, Die Mnchner Kche. Grundriss und Lebensform, in Robert
Vorhoelzer Ein Architektenleben. Die klassische Moderne der Post, ed. Florian
Aicher and Uwe Drepper (Munich: Callwey, 1990): 245249.
43 Gert Khler, Wohnung und Stadt. Hamburg, Frankfurt, Wien. Modelle sozialen
Wohnens in den zwanziger Jahren (Braunschweig and Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1985): 256.
44 Ibid., 75.
45 Peter Faller, Der Wohngrundriss (Stuttgart and Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
2002): 28.

42

Klaus Spechtenhauser

Refrigerators, Kitchen Islands, and


Other Cult Objects
Kitchens from the Second World War to Today

For thousands of years, the kitchen hearth was the center of


the household; it was the place where everyone sat, thought, and
planned, and where the woman of the house was more than just
a cook. Certainly, we should not wallow in false romanticism
and dream of a return of the cozy hearth. But the modern
kitchen with all its technological fittings, its rationally conceived interior design, and all of the advantages of our scientific
age can also be the heart of a dwelling, giving nourishment not
just to the body but to the soul and spirit.1

Resopal and chrome steel: the Kruse 22E


fitted kitchen, 1960s. Everything
about this complete kitchen has been
thought through with the active housewife
in mind. Not a detail too much or too
little.

Towards the end of the fifties, when these lines were written, the
kitchen-space was a site of significant change. The form of the
modern kitchen was being dictated more and more by the modernization, mechanization, and rationalization of the household and
by new materials and the arrival of the fitted kitchen. This was
accompanied by a fundamental re-evaluation of the role and responsibilities of the housewife. To be sure, she remained the sole ruler of
the kitchen realm, but now, after the years of hardship of the Second
World War, the provision of the basics of life took on a new emotional aspect. She was the one responsible for providing a pleasant
and cozy environment to promote a positive disposition in her husband and children. The rationalization of household chores, reduced
to a minimum thanks to new machines and shortened distances, was
to create the necessary free time for this, and also for the housewife
herself.
Looking back now at the guides to good housekeeping from this
time, these developments seem to belong to a distant past. They
evoke above all the specific aesthetic and taste of the fifties: the first
Resopal kitchens with their garish colors, massive refrigerators,
hors doeuvre platters with large helpings of mayonnaise, CocaCola, and sophisticated peas from the can. Nevertheless, in light of
the development of the kitchen over the last fifty years a development which established the kitchen as an architectural, social, and
imaginative space it is evident that the opening quotation is relevant beyond its particular time frame in relation to the following
crucial factors:
the mechanization, technological upgrading, and, more recently,
digitalization of kitchens and household work;
the triumphant progress of the fitted kitchen, which, despite
45

varying requirements and preferences, became the standard from


the sixties onwards;
the reduction of the kitchen space to a mono-functional space
(modern eat-in kitchen or kitchenette), accompanied by a
marked shrinkage of the kitchen area;
a deeply rooted awareness that the kitchen is the actual heart of
the dwelling, performing a wider role than the mere provision
of nutrition (modern eat-in kitchen or kitchen/living room);
the desire for a cozy, well-designed kitchen space or sphere
that increasingly has a showpiece function;
finally, and very generally, the altered and highly variable use and
individual utilization of the kitchen as a result of far-reaching
changes in society and the environment (family structure, nutritional customs and others).

Under certain circumstances, frequently dependent on regional


traditions and customs, these predominant tendencies become more
significant, reflecting the particular mode of existence of every individual together with the prevailing sociological conditions, which
are complex and seldom conclusively ascertainable.
By no means should the development of the kitchen after the
Second World War be viewed as a simple chronological sequence
of pioneering occurrences and inventions, which had wide-ranging
consequences and, so to speak, exchanged one radical and superlative standard with another.2 Rather, the ever-changing ideas and
concepts of what a kitchen can be and what it can be used for coexist. Indeed, it is sufficient to consider the different kitchens of
friends, acquaintances, or relatives, or to make a side-trip into
another region to appreciate the diverse juxtaposition of varying
kitchen spaces, furnishing standards, and customs of use.
Continuity and Progress
Like many decades that have been rediscovered and correspondingly
deformed as a consequence of different stylistic revivals, the fifties
from todays perspective seem distorted and idealized in many
ways.3 In most European countries it was an extremely ambivalent
time: on the one side, the traumatic experience of National Socialism, abominable persecution, and political repression, along with
prevailing poverty and destruction; on the other side, a mood of
reawakening, optimism, and hope for a better future. This uncertainty and contradiction manifested itself not only in the way people
felt about life but also in the cultures of construction and housing.
Where was one to begin? What tools were available? What formative language could lead to the new without constantly reminding
one of the old?
In the immediate post-war period, the design of the kitchen space
fluctuated between continuity and progress, or between emotive
tradition and functional modernity.4 Thus, the first communal
housing development in Vienna, the Per-Albin-Hansson-Settlement
West in Vienna 10 (194754, Franz Schuster, Eugen Wrle, et al.),
adopted not only the conventions of the residential planning of previous decades (e.g. row housing, three-story border structures, ribbon development, free space, social and commercial developments),
but also aspects of the traditional design of Viennese residential
dwellings from the pre-war period in terms of the relationship
46

The picture of todays kitchen is shaped by


a variety of uses and standards of decoration:
1 Open kitchen/living room in a private
house in the Canton of Basel, photograph
2001.
2 While some people watch television in
the kitchen . . .
3 . . . others have fun baking together.
4 Kitchens like these can still be found in
many places: an ensemble of earthenware
sink with cabinet, free-standing electric
stove, and overhead and lower cabinets,
photograph late 1980s.
5 Kitchen in 1970s style.

47

between the kitchen and the living area. In addition, the kitchens of
the housing development in Heiligfeld in Zurich (1947/48, Josef
Schtz & Alfred Mrset) were very similar in a practical sense to the
designs of the thirties: freely erected kitchen furniture, an electric
stove with three burners, a stoneware basin with cold and warm water; the refrigerator was not yet standard equipment. The eastwardfacing kitchens had a direct entrance to the balcony and were enlarged by a relatively generous area of free space, in which the dining/work table was located and which was heated by the tiled stove
in the living room. Here, calls for a rationalization of the household
and kitchen to cut work loads along the lines of the Frankfurt
Kitchen went largely unheeded; nevertheless, it was important that
the kitchen design was well integrated, appropriately proportioned
and suitable for a multifunctional role.
At the very start of the fifties, there was an increased effort to
move away from the traditional style of kitchen design with individual furnishings, a voluminous counter bench and central kitchen
table. This satisfying formal coherence was criticized as an amorphous conglomeration of individual items, in which individual
pieces of equipment and furniture were utilized without regard for
their functional interaction.5 Designers now looked to the individual
demonstration buildings with their model kitchens and the costly

68 Lasting values in kitchens of the


immediate post-war period: an ample
dining-in kitchen instead of the minimized
work kitchen of the Heiligfeld I Municipal
Housing Development, Zurich-Wiedikon
(1947/48, Josef Schtz and Alfred Mrset):
Views of the cooking and dining areas;
floor plan of three-room apartment (1:400).

48

910 The U.S.-American kitchen as a model of progressive technology and modern


sociability: General Electric refrigerator
from 1942; kitchen scene from an advertising brochure.

architect-designed kitchens for detached houses built in the interwar period: the integration of furniture items and appliances into a
stylish, considered, and coherent whole; the consideration of ergonomic and labor-saving factors; the use of new materials and technological appliances; the increasing adaptation to the available spatial relationships. As had been the case with the first European steps
towards rationalization and mechanization, it was the United States
that provided the models for technologically progressive households. Here, the technical development immediately before the war
had already reached an extremely high standard.6 The concept of the
American wonder-kitchen finally reached Europe via magazines, exhibitions, and the weekly show Wochenschau, setting new standards,
which were, however, still well behind those of the U.S. with respect
to both labor minimization and design. Already at the end of the
thirties, kitchens in the U.S. were described as streamlined, referring not to their formal exterior in terms of the current streamlined
style but instead to the overall planning of the kitchen as a complex
whole with a logical positioning of appliances, fittings, and work
areas. Hence, the term streamlining in kitchens did not only refer
to a creative molding of the surface form but was also used to refer
to an economized, rationalized, and free-flowing style of kitchen
labor.7 Comparison with European conditions at the time seemed
to confirm this. In Germany in the mid-fifties, it was estimated that,
depending on profession, a housewife would spend a combined total
of between sixty-three and eighty-six hours per week on household chores and at work. In comparison, an American housewife
required an average of forty-nine hours due, naturally, to a thoroughly rationalized household with mechanized assistance.8
High time then, for a fundamental revolution of the kitchens of
Europe.
This had already been occurring for some time in Sweden. Here,
ideas for a scientifically planned household flourished, even during
wartime. Research institutes undertook detailed studies of household labor, and were soon advocating the employment of sensible
kitchen appliances and making recommendations on choice of
ground plan and measurements. These developments, termed
broadly as Swedish Kitchens, found wider appeal outside of Sweden, above all in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland: In [Swedish
Kitchens], ergonomic, efficiency-promoting and social innovations
were combined with the typical Scandinavian fondness for simple
wooden furniture to achieve a cozy functionalism.9
The first trends towards the integration and standardization of
furniture and appliances was presented as the sink combination:
the refrigerator, oven, boiler, and cupboards were integrated beneath
a bench top and sink, usually made from rust-resistant steel. Indeed,
this arrangement was soon transformed into the normalized
combination, as, towards the end of the decade, the debate over
wide-ranging standardization kitchen elements intensified.10 Rapidly
gaining ground were wide-ranging, tailor-made kitchen combinations (the first of the fitted kitchens in the post-war period) with
integrated stove cooker, refrigerator, and wash trough, low cupboards, wall cupboards, continuous and generously proportioned
working and storage space, as well as a cleverly devised cupboard
interiors. Thanks to varying sizes and implementation styles,
these new kitchens became affordable investments with a rising
49

Combining, standardizing, installing:


11 Sink combination with boiler, refrigerator, and electric stove (1958, Therma).
12 The Therma Norm and later Swiss
Kitchen Norm (SINK norm) visualized in an
advertisement.
13 Fitted kitchen combination from a
kitchen planning book (1958, Franke).

2.5

5m

1416 Apartments on Hohenbhlstrasse,


Zurich-Hottingen (195153, Max E. Hfeli,
Werner M. Moser and Rudolf Steiger):
Entryway with kitchenette; floor plan
(1:200). A small, carefully equipped kitchenette with window to an access balcony.

50

prestige value. L-shaped, U-shaped, G-shaped, single-row, and


galley kitchen designs began to displace the traditional kitchen
compositions.
At the same time, kitchens were becoming more colorful, attractive, and user-friendly, due to the utilization of easily adaptable
synthetic materials, which increasingly supplemented the more traditional materials of wood, steel, glass, and porcelain. Industrially
manufactured and easy to maintain, these materials reduced the
costs of manufacturing and fitting out a kitchen, and required less
cleaning due to their smooth, seamless surfaces. As the magic material (Roland Barthes), plastic enjoyed a reputation as progressive
and appeared to point to a beautiful, colorful future full of surprises.11
The willingness of large sections of the community to radically
change their kitchen and replace it with something completely new,
rooted in the spirit of the age, stemmed in part from decreasing
scepticism regarding proposed reforms of the household. The appliance and kitchen manufacturers marketing mottoes of functionalism and efficiency increasingly fell on receptive ears. Those who
took pride in their houses modernized their kitchens in accordance
with the newest guidelines in order to provide the housekeeper and
wife with a pleasant, practically structured, and well situated working area and this was by no means without an element of obstinacy: A kitchen should be friendly and inspiring for these qualities are what produce the good dishes.12
The fitted kitchen as it is known today a modular construction kit made from standardized appliances and cupboards that are
combinable in any number of ways was preceded by the so-called
unit kitchen. Poggenpohl already presented such a model (the
form 1000) at the Cologne Furniture Fair in 1950; it consisted of
wall and floor cupboards that could be hung or fitted together in
blocks stretching from wall to wall. The main feature of the kitchen
unit was its simplicity in combining individual elements according
to personal requirements. This represented a considerable step forward from the previous, custom-made fitted kitchens. Today, the
difference between fitted kitchens and unit kitchens no longer
applies due to increased standardization and norming of kitchen
constituents (SMS, DIN e.g. Euro-Norm).

17 Adding on, fitting in, and continuing


building for every budget: The Poggenpohl
form 1000 kitchen, presented at the
1950 Cologne Furniture Fair.

The Kitchen Becomes a Machinery Park


In the early sixties, there was a surge in sales of kitchen appliances.
Together with the fitted kitchen, electrical appliances became the
front line in the technical revolution of the household, the unstoppable progress of which changed the way of living in the fifties and
sixties.13 Admittedly, the great majority of electrical household
appliances had already existed since the early twentieth century,
but for the average household they were prohibitively expensive and
far inferior to later models in terms of efficiency. This, however,
changed fundamentally in the post-war period. The appliances became more effective, more portable, and more affordable thanks to
increasing mass production. Consequently, their exclusive status declined and they developed into products of mass consumption in all
strata of society. In addition, the nature of the products themselves
changed: the formerly cumbersome, laboriously operated machines
and appliances were now packaged elegantly and rapidly assumed
51

The transformation of the kitchen into a


machinery park. Refrigerator, electric or gas
stove, and dishwasher remain the basis
equipment of every household.
18 Poster of the Usogas Cooperative in
Zurich, 1956.
19 Advertisement brochure for Wyss-Purana dishwashers, 1960s.
20 Practically every household has one of
these: the toaster.
21 Many might like to have one of these:
The Profi Coffee built-in coffee machine
(2005, Electrolux).
22 Todays refrigerator, a.k.a. Food Center: The exclusive freestanding model with
522 l net volume (2005, Electrolux).

52

23 Home sweet home as a marketing


strategy for new technologies (Electrolux
poster, 1942).

priority position on the wish lists of progress-conscious housewives.


For many, these products imparted an air of the American way of
life. A commentator of the time mused: Today, when a wife finds
a pink mixer or a new-model vacuum cleaner under the Christmas
tree, she is usually very pleased. One can imagine Grandmothers
delight at discovering a wooden spoon or a mop decorated with a
ribbon!14
The first appliance to conquer European kitchens was the refrigerator, followed by the washing machine and electric stove, and
later, the deep freezer and all the other household machines and
appliances. Of course, the size of the kitchen machinery park
was dependent on personal preferences, prestige value, and not least,
the available budget. However, the refrigerator, washing machine,
and electric (or gas) stove became and remain the basic appliances
considered essential to the household.15
Towards the end of the fifties, the refrigerator had become a
widely adopted kitchen appliance thanks to mass production and
massive price reductions. A 1101-Model refrigerator cost 770
deutschmarks in 1952 but only 380 deutschmarks in 1957: a price reduction of around fifty per cent in less than five years.16 A full fridge
rapidly became the symbol of a progressive way of life and a modern mode of household management by the enlightened housewife.
In an Bauknecht advertisement from 1959 we read: There shines a
bright-red wine jelly, and over there sit some balls of anchovy butter
next to the iced fruit salad. The rest of the lovely lemon cream can
wait quietly until morning. It will still be deliciously fresh. But the
empty corner to the right entices most of all, simply because it is
empty and therefore must be filled. Our beautiful Bauknecht ought
to be completely stocked.17 The new and most voluminous appliance would be presented proudly to friends, relatives, and unexpected guests. From now on they could be given adequate refreshment because the cooled ingredients would be promptly made into a
small cool plate or some canaps, as we all know from the colortinted black-and-white photographs from cookbooks of the time.
These morsels today frequently replaced by potato crisps, salty
snacks (party mix), or olives were considered sophisticated and,
to a certain extent, vouched for the good form of the housewife.
Likewise, drinks cooled with ice cubes became a much admired
novelty.
The mid-sixties saw the arrival of box deep freezers. Previously,
expensive methods for deep freezing food were used only in the
military, but now deep frozen food products found their way via
public freezing plants and frozen food chains into these new household appliances. In the early stages, food was frozen for storage in
the enlarged freezer boxes of refrigerators, but the increased availability and popularity of pre-prepared food products required the
manufacture of a dedicated appliance capable of producing arcticlike temperatures. Today, around seventy per cent of households in
central Europe have such an appliance.
With new possibilities for cooling and freezing within the
household, the way in which families stored and consumed goods
changed fundamentally. Refrigerators and freezers increasingly became the larders of our time,18 and pantries and cellars were used
less and less for food storage. What previously one had needed to
buy every day could now be purchased easily on the weekly shop53

24 A full refrigerator something the


whole family can be proud of (Forster
brochure, 1960s).
25 The calling card of the modern housewife: sophisticated hors doeuvres.

ping trip. Consumers were also now prepared to travel longer distance: the increased mobility provided by private cars guaranteed
trouble-free access to new self-service shops and, later, to supermarkets the veritable strongholds of freezing technology19
which sprang up on the margins of cities and contributed to a decline in food retail business in residential areas. In contrast to the
traditional bakeries, butchers shops, grocery outlets, and fruit and
vegetable sellers, with their focus on specific ranges of foods, these
new supermarkets, with their previously unimaginable range of
food articles, must have appeared like the consumer land of milk
and honey.20 Shopping, however, lost its element of communication, i. e. exactly that quality we appreciate today when we visit an
alimentari shop in an Italian provincial city, stocked to the ceiling
with products and run by a shopkeeper who explains the differences between distinctive varieties of pasta. The individual service
and purchasing negotiations between the housewife and the butcher,
fishmonger, and fruit or vegetable seller were replaced by the general purchase of packages standardized by weight and type . . ..21
The packaging itself now had to replace the vendor and advertise
and extol the goods, which were displayed in expanses of cooling
units and wall shelves. A careful balance between covering and displaying the packaged contents became an important design element,
complementing the desires of the shopper and motivating a purchase.
With the increasing availability of convenience-products of
each and every variety, traditional methods of conserving foods
(e.g. bottling, preserving, pickling, smoking) began to die out.22
For housewives and other kitchen managers, the making of jams
and syrups became an almost insurmountable hurdle, and consumers came to rely on finished products, whether with preservatives added or manufactured according to the Demeter standard:
54

2627 New refrigeration and freezing


possibilities have had a decisive impact on
storage and consumption practices.

The responsibility for ones own nutrition was passed on, and
cooking degenerated into following the preparatory instructions
printed on the package. Creamed spinach and pizza were differentiated only by their thawing and cooking times. Groceries turned
into standardized branded products with homogeneous quality
guaranteed.23 And what of the kitchen as a space? As Otl Aicher
put it, it mutated into a branch of the food industry. It seems
that artificial coldness had a decisive influence on consumer sensitivity regarding quality, seasonal availability, and actual taste.
Everything disappeared into the refrigerator even berries, bananas, and melons or was deep-frozen and used later as preference dictated. We read in an advertisement for a deep freezer from
1966: Instead of seven errands per week, now two are enough.
You can also prepare and store additional meals at the same time,
and be ready for unexpected visitors. And thats not all. Youll also
get a completely different feeling a feeling of independence from
shopping lists and seasons. Because summer fruits can now be
enjoyed in winter, too, thanks to the deep freezer.24
Following the widespread purchase of electric washing machines in the sixties, many other electrical appliances conquered the
household with varying degrees of success, changing it into a virtual machinery park: vacuum cleaners, irons, electric razors, drills,
televisions, radios, record players, answering machines; and in the
kitchen: blenders, egg cookers, juicers, toasters, coffee machines,
bread slicers, waffle irons, deep fryers, and electric can openers.
On average, there are around thirty types of electrical appliance in
every household today, helping to make life more enjoyable. The
microwave oven, which found a place in many households from the
eighties onwards, also had a crucial influence on eating habits and
the way food was prepared. It arrived at a particularly convenient
time, coinciding with the declining significance of the family dining
55

2829 Self-service saves time: In the


1950s, the first self-service stores were
opened, where one could shop without
being disturbed by salespersons. Refrigerated and deep-frozen products soon made
up an important part of the offerings in
these new temples of consumption.

30 A common sight in kitchens since the


1980s: the microwave.

community. Now, it was even easier simply to reach into the deep
freezer. Individual menus replaced the monotone character of
the family meal and made it unnecessary to sit around the table together.
The fitted Kitchen as a Standard
The conversion of the kitchen into an arsenal of kitchen machines
and appliances was accompanied by the widespread construction of
fitted kitchens. Architects and planners, and appliance and kitchen
manufacturers promoted these kitchens as the ideal model. In trade
and lifestyle magazines, such as Schner Wohnen and Ideales Heim,
the fitted kitchen was presented in idealized form and as essential
to the modern and rationally managed household. Now only a
fitted kitchen could be a dream kitchen, and consumers responded accordingly. This situation has remained largely unchanged, despite varying utilization preferences, efforts to change
design, and adaptations to ground plans. Like a car, television,
mobile telephone, or summer holidays at the seaside, it seems today
that a fitted kitchen, in which the stove, oven, dishwasher, and
refrigerator can be integrated into the overall design, is a basic,
indispensable requirement.25 In western Germany in the midnineties, fifty per cent of households had a fully fitted kitchen,
while a further twenty-four per cent had at least some elements of
a fitted kitchen.26
There were a number of important factors that aided the spread
of fitted kitchens, one of which was the positive connotations
people attached to the ideas of modern, new, and advanced
associated with this type of design. Then there was the tempting
promise of easing and minimizing household chores by fitting out
kitchens in accordance with ergonomic guidelines and principles of
rational labor management a promise that, over the long term,
turned out to be false. It has long been recognized that the increased mechanization of household chores has had little impact for
the housewife: Although they have changed the home, they have
not brought housewives increased freedom from household drudgery in any tangible way. Research on time budgeting has raised the
question as to whether technology has led to greater flexibility in
housework or to its intensification.27 Rephrased more generally:
At the time when it was closest to being achievable, i. e. the fifties
56

3132 Out of the can and onto the plate:


Finished products and convenience food
have increasingly defined how we eat (following double page spread).

and sixties, the euphoria of more leisure time as the result of


progress collapsed.28 Moreover, in the sixties, people increasingly
had problems finding space for all their kitchen appliances: The
challenge of the next few years lay in more effectively arranging the
kitchen machinery plant, coordinating the kitchen and its appliances and harmonizing form and function.29 Put more simply:
How could as many appliances as possible take up as little space as
possible while remaining easy to use? The answer lay in an increasing standardization of appliances and furniture to enable combination and exchange. In western Germany, these changes were made
by the industry itself; in East Germany, the responsibility was
assumed by the state. Whether using the SINK-, DIN-, or later
EURO-norm, the priority was to create a user-friendly system
of measurement in order to improve coordination among manufacturers, planners, and interior designers. As a consequence of this
development many appliance manufacturers soon began to offer
complete kitchen solutions: standardized assembly-line kitchens
for the assembly-line work in the home. At the same time, manufacturers argued that fears of the uniform kitchen were groundless since whoever visits a kitchen factory or display room will
recognize that such a beautiful and diverse range of kitchens has
never before been available.30
Clearly, however, the reality was somewhat different. As a result
of the mass construction of dwellings in the sixties, the desire to
experiment was limited. While movable structures, flowing spatial
transitions, and rooms tailor-made for new moderns were once
distinguishing features of the modern architectural movement, this
trend now became mired by the unimaginative schematic solutions
and guidelines of the construction industry. The ground plans in
East and West were completely rationalized and built on mass.
The stereotypical development and precise organization of uniform
living rooms left practically no recreational areas for more flexible
use in response to the changing needs of residents. The kitchen space
demonstrated this emphatically: usually combined in the ground
plan with the bathroom/wc to form an inflexible wet-cell block, the
kitchen area was steadily reduced in size and rapidly converted into
a kitchenette (seldom larger than 2026 sq. ft.) of a size that went
beyond requirements dictated by construction costs, the need to
save space, and emergency construction measures.31 This questionable mono-functionalism transformed kitchens ever more frequently
into sober, unimaginatively equipped, uninspiring utility spaces.
The use of white ensured a homogeneous appearance; natural
materials were increasingly replaced by chipboard veneer and a wide
range of plastics. Spatial flexibility was reduced to the replacement
of a refrigerator or stove within the standardized kitchen combination. The personnel operating the kitchen also remained unchanged:
only one person usually female could work in this minimal
kitchen space.
Consequently, the kitchen household, once a widely branching,
spacious network within the own four walls, was transformed into
a sterile and impersonal kitchen cell, adequate for the preparation of
frozen spinach and canned ravioli. In the wake of unbridled optimism and belief in progress, rationalization and industrialization
had demonstrated their negative consequences more swiftly than
expected.
57

3335 The fitted kitchen of the 1980s:


Comfortable, scuffproof, and easy to
clean . . .

36 When the model is more convincing


than what it is meant to resemble: toy
kitchen from the 1970s.

37 A minimal work kitchen in a housing


block, combined with the bath and wc in
order to save building costs: Housing development in AdlikonRegensdorf, Switzerland (196873, Ernst Ghner AG, Steiger
Architekten und Planer, Walter M. Frderer): floor plan, upper floor (1:200).

Functional, Colorful, and Mobile: Kitchen Visions


During the building boom, criticism of the negative consequences of
unrestrained construction increased. As early as 1958, Friedensreich
Hundertwasser stated in his famous Verschimmelungsmanifest gegen
den Rationalismus in der Architektur [Mould Manifesto Against
Rationalism in Architecture]: We must at last put a stop to having
people move in their quarters like chickens and rabbits in their
coops.32 Increasingly sterile, monotonous, and inhospitable,33
architectural and residential landscapes were frequently denounced
for following the principles of functional design, often simply
serving building-industry interests and ignoring peoples emotional
and socio-psychological needs.
More critically focused architects, planners, thinkers, and designers quickly adopted the new slogans of flexibility, mobility, and
variability, which were to lead the way out of the crisis of functionalism. Parallel to events in the socio-political sphere, the time
appeared ripe for new experimental ideas and hypotheses that radically questioned the doctrine of functional design. New architectural visions involved adjustable and interchangeable structures and
constructions, mobile architecture, labyrinths of biomorphic forms,
floating towns comprising spaceship-like bodies, blow-up room
furnishings, and even houses that could be carried from place to
place in a rucksack. Examples include the early works of Coop
60

Himmelb(l)au, Haus-Rucker GmbH, Hans Hollein and Walter


Pichler, the city utopias of Archigram, and the designs by the
Japanese Metabolists. Admittedly, practically all these projects remained unrealized visions, but they were not unimportant for the
further development of architecture. The widely promoted variability of spatial units was manifested in the late sixties in the form of
new, more flexible ground plans, and the willingness of some construction companies to offer residents a say in the design of their
apartments.
This new experimental focus on the design and use of dwellings,
ground plans, and furnishings was also directed at the kitchen space.
Visionary designers worked on the design of new cooking facilities
that were no longer restricted to a specific kitchen space but could be
set up as self-contained, room units in any part in the home. Examples
include the Kugelkche or sphere kitchen (1969/70), which was
designed by Luigi Colani for Poggenpohl and presented as experiment 70 at the Cologne Furniture Fair, the Elektra-Technovision
(196870) by Hasso Gehrmann, and the Softmobil kitchen concept
developed by Coop Himmelb(l)au for EWE from 1974 onwards.
At the time, Colanis vision of a residential environment was
based on the idea that bathroom and kitchen should be grouped together as a functional cell around a central living area. Although
such concepts might have radically questioned previous ideas of residential space, the fact remains that the round kitchen did not contain
much that was innovative, apart from its formal characteristics,
which recall a spaceship capsule and which have once again become
popular. The biomorphic forms and loud colors of the sphere, which
has a diameter of 7.8 ft., tend to obscure the fact that this model
represents a continuation of the housewifes isolation from the rest
of the dwelling: the kitchen as a hermetic food preparation unit,
in which the woman accomplishes all of the kitchen work with the
touch of a button and communicates with the rest of the apartment
via monitors and microphones. Her function as nurturing mother
is emphatically confirmed by the serving hatch leading out of the
uterus-like inner world, which allows her to supply food guaranteeing survival in the world outside.34
Gehrmanns Technovision was also based on the notion of a
central working area in which all activities were carried out. The explanatory material of the time states that the woman no longer goes
to the individual appliances; the appliances come to her. Following
selection of a recipe on the monitor of the control desk, the corresponding appliances and shelves would move into place at the touch
of a button or pedal. All relevant appliances whether an egg
cooker, slicer, infrared grill, toaster, dishwasher, garbage disposal
unit, refrigerator, or pantry would wait until called up by the control desk either in the body of the kitchen apparatus or in laterally
located, rotating cylinders. The most salient feature distinguishing
the Technovision, the worlds first fully automated kitchen,35 from
Colanis sphere was the formers pragmatic openness and active role
as a room divider.
It was a component of Gehrmanns 1965 Total Living project,
which was aimed at creating an intelligent living environment
with interconnected, electronic screens and control desks. Living
areas were to be constructed out of mobile spaces that could be used
flexibly, rather than a rigid honeycomb of rooms.36 The belief that
61

industrial design need not be confined to the design of fashionable


tools and appliances but should also manifest their synergy and system has not lost any of its relevance today.
The work of Colani, Gehrmann, and other visionary kitchen
designers of the sixties, with their exuberant enthusiasm for technology and lively forms, is also linked by the idea of using freely arrangable designs within a living area conceived as a whole. This idea

38 The woman in the kitchen-capsule:


The experiment 70 sphere kitchen
(1969/70, Luigi Colani for Poggenpohl).

was also the basis for Coop Himmelb(l)aus Softmobil from 1974
onwards. Kitchens and working and living areas were to be brought
into close proximity again. Cooking, at least theoretically, was reevaluated: it was no longer to be seen as an obligatory task (for
women) but as an enjoyable and above all communicative activity
(suitable also for men).
Back to the Kitchen/Living Room
Although the world of men began to impinge on the female territory of the kitchen (men as users, not designers), it would be somewhat daring to assert that the very nature of the minimalist working
kitchen was called into question. But the fact remains that at the
end of the seventies, the well equipped but very small kitchenette
came up against ever more frequent opposition. Even foldable
tables and benches used for eating breakfast or small snacks were
labelled unsatisfactory. Breakfast meals such as muesli, slices of
fruit, or a small, seasonal salad placed further pressure on such minimized eating surfaces. Furthermore, the preparation of these meals
required more space, space that had been rationalized away in the
past few decades. The lack of coziness and a sense of well-being in
the kitchen was ultimately traced back to the cold, sterile atmosphere of dull fitted kitchen combinations with their artificial materials.
62

39 Since 1974, beginning with Softmobil,


the Austrian kitchen manufacturer EWE has
worked together with Coop Himmelb(l)au.
With the Mal-Zeit kitchen (1987), the
architects created a heavily awarded design
object for trendsetters. The arrangement
does, however, seem better suited for
staging a single meal rather than feeding
the average family.

40 Elektra-Technovision: The first fully


automated kitchen for the world (1968
70, Hasso Gehrmann for Elektra Bregenz,
following double-page spread).

Since the size of the kitchens could only be modified with


difficulty, the first corrective adjustments to the standard fitted
kitchen were of an aesthetic nature. The compact units were opened
up, creating areas that could contain shelves and display cases for all
types of kitchen utensils and personal knickknacks. Hygienic white
was increasingly replaced by color, and there was a steady increase
in the popularity of rustic kitchen panelling with wood veneer,
and profiled wood and tiling, which aimed to supplement functional modernity with the coziness of earlier living rooms and
eat-in kitchens an aspiration which led to rather dubious results.
Thus a period began in which the kitchen was no longer seen in
terms of covering up primary needs but in terms of luxury as
stressed in the essay in this volume by Gert Khler whereby
factors such as emotionality, style, and taste became increasingly
important.
It was a man who recognized the sign of the times and provided
an important impulse for a general rethinking of the kitchen: Otl
Aichers book Die Kche zum Kochen [The Kitchen for Cooking]
appeared in 1982.37 In place of routine preparation of food in a
cell-like working kitchen with the aid of numerous pre-prepared
products, Aicher advocated cooking and eating as a communal and
communicative experience. Aicher, himself a passionate cook and
gourmet, saw incompetent kitchen planning as the greatest problem:
Designers who do not cook should not be allowed near the
kitchen38 The central tenets of the new kitchen philosophy were
the connection of the kitchen with the living room, the integration
of elements from the restaurant sphere, and the revitalization of the
central kitchen area, through the use of a classic kitchen table and, in
particular, an island work area. The kitchen manufacturer Bulthaup,
which contracted Aichers study, responded by bringing such a
kitchen work-bench on the market in 1984. Since then, it has become the firms brand symbol and has given the general name
kitchen island to the various types and models on the modern
market. In effect, the kitchen island is little more than a new interpretation of the voluminous, free-standing cooking apparatuses that
were prevalent in upper-middle class kitchens of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
Aichers book focused the dissatisfaction of kitchen users. Once
again, the eat-in kitchen appeared to be a real alternative to the
small kitchenette. The average citizen now wanted a return to the
kind of arrangement common in communal flats: the kitchen as a
central meeting point for home life and as a recreational room for
diverse activities, provided this was possible within the confines of
the kitchens ground plan. Today, half of all kitchens in Germany
measure less than 32 sq. ft., and only fourteen per cent are larger
than 50 sq. ft. Nevertheless, it is notable that the type of kitchen
that was more than a dedicated cooking and working space had
never completely died out certainly not in rural areas and not in
large, older apartments. Moreover, the prevalence of eat-in kitchens
had nothing to do with socio-economic status, as confirmed by
Josef Frank, a distinguished modernist par excellence: And we
know that the majority of civilized humanity lives in the kitchen,
not in a kitchenette but in a so-called eat-in kitchen.39 New buildings did not necessarily opt for the functional kitchenette, and not
all kitchen mechanization was seen as a positive thing. As early as
63

41 Camouflaged with traditional materials


and formal borrowings in the country
house style: Only one of the numerous
attempts to make the monotone fitted
kitchen more home-like.

1957, kitchens overloaded with electrical appliances were criticized


as the result of highly effective sales methods, and the disquiet
and unease in the home were attributed to the separation of the
living room and kitchen. It was argued that this arrangement
should be replaced by a studio kitchen, which was open to the
living space and was more of a homely working center than an
isolated machine.40
It would be wrong to describe Aichers Die Kche zum
Kochen [The Kitchen for Cooking] as the absolute starting point
for a kitchen revolution. Rather, planners, builders, and appliance
and kitchen manufacturers geared their products and services better towards market requirements and aimed to provide a solution
to as many different consumer desires as possible. Moreover,
Aichers plea for more communication, fun, and sensory delight in
cooking and eating had little to do with social reality. Although
his request seemed to strike a chord, the actual drivers of change
were somewhat different. As ever, it was women, now even more
burdened than before, who were responsible for the daily provision of food.
In this respect, little has changed today. Seasonal ingredients,
market-fresh goods, or the involvement of the sense in preparing
food remain low priorities for most, representing more often a
preoccupation of sophisticated and extravagant male hobby chefs,
cooking on the weekends or for important guests. Characteristically,
the following comment could only come from a man: Really good
chefs, male and female, work intensively by hand and require relatively little technical equipment. The most important things are a
sharp knife and a wooden cutting board, a few good pots, and a hot
flame.41
Design Kitchens as Showpieces
In the eighties, awareness and sensitivity towards the kitchen space
grew steadily, regardless of existing spatial conditions, types of
utilization, or financial resources. More and more design pieces
and high-tech appliances from the professional sphere found a
place in the kitchen. Aluminium and chrome became trend-setters,
and appliances such as dishwashers and microwave ovens (German
household saturation figures for each in 2003: fifty-seven and
sixty-three per cent respectively) were seen as representing another
66

42 Island workplace designed following


Otl Aicher in a private house near Zurich,
photograph 2005.

43 Even when the 26 sq.-ft. work kitchen


was at its most popular, there were open
kitchens connected directly to the dining or
living areas, photograph 1965.

step towards the labor-free kitchen. Thus the lavishly equipped


kitchen increasingly gained in prestige and is regarded today as an
indicator of a contemporary form of living, in much the same way
that the first refrigerators were in the fifties. Induction ovens,
LCD screens, and wine-tasting shelves are proudly shown to interested guests more often by the men, who have discovered the
kitchen as a new place of self-fulfilment. In contrast, the housewife
and family cook has become a rare species since daily nutrition is
increasingly acquired away from the home: eating in the canteen,
refectory, or diner; eating while travelling in trains or from street
stalls or in the corner fast-food store. Everyday dining is increasingly becoming a minor activity located outside the home, and
cooking at home is becoming an infrequent leisure-time activity.
At best, the family comes together for an evening meal, provided the
television in the living room does not prove too enticing along
with the potato chips, salty snacks, cans of beer, and take-away
kebab.
Today, we frequently experience an extremely paradoxical situation in our kitchens. On the one hand, kitchens are now creative
centers equipped with highly technically advanced refinements;
while on the other hand, no one really cooks in them anymore, or at
least very seldom. Nevertheless, modern kitchens must be allrounders more than ever before, because different people with different cooking and eating preferences now use them at different
times of the day: ambitious, duty-conscious, creative, fast, and critical cooks contrast with ecologically conscious, carefree, indifferent,
or convenience-oriented eaters. Thus, depending on who is cooking
and when, the same kitchen can produce food that is simple, quick,
pre-prepared, environmentally conscious, healthy, or hearty comfort
food.42
Ultimately the increasing aestheticization and formalization of

67

the kitchen reflects a social continuity. Whether upper class salons


or lower class parlors, there have always been rooms that are more
for show than for use.43
Happy Coexistence
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the kitchen is such a
highly complex space with respect to its use and equipment that it
is difficult to form a uniform image of it. The kitchenettes and eatin kitchens in both old and new buildings are too different, as are
the levels of financial investment, the types of use, design tastes,
and levels of importance attached to kitchens by their owners and
users. Apart from certain standardized equipment to be found in
every kitchen, the much proclaimed brave new kitchen manifests
itself as a heterogeneous construct of functional demands and
homely-aesthetic requirements. Important trends, however, include an increased merging of kitchen and living areas as well as a
re-evaluation of the kitchen as a representative prestige object.
These trends stem almost certainly from the conception of dining
and cooking as a culturally significant (recreational) experience
an increasingly important event in our post-industrialized, recreational society.
In the final analysis, however, it does not matter what type of
kitchen we have within our four walls whether it is a kitchenette,

The prestigious designer kitchen.


5253 The Idea and Bludream
kitchens (2000, Snaidero).

69

contains a dining table, or is directly linked to the living area nor is


it important which appliances or digital devices are at our disposal.
Far more critical is the fact that cooking actually takes place in the
kitchen with passion and heart-felt enjoyment and is not reduced
to event cooking or the provision of nutrition without regard for
quality or quantity. Certainly, this can demand more time but it
need not do so. Wonderful meals can be created, despite a restricted
time budget and simple ingredients. In any case, we can be hopeful
that the ability to produce real meals e.g. high-quality goulash,
tender schnitzel, fresh salad with lots of colorful ingredients, hot
Thai curry, sirloin with morel cream sauce, herb-filled tomatoes and
rosemary-baked potatoes, a perfectly layered lasagna or salmon
stuffed with mushrooms, herbs and plenty of garlic (the author
admits some bias) is not lost completely and left entirely to the
professionals of the gastronomic scene.

54 A roomy kitchen-living-dining room


with direct access to the garden.

1 A. A., Kchentypen. Eine Analyse, Das Wohnen 34, no. 8 (1959): 252255; 255.
2 Two publications in particular provide an overview: Michael Andritzky, ed., Oikos
Von der Feuerstelle zur Mikrowelle: Haushalt und Wohnen im Wandel (Gieen: Anabas, 1992), and Elfie Miklautz, Herbert Lachmayer, and Reinhard Eisendle, eds., Die
Kche: Zur Kulturgeschichte eines architektonischen, sozialen und imaginativen Raums
(Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Bhlau, 1999). See also the select bibliography at the
end of this volume.
3 See Michael Andritzky, Balance zwischen Heim und Welt: Wohnweisen und
Lebensstile von 1945 bis heute, in Geschichte des Wohnens, vol. 5: Von 1945 bis heute.
Aufbau Neubau Umbau, ed. Ingeborg Flagge (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1999): 615686; esp. 626 ff.
4 Margret Trnkle, Neue Wohnhorizonte. Wohnalltag und Haushalt nach 1945 in der
Bundesrepublik, in Flagge, Geschichte des Wohnens, 687806; 722.
5 Hans Hilfiker, Apparateindustrie und Kchenbau. Nach einem Referat von Dipl.
Ing. H. Hilfiker, Schwanden, an der Jahrestagung des CECED, Conseil Europen de la
construction lectro-domestique, vom 27. Juni 1967 in Montreux, (Schwanden, Switzerland: Therma AG, n.d.), 56.
6 See Sigfried Giedions landmark work Mechanization Takes Command. A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). First published in German in 1982.
7 See Brigitte Selden, Die Stromlinienform im Haushalt, in Stromlinienform, exhibition catalogue, ed. Claude Lichtenstein and Franz Engeler (Zurich and Baden: Museum fr Gestaltung Zrich and Lars Mller, 1992): 121127.
8 Kaethe Lbbert-Griese et al., Die moderne Kche (Hildesheim and Darmstadt:
Werkhof Arbeitsgemeinschaft Die moderne Kche e.V., 1956): 1112.
9 Ruth Hanisch and Mechthild Widrich, Architektur der Kche. Zur Umwertung
eines Wirtschaftsraums in der europischen Architektur des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, in Die Kche: Zur Kulturgeschichte eines architektonischen, sozialen und
imaginativen Raums, ed. Elfie Miklautz, Herbert Lachmayer, and Reinhard Eisendle
(Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Bhlau, 1999): 1747; 35.
10 See the essay by Christina Sonderegger in this volume.
11 Alexandra Binnenkade, Eine Kche soll freundlich und inspirierend sein. Daraus
entstehen die guten Mens Werbung und Widerstand zum Thema der Einbaukche,
in: Perlon, Petticoats und Pestizide: Mensch-Umwelt-Beziehung in der Region Basel
der 50er Jahre, ed. Arne Andersen (Basel and Berlin: Reinhardt, 1994): 150153; 151.

71

12 The motto of the essay by Alexandra Binnenkade comes from Was Basler Frauen
von ihrer Kche halten. Eine Umfrage des Basler Frauenvereins, ausgewertet von Karl
Wunderle, Wirtschaft und Verwaltung 22 (1963): 738; 36.
13 Trnkle, Neue Wohnhorizonte, 749.
14 Janet L. Wolff, Kaufen Frauen mit Verstand? Ein Leitfaden zum Verstndnis der
Frau von heute und zur Beeinflussung ihrer Kaufwnsche (Dsseldorf: Econ, 1959):
183.
15 Today, practically every household has a refrigerator; over ninety per cent have
their own washing machine and an electric or gas stove. See Alphons Silbermann, Die
Kche im Wohnerlebnis der Deutschen. Eine soziologische Studie (Opladen: Leske +
Budrich, 1995): 8385.
16 Ullrich Hellmann, Knstliche Klte: Die Geschichte der Khlung im Haushalt,
Werkbund-Archiv, vol. 21 (Giessen: Anabas, 1990): 240.
17 Cited in Arne Andersen, Der Traum vom guten Leben. Alltags- und Konsumgeschichte vom Wirtschaftswunder bis heute (Frankfurt am Main and New York:
Campus, 1999): 96.
18 Trnkle, Neue Wohnhorizonte, 751.
19 Hellmann, Knstliche Klte, 261.
20 On developments in Switzerland, see Philipp Gysin and Thomas Poppenwimmer,
Die Geburt der Selbstbedienung in der Schweiz oder die Rationalizierung des
Verkaufs, in Andersen, Perlon, Petticoats und Pestizide, 154156.
21 From an early critique of the consequences of the self-service shop in the United
States, quoted in Hellmann, Knstliche Klte, 263.
22 See Eva Stille, In Keller und Kammer: Vorratswirtschaft frher, in Andritzky,
Oikos, 215226.
23 Hellmann, Knstliche Klte, 263.
24 Electrolux advertisement for deep freezers, using the slogan What does your
leisure time have to do with deep freezing?, Interieur 12, no. 4 (1966).
25 Trnkle, Neue Wohnhorizonte, 755.
26 Silbermann, Die Kche im Wohnerlebnis der Deutschen, 66.
27 Judy Wajcman, Technik und Geschlecht: Die feministische Technikdebatte (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 1994), 136; originally published as Feminism
Confronts Technology (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1991). More on this subject can be found in the essay by Marion von Osten.
28 Binnenkade, Eine Kche soll freundlich und inspirierend sein, 153.
29 Rita Mielke, Die Kche. Geschichte, Kultur, Design (Berlin: Feierabend: 2004): 24.
30 [Editor], Die moderne Kche: das Cockpit der Wohnung, Das Wohnen 48, no.
11 (November 1973): 311.
31 Trnkle, Neue Wohnhorizonte, 758.
32 Quoted in Ulrich Conrad, Programme und Manifeste zur Architektur des 20.
Jahrhunderts, Bauwelt Fundamente, vol. 1 (Braunschweig and Wiesbaden: Vieweg,
1981): 149152; 149.
33 Sociologists were among the most radical critics of architecture and urban planning. See e.g. Alexander Mitscherlich, Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Stdte: Anstiftung
zum Unfrieden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965).
34 Hanisch and Widrich, Architektur der Kche, 3839.
35 Pamphlet from Elektra Bregenz, 1971.
36 Hasso Gehrmann, Biologik und absolute Relativitt, typescript, 2004.
37 Otl Aicher, Die Kche zum Kochen. Das Ende einer Architekturdoktrin (Munich:
Callwey, 1982). See also: Michael Andritzky, Gemeinsam statt einsam: Otl Aicher
und die Kchenphilosophie von bulthaup, in Andritzky, Oikos, 136138. Otl
Aicher (19221991), Graphic artist, designer, and author, co-founder and, from 1962 to
1964, Rector of the Academy of Design in Ulm. In 1972 he became renowned for his
pictograms for the Olympic Games in Munich. His work in creating the design image
of companies like Braun, Lufthansa, and ZDF has been no less groundbreaking.
38 Aicher, Die Kche zum Kochen, 6.
39 Josef Frank, Der Volkswohnungspalast: eine Rede, anlsslich der Grundsteinlegung, die nicht gehalten wurde, Der Aufbau 1, no. 7 (August 1926): 107111; 109.
40 H[ans] Bisch, Wie verschnern wir die Arbeit der Hausfrau?, Bauen + Wohnen
11, no. 1 (January 1957): 2930.
41 Helmut Krauch, Die Kche der 70er Jahre, in Andritzky, Oikos, 133135; 133.
42 Elisabeth Leicht-Eckhardt, Ausstattungsvarianten und Nutzungsformen von
Kchen vom achtzehnten Jahrhundert bis heute, in Miklautz, et al., Die Kche,
161206; 200.
43 Trnkle, Neue Wohnhorizonte, 765.

72

74

Gert Khler

The Kitchen Today. And a Little Bit Yesterday. And Tomorrow, Too, Of Course.
On Kitchen Styles and Lifestyles

A well-known writer in his field drives his daughter off to her university, and finds himself telling her friends while sitting around
the table at the local Italian place how hed given her a hand-made
cookbook containing their mutual favorite recipes, to accompany
her on her lifes path. Reaction: amazement all around. Not so much
because the man could cook. But to have all your favorite recipes
compiled as a personal cookbook: Wow!!!
The writer, however, began to brood: what was so remarkable,
possibly even strange, about that? That he was encouraging his
daughter to cook? That you need to learn how to do something in
order to do it well? That he had little confidence in the student dining hall? That here was a worried father afraid his daughter might
fall prey to bulimia or its opposite? Whatever they might have been
thinking, the real reason for his giving his daughter the cookbook
was something different: he simply did not want to let the old
recipes die out.
Apparently, the moral goes, the world of the hearth and home
and children still has the power to surprise and amaze, despite the
fact that relevant magazines have already written the book on better
living and eating, and always under the banner of the newest trends.
Which has produced a strange kind of ignorance. The newest trend
happens roughly once a year; kitchens themselves are designed for
twenty years. Which means that only one in every twenty occupants
in Germany works in a modern kitchen, and the other nineteen, by
contrast, are left to their own devices in unmodern ones. The embittered housewife stands over her pots on the stove, stirring their contents half-heartedly because shes been banned from modernity ...
Or else it doesnt matter to her because even after a year she still
hasnt gotten used to most of todays appliances which would suggest that perhaps she doesnt really need them ...?

Pigs head (in the kitchen of Swiss artist


Werner Luginbhl), Mtschwil, 1969. The
kitchen as a central human experience, regardless of age, cooking talent, furnishings,
or menu.

More Kitchen Doesnt Necessarily Mean More Cooking


The kitchen has always been a central experiential space for humans,
whether gathered around the fire in a stone-age cave, gnawing chunks
of meat off the bone, or grilling the ribs in a modern, multifunctional
oven. On the other hand, according to the website of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Die Moderne Kche [The Modern Kitchen Association],
the kitchen has long ceased to be merely a place for nutritional preparation. It is a site of encounter and communication.1
75

The author of that sentence, written in 2004, is an optimist. The


kitchen as a site of encounter and communication that presumes
not only that men and women speak to each other, but that they do
so in the kitchen. Both notions are open to dispute.
On the other hand, the anonymous author is also a closet pessimist. He talks of the kitchen not as a site for cooking, but for
nutritional preparation a term that like satiation supplement

Despite the expensive technological furniture of todays kitchens, real cooking


is increasingly becoming a leisure-time
activity, a special event. Does anyone still
follow the nutritional preparation routine of cooking during the week using all
four burners?
1 Woman cooking, 1977.
23 Luxuriously furnished kitchens in the
high price range, 2002/03.

76

comes straight out of the good old days of the German Democratic
Republic. It leaves open the question whether this preparation
simply means unpeeling the plastic off a frozen pizza or slipping a
TV dinner into a microwave, or actually cooking a side of roast beef
with the aid of red wine, currant jelly, and cream, and serving it
along with mashed potatoes (real potatoes actually peeled and
mashed!) and a side of hand-sliced (!) green beans sauted in butter
and summer savory. The vague phrasing of nutritional supplement
suggests bad experiences.
Not necessarily cooking, but communicating examining this
jumble of ideas, we can just begin to make out what a typical
kitchen of today is. It is more than the sum of its appliances and
functions, which was assumed for the Frankfurt Kitchen of the
twenties, the epitome of the functional kitchen. In fact, its functionality was all show; the kitchen itself was miles away from the
real thing, as was amply demonstrated at the time in an extensive
study.2
Todays kitchen has a considerably higher range of appliances
than before, but it is far less suited to its original purpose, i. e.
cooking. It may in fact be geared more for anticipated communication, even if not necessarily between men and women. As everyone knows, at parties everyone ends up sooner or later in the
kitchen. Along with all the new appliances and additional space
comes an increase in pre- or partly prepared foods that in fact
interfere with the kitchens real purpose: cooking. The appliances
make cooking more convenient, and the space makes it even
more fun which may be why hardly anyone does it anymore.
Most people have two different modes of behavior: whipping
up quick meals during the week and using expensive cookbooks
and gadgets for their nutritional preparation on the weekends.
An odd phenomenon indeed, one worth looking at more
closely.
Gauging the Bandwidth
Ill begin by examining our object of desire, the contemporary
kitchen, in terms of two prototypes that could not be more different
from each other. On the one side of the spectrum we have the traditional-romantic kitchen, which is particularly nicely illustrated
by Christopher Alexander in his A Pattern Language:

Think a lot about yourself in the kitchen, the other people you
live with, and what kinds of activities are important. Kitchens
like all other rooms are composed of centers .... Each one ...
will receive your full attention as to its own organization and
how it relates to the ones already in place. In the end they will all
support each other in a collective strength which gives you,
whether your kitchen is small or large, modest or high end, a
comfortable place to work and just be.... The table will be the
first and most important center. It will be where you share meals,
talk, work, and relax with a cup of coffee. Even if you can have
only a small table, it should be in the best position, a place where
you really want to be because of light, view, and a sheltered position in regard to traffic in the room. The table is the source of
pleasure and of practical work together. A low-hanging lamp
provides a pool of light in the evening which will be more com77

Successful kitchens according to Christopher Alexander:


4 Kitchen of the George Residence, Pleasant Hill, CA (1997, Christopher Alexander
and the Center for Environmental Structure).
5 Make the room beautiful and comfortable. Kitchen in a pre-war building in
Zurich, 2005.
6 Kitchen of the Heisey Residence, Austin,
TX (1995, Christopher Alexander and the
Center for Environmental Structure).

78

fortable than homogeneous lighting .... Make the room beautiful


and comfortable: this is what is important.3
As Kurt Tucholsky once said, equally eloquently and maliciously,
about Bertolt Brecht: Even reading the ABCs in a measured singsong will draw the crowds. Alexanders Pattern Language is
fraught with a similar momentum and simplicity, as if it were being
delivered by Moses from Mount Sinai only now instead of ten
commandments there are two hundred fifty-three.4 Despite all the
individual banalities (one hardly needs patterns to think of putting
the kitchen table next to the window!) the book manages to strike a
tone of longing that openly expresses what we all secretly wish for:
wholeness. The unguardedness of Alexanders tone makes him so
vulnerable that one loses all interest in attacking him.
One thing is sure: in Alexanders kitchen traditional cooking
is the rule. That means following Grandmothers recipe, albeit
with an occasional refinement reflecting a certain nostalgia for the
upper class: the stew is made with real chicken broth instead of
bouillon cubes, and the vegetables are supplemented with fresh
thyme, clove, and morels things that never would have made
their way into Grandmas original recipe let alone been considered
edible.
On the opposite end of the spectrum of contemporary kitchens
lets call it the sober modernist end we find the most technically
advanced house in Germany, the Sobek House R128 that Werner
Sobek built for his wife and himself in 19992000, a sequel to Mies
van der Rohes 1951 Farnsworth House. Mies would have liked
Sobeks building, and would have envied him the technological intelligence Sobek availed himself of in pursuing his intended aesthetic
aim: exclusively horizontal and vertical lines, and as far as possible
nothing that might interfere with them. So none of the cabinet doors
have handles, the familiar wall-cupboard has vanished entirely, the
smooth doors and the refrigerator open by virtue of a simple wave
of the hand registered by microwave sensors.5 The houses almost
square floor plan is articulated on the kitchen level only in air
space by means of the steps, dining table, refrigerator, and kitchenette; the view in all directions remains open.
Whether or not the technological genius at work here detracts
from the aesthetic intention of inhabiting a house that is a component of the environment,6 may be viewed differently by a visitor
than by the houses owners, who deal with its amazing facilities on a
daily basis:
The operation of auxiliary functions should be easy and independent, in the sense that it is always the user who applies this
life-simplifying technology. The personification of technological
devices considering the computer as a co-worker for example
is something I reject. I am more interested in technological
procedures that make life easier and for that reason can be interpreted just a little as a luxury. It is important that these technologies, once applied, fulfill their desired functions in the best way
possible, that they are robust and simple to use. Robustness here
means combining sensory features in order to prevent unwanted
effects. So, for example, we have infrared sensors combined with
microwave sensors. None of this is particularly difficult or in79

volved, and it provides us with considerably greater comforts,


which one soon becomes accustomed to.7
It may also be considerably more expensive, but this isnt the place
to consider that, especially since these things can be mass-produced,
and should they be mass-installed into future kitchens, prices would
drop.
Alexander Contra Sobek
Neither of these two architects would feel at home in the kitchen of
the other, yet both kitchens are without a doubt contemporary.
Even Alexanders kitchen is inconceivable without the (more) ample space available today, where the living area per person runs
around 485 sq. ft. Unlike in the twenties, the kitchen today is no
longer about the efficient accommodation of functions, but about
luxury.
This goes for the entire home as well, if you consider a more or
less representative cross section of the population. For the first time
in the history of Central Europe every man and woman has access
to an adequately equipped home at an affordable price, or at a price
made so by the state through a social housing plan or rent subsidies.8 This could hardly be said for the twenties, hence the Frankfurt Kitchen and Munich and Stuttgart and Hamburg Kitchens, all of which were reduced to their bare functions, regardless
of whether they had a dining table or not. And this was considered
an achievement, not because they had finally succeeded in reducing
the kitchen (or other rooms as well) to their basic function, but
because working-class apartments could thus be enlarged enough
so that they could even function at all!
The sociologist Alphons Silbermann, who has personally investigated contemporary living conditions, attributes changes in
domestic behavior, including the experience of the kitchen, to
the following points:

The general improvement in quality of life, often termed by


sociologists the elevator effect, that attended the economic
boom in the Federal Republic.
The expansion in education, evident primarily in the greatly
increased numbers of women with higher degrees.
The greater consumption orientation and market dependency
of private households.
An ongoing individualization in all areas of life, and not only in
terms of reducing household size, but also, for example, in terms
of family law, the job market, consumer habits, or leisure activities, which involves the increasing superimposition of horizontal
differences (life styles) on vertical ones (classes).
The weakening of the social system by economic crises and mass
unemployment.
Scarcity of homes, increasing homelessness, and the new
poverty as expressions of an growing aggravation of the situation of minorities, which has run parallel to the economic boom,
and not least of the migration patterns that also affect
Germany.9

80

710 Sobek House R128, Stuttgart


(19992000, Werner Sobek). Kitchen level
with detail views; living and dining areas.

81

Silbermann discovered in his study a new model of the kitchen:


the kitchen that opens out to another room.10 This is by no means
the only valid model; it has more to do with differentiating according to different parameters, as his detailed study shows:
By way of a summary, the results concerning kitchen use
treated in this chapter all indicate that a use pattern based on
single-function kitchen use, which remains strongly oriented to
meal preparation, is still dependent on a number of things: first,
on the size of the kitchen; second, on the life circumstances of
the individual or the household i.e. age, gender, type of
dwelling; third, on lifestyle, which is expressed in everyday
activity and aesthetic sense and is bound to specific life circumstances. Thus do the lifestyles and domestic habits of younger
people demonstrate more than those of the older population
tendencies to expand kitchen use in terms of increasing multifunctionality.11
In terms of finding out what kind of kitchens are actually in demand
today, we can confidently fall back on Silbermann: his young people, advocates of the open kitchen, are not only ten years older
since his investigation, they are more numerous as well. The only
problem might be that the great majority of apartments still have the
old kitchen cells; and they can hardly be renovated according to
the open kitchen model since most of them in the Federal Republic
are rental units. Only in 1970 were housing construction standards
revised to include standards for such kitchens as well. Their raison
dtre was clearly that of social housing inherited from the twenties
and thirties. Accordingly, the rooms were designed around a given
type and number of items of furniture, the dimensions of which
were treated as sacrosanct. Hand in hand, the DIN-standards and
11 The desire for better connections
between the kitchen and the dining / living
area was often only timidly pursued.
Photograph 1963.

82

the Neufert12 played their fateful and as yet unsurmountable game


here as well.
Today the tendency is definitely in favor of the open kitchen,
no matter how great the practical obstacles may be.13

1213 Standard floor plans from the


1970s: on the left, a separate kitchen;
on the right a narrow door connects the
kitchen and dining area.

Beyond the Bandwidth: the Usual


That Werner Sobeks kitchen is an open one is indisputable. With
Alexanders, on the other hand, matters are not so clear, especially
when what we have to go on are examples from A Pattern
Language, which is expressly oriented to well-founded solutions
rather than to prototypes. On the one hand, Silbermanns multifunctional kitchen is connected with other rooms, although that
does not really make it open; on the other hand, if it is large
enough, one can consider it to be so.
Presumably Sobek and Alexander would find each others
kitchens appalling regardless of how willing they each were to
accept it as reflecting the taste of a strange, though hardly illegal
species. Alexanders would undoubtedly be a nightmare for any
cleaning lady. But precisely because of its imperfection, outdatedness, and rough edges, it epitomizes comfort and coziness. It seems
familiar and awakens memories of times when people trudged
through the fields by the light of a kerosene lamp. This is not meant
as a caricature: the longing for wholeness is an immense force.
Alexanders kitchen is not, by the way, particularly cheap.
Finely crafted rustic cupboards, hutches, tables, and chairs all
of which we can take for granted with Alexander cost a great deal
of money.
The Sobek installation of storage and cooking functions is no
doubt easy to clean; which is good, because it demands to be cleaned
immediately after use. But even a pile of vegetables on the cutting
board would be a disruption of order!

However, neither of these two prototypically opposite kitchens


has much to do with reality, i.e. the usual kitchen to be found in
the average central European home. This assertion is supported by
Silbermanns perception, which he corroborated by visiting less upscale kitchens:
The rustic kitchen model, which includes a great deal of visible
natural wood and is correspondingly decorated in colors generally considered as warm, was predominantly popular, we determined, amongst older persons, persons with a lower level of edu83

cation, and people from low- and middle-income households.


[It] can be said that these people express their idea of homey
comfort in the kitchen.
Equally unambiguous sociodemographic conditions can be
discerned for the model of the modern or avant-garde
kitchen . . .. The deciding factor here is age. Only in groups
of those under forty-nine years old did we find the majority
having this preference; and even here, it seemed that the
younger they were, the more strongly they had it. Here, too,
the level of education played an important role; the more
highly educated a person was, the more likely he or she was
to prefer the modern style.14
Simplistically put, this means that the elderly, the uneducated, and
the indigent all feel at home in Christopher Alexanders kitchen
world, while the young and intelligent are inclined to Sobeks (if
only because they may well be the only ones who can operate it!).
Unfortunately things are not so simple. For even if that last
statement may be correct, the first is not, for two reasons. For one,
the kitchen that Alexander presents as successful is hardly one that
low-income people could afford. The surrogate of this surrogate,
however i.e. the rustic kitchen timbered together out of particle
board from the local Home Depot will lack the aesthetic quality

The homey feel of wood in contrast with


gleaming steel and aluminum.
14 Kitchen in the popular country house
style. This type can be had in all price
categories.
15 Kitchen, Sobek House R128, Stuttgart
(19992000, Werner Sobek).

84

that Alexanders kitchen emanates in the photographs. The difference would be immediately noticeable.
Another point is that the young people in Silbermanns study
will naturally gradually become older and then, a strange metamorphosis, they will begin to prefer the traditional kitchen! Even
if that were not the case, if the younger people were to maintain
their preferences in old age, too, then the devotees of the traditional
kitchen would certainly die out which is not the case: the traditional kitchen remains quite popular, as a visit to any kitchen department store will show. The desire for wholeness only increases
with age and seeks out familiar forms which are not so familiar in
fact, since it was the modern kitchen that one knew in ones
youth (which unduly abridges sociological findings, but is nevertheless remarkable as a phenomenon). The familiar is apparently
just as much a projected fiction as is the modern. After all, brushed
steel (the sandblasted banisters feel satiny-smooth, raves
Sobek15), microprocessors, and countersunk door knobs are more
than just functions; they stand for something. With all their satinysmoothness, they conspicuously display how practical, functional,
and future-oriented they are. These home owners are firmly
planted in the here-and-now and want to make sure that everyone
knows it.
The kitchen as a site for self-fashioning and display, where it is
lifestyle that gets foregrounded rather than the capacity and technological facilities for nutritional preparation. This is a luxury issue,
no question about it. People who have difficulty even buying a stove
for cooking and finding room for it will take what they can get.
Design only enters the picture when surplus has become the rule.
In this respect a great deal really has changed since the days of
the Frankfurt Kitchen. Then, a stove for cooking was installed
and almost ostentatiously made to fit in. The fitted kitchens of the
fifties and sixties underscored this: with prefab furniture installed,
there was little room for anything else, and the space was used one
hundred percent. The factory of the housewife was set until new
possibilities brought with them new needs. As Michael Andritzky
summarizes: The working kitchen is out, and the kitchen is opening
itself up again as a living space. Its sensory qualities have been rediscovered, but are hardly used: no one remembers how to cook
anymore. The nostalgic longing for the lost warmth of the fire is
reflected in the new interior dcor the functional kitchen with
crown glass. A society of affluence has taken root; the days of
pinching pennies are over.16

16 Kitchen as stage: bulthaup b3, 2004


(following double-page spread).

Coming Soon . . .
Social realities reflected in kitchen design can be documented to
the present day and are nothing to be particularly surprised about.
The newest trend has been to shift from a permanent, static fitted
kitchen to a modularized one. Although it sounds like just a
catchy term for the fact that refrigerators and dishwashers are separate appliances, this actually has to do with something that intersects with the desire for more space, for the open kitchen: the
needs of the modern nomad who, fleeing the specter of unemployment, must move from one city to the next, or at least from apartment to apartment. The modularized kitchen basically means that
kitchen furniture, which we earlier on gave a half-life of twenty
85

years, now in these modern times tend to outlast the average length
of occupancy in an apartment or house. Flexibility is everything,
and as long as we are being hounded by the Furies of unemployment, then at least the kitchen, our homely hearth, will preserve the
sense of continuity. Finally we are seeing the actualization of the
1920s avant-garde dream, the dream of the modern nomad, as formulated by Ludwig Hilberseimer: In case one must move house, a
moving van is no longer necessary; all one needs to pack now are
suitcases.17
The newest concept from the Bulthaup company, which Otl
Aicher used to design for in his day, goes a step further. Now or
better: the day after tomorrow, when we will have more room
we can have more than just modules, we can have our own kitchen
wall, installed in front of the existing one. Previously, kitchen planning was dictated mainly by the floor plan. With Bulthaup b3, the
kitchen evolves from the wall, or more specifically from the functional wall. Furniture and horizontal panels can now for the first
time be freely suspended from it. All Bulthaup b3 elements such as
cupboards, sideboards, lights, and appliances become functional
carriers within a creative overall plan of the wall. From a technical
perspective, the functional wall is a highly stable steel skeleton ....18
though hardly as easy to take with you as Hilberseimers suitcase
was.
The increased application of computer technologie will turn
everyday life in the kitchen upside down. Intelligent networked
household appliances will take over burdensome routine work.
There are already prototypes for intelligent refrigerators. A touchscreen allows kitchen appliances like the stove and the dishwasher to
be centrally controlled. The screenfridge can download videomails
or recipes from the internet. It oversees expiration dates and automatically organizes what needs to be restocked from the supermarket online or by fax.19
How will history continue? One thing we can be sure of is that
industry will go on inventing machines that make physical labor
easier for the housewife or househusband by encumbering intellectual instead of sensory faculties she or he will have to comprehend
the operating instructions after all. Machines that increasingly are
being designed for multiple uses and thus conform to the trend in
kitchens: mobility and multifunctionality: We will have to rethink
leisure and work, which means likewise that we will have to redesign the space in our houses. For me, the kitchen/ home office is
an ideal foundation for this new thinking. With the help of new
electronic components and even new materials, such a kitchen could
no doubt be mutifunctionally designed so that it can be used both
for cooking and as a modern office space.20
The Kitchen Office as a Vision of the Future?
Cynics can make their own calculation: a home for living and working, with a kitchen of variously functioning appliances, serves as little for cooking as the office does for work. In times of structural
mass unemployment we can afford little more than a studio apartment the freelancer meets the multifunctional kitchen, modularized for the quick move.
And here we would find ourselves back where the children once
did their homework at the kitchen table while Mother brandished
88

her cooking spoon: the nineteenth-century working-class tenement.


As the table shows, this is already the situation for nineteen percent
of families today. The only differences would be that now the father,
along with his computer, would also be sitting at the table, calling to
have a pizza delivered from the videophone in the refrigerator. It is
no longer the stove, the hearth, that is the center of the family, but
the microwave oven/washing machine, where you can heat up a
frozen dinner while washing your clothes. And a large percentage of
the money one earns with ones side jobs and freelance work goes
into the pockets of the electric company, because a rather unpleasant, but little considered side effect of all these innovations is that
they only function when there is enough juice coming out of the
wall socket. If everyone is to be communicating with everyone else,
then we will all have to stand at attention around the clock, in
standby mode. According to a prognosis of the Fraunhofer Institute, by the year 2010 the use of communications and information
devices in the household will have increased electricity consumption
by forty-five percent.
And the liberation of women that in the twenties the Frankfurt
Kitchen was supposed to hasten on? Well, it was a rather strange
theory anyway to think one could liberate woman by first making
her a factory worker in the home. She was, in fact, doubly cut off
from urban life, first through her own isolation in the kitchen cell

1719 Transition from the living room to


the kitchen, both furnished in bulthaup b3.
1819 The b3 functional wall on which
variously sized components, appliances,
and furniture can be hung.
Here is what the manufacturer has to say
(Bulthaup press release, 2004):
Bulthaup firmly believes in using genuine
products the design should not pretend
to be something that it isnt. This demand
for authenticity, combined with the lightness of the products, dovetail into a consistently clear design concept. At Bulthaup,
there is no place for faade, arbitrariness,
or forced extravagance. No flourishes, no
fanciful edges and no illusory details mar
the pure form that takes on a sculpted
quality as a result.

89

and then through that of the housing development, Mays suburban satellite orbiting around the city. What was originally considered a building block of the minimal existence home, a beneficial
measure for reducing the enormous housing shortages in cities, became a trap for the housewife. The few square feet of rationalized
space made it imposssible to do much more in it than cook, uncoupled from the the family, who were waiting in the next room for
their meal to be served. The emergency measure had become a dismal standard.21
The liberation of the housewife was hastened (if unintentionally)
by Otl Aichers 1982 Kche zum Kochen. Here liberation had to
do quite simply with the increase in floor space mentioned earlier.
Anyone who had a lot of space, enough so that he could install one
of Aichers kitchens, would naturally feel less functionalized: Otl
Aicher did not especially design his ideal communication-oriented
kitchen with either men or women in mind. But he succeeded in
stripping off the corset of the post-war kitchen, in which more
women than men on average were confined.22
And what sort of kitchen belongs to the respected author mentioned
at the beginning of this essay whom, perhaps significantly, we discovered not at home but in an Italian restaurant? After all we have
learned so far, we might find him in a technologically well equipped
but cozy kitchen la Alexander, albeit of a somewhat different aesthetic mold: the elevated rustic kitchen would be too much ...
In fact he prepares his traditional househusband fare those
remarkable hamburgers! in a home office/living room/kitchen.
And even today he still has not figured out how to work all the
devices.
Percentage of those surveyed who undertake the following activities in the kitchen

20 Activities conducted in the kitchen.


21 Time spent in the kitchen in Germany,
hourly average per day.

cooking/preparing meals
eating breakfast
holding conversations other
than during mealtimes
eating dinner
eating lunch
listening to the radio/to music
reading newspapers/magazines
repairing
writing activities
mending and ironing
laundry washing/drying/folding
polishing/caring for shoes
pursuing hobbies
reading books
talking on the telephone
playing with children
playing games with other adults
doing homework
percentage sum

total

90

west

east

men

97 %
83 %
83 %
83 %
79 %
75 %
67 %
59 %
52 %
51 %
44 %
38 %
38 %
34 %
33 %
29 %
26 %
19 %
986 %

women

most common

least common

1 person 2 person 3 to 4 person 5+ person


household household household household

22 The return of the kitchen as an inspiring, poetic space for a variety of activities,
from cooking and eating, to having discussions, communicating, working, and simply
passing time.

91

1 AMK Service GmbH, http://www.amk.de/ratgeber.htm (accessed 31 May, 2005).


2 On the basis of reports by housewives, the Reichsforschungsgesellschaft fr
Wirtschaftlichkeit im Bauwesen (RFG) [Reich Research Commission for Building
Construction Efficiency] investigated the quality of the Frankfurt Kitchen in a report
on the Praunheim experimental housing development and came upon a series of
functional deficiencies resulting partly from the kitchens exaggerated purpose. The
commission determined that of the eighteen pre-labeled stock bins, around twelve
[were] unnecessary. The room was not entirely useable due to the permanently
installed furniture, which could not be adapted to multiple needs. Quite often the
residents indicated that the kitchen was too narrow for an efficient household since
most of them wanted to use it for other work as well, and because it was also often
necessary for more than one person to be in the kitchen at the same time. However,
the RFG affirmed Ms. Schtte-Lihotzkys positive attempt, which nevertheless
overshot its goal through excessive organization (Reichsforschungsgesellschaft fr
Wirtschaftlichkeit im Bauwesen e.V., Bericht ber die Versuchssiedlung in Frankfurt
a.M. Praunheim 2, special issue 4, Group IV, no. 1 [April 1929]: 2230). The emancipatory project, which aimed to provide individuals with greater freedom by minimizing unproductive work, was neutralized by the wide-ranging standardization of
requirements and the functionalization of integrated relations.
3 http://www.patternlanguage.com/kitchen/keyissues3.htm (accessed 31 May, 2005).
See also Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein et al. A Pattern
Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
4 This impression is consciously invoked. On the website, for example, next to the
heading Create Your Own Kitchen, the fragment of Michelangelos ceiling in the
Sixtine Chapel is shown where God endows man with a soul through his outstretched
finger. Create your own kitchen?
5 The entire, highly complicated process is described in detail, along with an overview
of the houses sophisticated technological features, in a documentation in Arch+ 157
(September 2001): 3055.
6 Werner Sobek, Sobeks Sensor, interview with Nikolaus Kuhnert und Angelika
Schnell, Arch+ 157 (September 2001): 2429; 24.
7 Ibid., 25.
8 This is not to say that certain social groups, single mothers for example, do not remain faced with considerable difficulties. But in terms of the average, the provision of
housing remains better now than it has ever been before.
9 Alphons Silbermann, Die Kche im Wohnerlebnis der Deutschen: Eine soziologische
Studie (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1995): 2728.
10 Ibid., 59.
11 Ibid., 112.
12 On Neufert, see footnote 2 in the essay by Brigitte Kesselring in this volume.
13 One interesting finding might be that kitchens become more open the less they are
cooked in, because the problem of cooking odors is no longer so great. The propagandist for American kitchens, Adolf Loos, once suggested, both pointedly and imperiously, that it would be very good for human nutrition if we could cook without it
stinking ... I dont understand why food has to stink, to have such an unsavory odor
.... Cauliflower and cabbage, on which chamber pots were being emptied only days
before, can simply be done without. (Adolf Loos, Die moderne Siedlung (1926), in
Adolf Loos. Smtliche Schriften in zwei Bnden, edited by Franz Glck, vol. 1 (Vienna
and Munich: Herold, 1962): 402428; 414.
14 Silbermann, Die Kche, 149.
15 Werner Sobek interview, Arch+ 157, 25.
16 Michael Andritzky, introduction to essay by Helmut Krauch, Die Kche der 70er
Jahre, Oikos Von der Feuerstelle zur Mikrowelle. Haushalt und Wohnen im Wandel,
ed. Michael Andritzky (Giessen: Anabas, 1992): 133.
17 Ludwig Hilberseimer, Groszstadtarchitektur (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1927): 19.
18 Bulthaup press release, April 2004 (http://www.uk.bulthaup-press.net/, accessed 25
August 2005).
19 Jochen Dietrich and Lisa Vieth, Die Kche der Zukunft, WDR Ratgeber Bauen
und Wohnen (21 January 2000), http://www.wdr.de/tv/ardbauen/archiv/000115_4.html#0
(accessed 31 May 2005).
20 Peter Zec, cited in Die Kche der Zukunft.
21 Oliver Elser, Kampf um die Kche, Der Standard (15 October 2004), http://die
standard.at/?url=/?id=1825356 (accessed 31 May 2005).
22 Ibid.

92

Christina Sonderegger

Between Progress and Idling:


The Standard Kitchen
Notes on the Development of the Swiss Kitchen Norm

Individuals planning a kitchen today deal with exclusive manufacturers and fancy designer names, engage in precious materials, surface textures, and high-tech appliances. The kitchen has become a
showpiece and status symbol. Grappling with norms and standards
is unimaginable in this day and age. In the late fifties and sixties,
however, the question of standardized norms was a core issue in
kitchen architecture in Switzerland. At that time, in Europe,
Switzerland was at the fore in implementing a uniform authoritive
norm. But it was also particular and thoroughly pugnacious when
discussing issues such as a defined centimeter because the Swiss
norm still differs from foreign dimensions by five centimeters (a little under two inches). Within Europe, Swiss kitchen and appliance
manufacturers held on to their extra bit for decades a piece of
Swiss industrial history that in the era of globalization sounds even
more exotic than it was at the time.

Norm, system, module: Detail of a


Therma fitted kitchen, 1960s.

Home and Kitchen in the Post-War Era


The decades after the Second World War were shaped by a general
construction boom and social optimism that was evident in the
designed environment. The old forms, colors, and materials were
discarded, and space was cleared for a buoyant modernity. Lifestyle
was redefined. Individual ensembles of color and uncomplicated
single units gave the home an unavoidable contemporary and modern feel. The trend of the times was characterized by lightweight,
multifunctional furniture that stood out in the open in the room like
sculpture. While curved forms promised a dynamic force and the
dawning of a new era, orthogonal furniture models suggested the
ensemble and added character. Furniture could often be used from
different sides, and they no longer really possessed a rear panel.
In the kitchen, on the other hand, pre-war models persevered
longer than in living rooms. It would be worth investigating
whether this has to do with the traditional roles of man and woman
or with the higher cost of a kitchen cooker. The fact is, modernity
arrived later in the traditional domain of the woman. The typical
pre-war furniture of free-standing appliances and heirlooms proved
very popular even after the war. Cooker, cupboard, and maybe a refrigerator were put wherever space allowed for their size. Arranging
furniture according to the work procedure was not an issue; and the
housewife labored in a badly organized workplace, as if ergonomics
95

Freestanding and perhaps chance combined appliances and furniture still determined the image of the kitchen far into the
1950s and 60s.
1 Kitchen with Siemens electric cooker,
freestanding refrigerator and small electric
boiler for the sink, 1958.
2 The full electric kitchen with Therma
appliances, late 1940s.

and rationalization had never touched the kitchen. Cumbersome, arduous, and time-consuming, it was the anachronistic fossil in the
modern household. Yet the kitchen did not have to be so old-fashioned. It had been electrified in many cases as early as the thirties.
But, at least in Europe, it simply did not seem to have yet found a
suitable form.
Ergonomics and Industry
In America, the necessity to understand housework as a profession
that could be learned and organized was recognized as early as the
mid nineteenth century. Catherine Beecher (18001878), American
pioneer of the rationalized kitchen, published in her 1869 book The
American Womans Home 1 concrete suggestions for a thoroughly
organized, work-saving kitchen plan. The large kitchen table and
isolated buffet disappeared and were replaced by concentrated,
arranged, interconnected work surfaces that were supplemented
with drawers located under them and shelves on the walls. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, Christine Frederick, an American,
and Erna Meyer, a German, developed on Catherine Beechers
legacy; and influenced by industrial science studies by Frederick
Winslow Taylor (18561915) and Frank B. Gilbreth (18681924),
they advanced kitchens with smaller-scale ground plans and with
appliances and furnishings arranged more sensibly according to the
most common work procedures.2
The Forerunner of the Fitted Kitchen
While in Switzerland in the forties the first forerunner of the fitted
kitchen appeared with individual combination sinks, the American
housewife was already working in a standardized, dynamic-sounding streamlined kitchen. Innovations may have occurred in the
twenties and thirties regarding rationalization and standardization,
but the war abruptly put a stop to this. The twenty-one sq. ft.
Frankfurt Kitchen, developed by Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky
and Ernst May in 1926 and incorporated into the New Frankfurt
workers settlements, was organized in terms of work efficiency
and industrial criteria. With its continuous work surfaces and
fitted wall cupboards, it provided a small laboratory for the
woman, who increasingly had obligations outside of the home.
The rationalist philosophy of the Frankfurt Kitchen paved the
96

Other than the kitchen, residential furniture


design could be more quickly conquered by
new trends.
34 Residential high-rise buildings on
Letzigraben, Zurich (195052, A. H.
Steiner), livingroom with a shelf as room
divider.

way for the fitted kitchen. Despite its undeniable advantages regarding efficiency and hygiene, it would still be some time before
it was accepted. The war and sluggish technological development
contributed to the fact that, as a rule, kitchens at the end of the
forties still consisted of individual, freestanding furniture and appliances.
This out-of-date arrangement was gradually replaced by the
combination sink. A refrigerator, boiler, and cupboards were combined beneath a continuous covering of chrome steel with an embedded sink. The cooker was added separately to the combination
at first, until Therma AG and Franke metals works in Aarburg put
the first combination with integrated cooker on the market in 1951.
The sink combination presented a significant step toward the development of the fitted kitchen as far as unity and compactness were
concerned. However, it was different from later fitted kitchens that
presented a system of standardized, interchangeable single units
constructively seen as furniture available in diverse sizes and variations. A basic difference becomes apparent when comparing examples of kitchen and home furniture. While furniture in living areas
and work spaces consisted mainly of freestanding single units,
kitchen furniture, on the other hand, was increasingly unified,
compacted, and pushed to the wall.

5 If you love your children, you cook


electric! Thermas sales slogan gained
rapid significance in the post-war years.
Electric cooking was considered progressive at the time. Gas cookers were often replaced by electric cookers even if a
gas connection was available. There are
electric cookers today in over 90 % of
Swiss homes, 10 % cook with gas
(Therma brochure, 1930/35).
6 The classic freestanding cooker was
preferred for decades: Siemens electric
Protos kitchen cooker, 1950s.

97

The first step towards the fitted kitchen:


the so-called combination sink became
more and more popular at the end of the
1940s.
7 Cooker-refrigerator-sink-combination
(Therma brochure, 1949).
8 Therma modernizes the Swiss kitchen:
Kitchen combination with cooker, boiler,
sink, trough cabinet and extractable work
place (Therma prospectus, 1954).

These forerunners of the fitted kitchen were praised in the


fifties as every housewifes dream. She would no longer be a Cinderella3 in her kitchen. Shiny work surfaces of chrome steel, colorful, easy-to-care-for plastic surfaces, and appliances of fascinating formal beauty4 addressed the specific female need for beauty
and harmony.5 The woman at the hearth would govern like a
princess in the grandest room of the home and the electric fitted
kitchen would make her work and life easier, give her more leisure
time, and keep her young and flexible for longer.6 The idea that
the woman could now apply her conserved energy to a profession outside of the home was not mentioned in the advertisements
at the time.
Flexibility and Norm
After the Second World War, the kitchen was given a great amount
of attention from different sides. The functional arrangement, the
most appropriate materials, as well as the dimensions of the built-in
units were reason for discussion. Existing examples were analyzed:
the American housewifes sink unit was located in most cases under
the window; and her preparation area was, compared to the Swiss
housewifes, noticeably small, which was explained by the almost
exclusive use of canned goods.7 The cooker in the Swiss kitchen
was located as a rule to the right and the sink unit to the left of the
work surface. The oven in the English kitchen was preferably built
to table height. In terms of material, chrome surfaces had the advantage of being resistant to heat and acid, yet were generally considered unpleasantly cold. On those fronts, colorful plastic was
competing with undesirable metal. From every point of the discussion, and with the idea of the fitted kitchen in mind, standardizing
the dimensions of units was considered an urgent task in Switzerland.
It is almost impossible today to conclusively ascertain why the
concept of the stationary, fitted kitchen was pushed so particularly
in Switzerland. It is clear that both the construction boom and prefabrication, which was a general tendency in construction at the end
of the fifties, encouraged the development of the fitted kitchen.
Maybe it also needed a driving force in one right place to materialize
a development in the making. Seen in this way, three names might
have been of decisive significance. Therma AG, then the largest
98

910 Extensive kitchen combinations with


top cabinet, 1950s. Contrary to later fitted
kitchens, these kitchens were not yet based
on a standardized system in a module construction method and were partially custom
fitted to the rooms dimensions. Characteristic 1950s forms, colors, and details were
later replaced by a more stringent, mostly
white design concept.

11 In the post-war era, Therma was already


one of the leading Swiss enterprises in
the manufacture of heating and kitchen
appliances: Housing colonies, complete
with Therma cookers and boilers (Photo
montage from a Therma anniversary publication, 1932).

manufacturer of electro-thermal home appliances, Franke AG,


which produced the chrome coverings, and Hans Hilfiker
(19011993), who from 1958 until 1968 served as director and chief
designer at Therma AG.
It was Hans Hilfiker who not only recognized measurement accuracy as the fitted kitchens most important prerequisite, but also
decisively contributed to the engineering of its products. Thus he
tightened Therma AGs production program, rationalized the production process and worked on a clear design expression. Hilfiker
managed to create for Switzerland an exemplary formal unity of
product design, construction, function, and graphic design advertising image.8 Before he took on designing home appliances and their
standardization, Hilfiker had worked for the Swiss Federal Railway
as an industrial, electrical, and construction engineer.9 One of his
most important works during that time was the standardized cabinet
system for circuitry and electronics, the prototype of a ninety-meterlong railway station roof standing on balancing posts, as well as an
elegant loading crane. Hilfikers most popular design, however, is
the second hand of the Swiss Rail Station clock, a red signal trowel
that has been circling around the dial since 1955. Innovative creativity along with an unremitting search for formal simplicity and typestandardization characterizes his work. He was able to realize both
at Therma AG.
The primary reasons behind a kitchen norm were both technical
and economic but also psychological in nature. The main purpose
was to simplify the cooperation between planners, architects, manufacturers, appliance manufacturers, and workers on site. In addition, authoritive dimensions were a precondition for industrial prefabrication and system construction. A serial prefabrication guaranteed, on the one hand, the supply of a large quantity of single units
and contributed to their lower cost. Another reason that supported
the devising of a norm lay in the essence of the fitted kitchen
itself. With it, kitchen furniture became a system it solidified. Introducing a construction kit system with standardized single units
accommodated the need for individuality and flexibility at least a
little. Because the fitted kitchen, despite its advantages for efficiency and hygiene, was accompanied by a loss of freedom to
arrange, shift, and replace the furniture and appliances at will. In
order to keep these limitations to a minimum, the organization of
99

stationary objects needed to be carefully considered and had to include the possibility of a certain amount of variability. In addition,
the simple replacement of a defective appliance was guaranteed for
decades.
Swiss Kitchen Norms
The Swiss kitchen norm is 556090 cm: the width of a unit is 55 cm
(21.6 in), its depth 60 cm (23.6), and height 90 cm (35.4 in). With the
longitudinal dimension of 55 cm, the Swiss kitchen differs from the
standard functional ISO norm, which has 10 cm unit intervals.
Different from the unit height and depth, this units width has no
relation to bodily dimensions or with the tasks to be performed; it
represents a purely calculated solution.10
Hans Hilfiker derived the Swiss conventions dimensions from
the nature of kitchen work and from the statistics of bodily dimen-

Therma products were not only known


for their functionality, robust quality, and
convincing design, they were represented
perfectly in their advertizing graphics.
12 New Therma logotype by Carlo L.
Vivarelli, 1958.
13 Prospectus for Therma small appliances, 1960.
1415 Cooking, preparing, presenting all
in one place: Therma cooker hobs with
folding hot plates, exhibition prototype for
the MUBA (Basel Trade Fair), 1958 (Therma
advertizing prospectus, 1958).

sions. The height of the unit for standing work was not easily determined as the requirements of the work table depended on the task.
Thus the best average working height of a cooker was about 85 cm
(33.5 in), and for the sink, which as a rule was set 16 cm into the
cover panel, at 92 cm (36.2 in). The need for two different heights
was abandoned in favor of a standard height. Because an oven can be
slightly higher without any major disadvantages, but a sink that is
too low causes uncomfortable stooping, a compromise was made at
90 cm. The depth of the unit at 60 cm resulted from its various functions and the average length of the arm. Hilfiker did not derive the
units width from either bodily dimensions or task requirements,
but arrived at it by taking the highest level of economic efficiency
into account: a sensible standardization should be based on economy, and since the square is the form which possesses the smallest
perimeter for a given surface area, it had to form the surface unit.11
100

He acquired the optimal side length of this square in this way: From
the 60 cm (23.6 in) unit depth, he subtracted 1 cm of distance to the
wall, which is necessary to compensate for unevenness in the wall
and to guarantee a hygienic alignment of the covering. Two centimeters accounted for the coverings projection, which served as a
drip catch. A further two were left for the materials thickness. All
this ultimately resulted in a clearance depth and a unit width of
55 cm (21.6 in).
Defining the width as a spatial and not as an axial dimension is
important for the structure and the easy-to-handle construction kit
system. Determining a standard dimension for the niche is decisive
for the installation and replacement of appliances. A fitted kitchen is
constructed as a type of case, where a cooker, refrigerator, or dishwashing machine can be easily inserted into the gaps in the structure
without any further constructional measures.

16 556090: During the 1960s, the


Therma kitchen norm became the Swiss
kitchen norm (SINK norm, from 1996 SMS;
Therma prospectus, 1958).

Since the use of a conventional dimension grows with its distribution, Hilfiker was active in getting other significant Swiss firms
in the industry to assume the conventional dimensions of 556090,
first defined as the Therma norm. In just a few years, almost every
appliance and kitchen manufacturer more or less willingly adopted
the new regulations and accepted the Therma norm as the general
Swiss industrial norm. Other interesting circles teamed up with the
pioneer firms Therma and Franke to form an association called
SINK, Schweizerische Industriekommission zur Normung der
Kche [Swiss Industrial Commission for Kitchen Standardization].
They launched the Therma norm under the term SINK norm. It is
not possible, despite thorough research and discussion, to clearly
determine when exactly the SINK norm became authoritative in
Switzerland.12 But what is known is that Hilfiker addressed the
problem of standardization in 1958, right at the onset of his
101

appointment at Therma. Every appliance thereafter was made to


the basic measurements of 556090 cm. Sources mention the
completed development of a norm at the beginning of the sixties.13
Hilfiker himself mentioned the norm for the first time in public
in a 1967 lecture.14 It can be assumed that the introduction of the
Swiss norm took place gradually during the first half of the
sixties.
Even if the unit width of 55 cm represented the Swiss kitchens
significant characteristic, how the height was calculated is equally
notable. It stemmed from one sixth of the base frame. From a height
of 600 mm (23.6 in) 105 mm was subtracted for the continuous base
as well as 30 mm for the covering and 3 mm for possible irregularities, which resulted in a clearance of 762 mm (30 in) or 6 x 127 mm.
The entire horizontal arrangement is based on one sixth of 127 mm
(5 in). The drawers and cupboards as well as the arrangement of appliances followed this system. The spacing between the basic frame
unit and the lower edge of the top cupboards was also calculated in
sixths.15
The Swiss kitchen norm is not only defined by a unit dimension
of 556090, but also by a height division in sixths of 127 mm. With
a niche dimension of 55 cm and the height grid of n/6, a minimum of
data is needed to deliver all the information necessary for the fitted
kitchens entire system. With these clear regulations, an additional
catalog of dimensions was achieved. This is the particular triumph of
the Swiss kitchen norm, to clearly define a construction system with
very little information. This is one reason why the Swiss kitchen
norm, compared to other dimension indexes, is still in use today.
The SINK norm was temporarily written with periods (S.I.N.K)
at the end of the sixties in order to avoid associations with the English word sink.16 In 1966 it was renamed to SMS (Schweizer MassSystem, or Swiss Measurement System), without the norm being
changed. Even today, forty years later, over sixty percent of appliances are still produced by Switzerlands main kitchen manufacturers according to the 55 cm norm.17
Norm as Aesthetic Expression
Parallel to the preparation of the kitchen norm, a seminal cooker
construction kit system was developed. This was because technical
limitations prevented Therma AG from immediately beginning
with the production of fitted kitchens; instead they went with the
next smallest unit, the cooker. The assortment of cookers at that
time was very extensive and non-standard. The single cooker was
of varying sizes depending on the number of burners or whether it
was equipped with an oven. Hilfiker now amalgamated the individual appliance types in corresponding dimensions and design. The
cooker construction kit system he designed allowed for approximately three hundred different variations, either for installation or
as freestanding models.18 This system of standardized cabinets with
individual functions guaranteed the formal unity of Therma
kitchens. The front side of the new cooker was divided into three
different large zones, which corresponded to the height modules.
The height of the switch panel corresponded to one, the oven to
three, and the appliances drawers to two sixths. Hilfiker was implying here that it was no longer about a single cast object, but
about a modular object consisting of singular, interchangeable
102

17 Therma one-front fitted kitchen, 1960s:


formal clarity as expression of a system
philosophy.
18 In every configuration, Therma
kitchens form a unity thanks to the formal
harmony of their elements: Installation
and basic measurements of a Therma fitted
kitchen, model A, 1960s.
19 Therma stand at the MUBA (Basel
Trade Fair), 1960.

103

units, which is part of a larger whole. The formal specification of


the cooker was thus an expression of a design attitude that no
longer prioritized the single piece, but the interplay of single parts
within an entire complex. Hilfiker underlined the cooker system
philosophy with their name. He replaced associative names like
the household oven or work oven with a type designation.
Every type received a two-part name that exactly defined its features and size. The level of comfort was defined using the Greek alphabet of alpha, beta, gamma, and delta, and the size was determined by the interior width of the oven, which was either 40 or
32 cm (15.7 or 12.6 in). With the new refrigerator line of 1965, the
type was particularly recognizable because there were no longer
types graded according to size, but now just one single norm unit
with different refrigeration features.19 The five new refrigerator varieties could be combined and integrated with individual cold storage elements.
Prefabrication and Architecture
Therma AG was primarily an electro-thermal appliance company.
Due to its intense engagement with the kitchen, the company no
longer had to limit itself to appliances, but could now tackle developing the entire kitchen. While at the beginning of Hilfikers direction, Therma first manufactured individual appliances and combi2023 Gradual unfolding: Therma
advertising campaign prior to the MUBA
(Basel Trade Fair), 1961.

104

nation sinks for installation, they moved on at the beginning of the


sixties to producing fitted kitchens. This had its consequences
however. Its double role as a supplier of appliances and kitchen
manufacturer caused it to enter a difficult competitive situation
with other kitchen manufacturers. This gradually led to these companies no longer purchasing their appliances from their competitor, Therma, but rather from other appliance manufacturers. This
and the recession prompted Therma in 1975 to reduce manufacturing entire fitted kitchens and to concentrate again on producing
appliances.20
With regard to prefabrication, Therma AG was a pioneer in
Switzerland. Hilfiker may have referred to parallel tendencies in architecture, but quite honestly he had already outstripped architecture in this regard. While constructions using prefabricated elements
represented an exception at the end of the sixties, individual units
for the kitchen were already rolling off the assembly line in mass
production in Schwanden, where Therma was based. As far as production technology was concerned, the construction of fitted
kitchens signified a switch from commercial to industrial production. Starting in 1962, in their own specially designed factory, single
parts for kitchen and appliances were being prefabricated in large
numbers, stored intermediately, and then on short notice installed
onto different end products.

Home or Lords Cooker became


alpha beta gamma delta:
Thermas product assortment at the end of
the 1940s still specified a variety of cooker
models, this was reduced in 1961 to four
basic models with different levels of comfort.
24 The complete electric cooker
(Therma poster, 1935).
25 Therma cooker, around 1948 (Therma
brochure).
26 Therma cooker gamma 40 in production as of 1961.
27 Hurray! The new Therma cooker has
arrived! (shop window, Aare Tessin AG,
Olten, 1961).

105

The compactness of the fitted kitchen made it possible once


again to shrink the scale of the kitchen down to laboratory size.
This accommodated the construction of cost-efficient housing. The
standardized kitchen was developed during the same period that the
real estate market bottomed out, and the number of empty apartments in Switzerland had fallen to a dangerous low.21 With industrial
prefabrication it was possible in Schwanden to react at short notice
to the need to supply large quantities. Therma kitchens were not
cheap, however; yet great store was set in top-notch, solid quality
work that would guarantee a long life span and lasting aesthetic.
Therma kitchen cabinets and drawers were manufactured in enameled steel, just like their appliances. Hilfiker chose a neutral white
for their color, since the Therma kitchen did not want to be degraded after a period of time as obsolete because of its color. It is not
surprising that practically every design from this period received the
Die gute Form [The Good Form] award by the The Swiss Werkbund. 22
During these pioneer years, different sorts of fixtures spanning
from wall to wall were subsumed under the term fitted kitchen.
In addition to kitchen buffets, Ernst Ghner AG developed two
types of fitted kitchens as early as the forties. Fitted blocks with
integrated appliances and fixtures: Ghner fitted kitchens Standard
and the somewhat larger Ideal. 23 The cooker however was not
built-in, but was a Therma freestanding cooker. The Ghner fitted
kitchens are carpentered extensions of the combination sinks of
the forties. The technical and formal characteristics of later standardized construction kit systems are significantly absent. In the
sixties, Ghner moved on to combining the parts of a home linked
to the plumbing, like the bathroom, kitchen, and wc, into the
ground plans and to prefabricating these as identical types. Ghner
fitted kitchens with integrated cooker and refrigerator resemble

2832 Serial manufacturing: photographs


of the Therma plant in Schwanden, Canton
of Glarus, early 1960s.

106

Therma fitted kitchens so much that they are hard to distinguish


from each other.24
Controversial Norms
The custom of fitting new buildings with ready-to-use kitchens led,
earlier in Switzerland than in other European countries, to an increasing need for fitted kitchens. The Swiss Measurement System
was dubbed a European pioneer achievement by Swiss kitchen manufacturers.25 Switzerland was the first European country to have access to clear regulations of how a fitted kitchen was to be built. But
what did the situation look like regarding norm and fitted kitchens
at the end of the fifties or beginning of the sixties elsewhere, for example in Germany? There could not have been a norm in the sense
of a construction grid like the SINK norm. In 1967, Switzerland introduced its norm to the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Die Moderne Kche,
AMK [The Modern Kitchen Alliance] and recommended that it
adopt the norm. But German manufacturers did not want to, preferring the 6M planning module (60 cm, or 23.6 in).26 This opened up a
debate about the correct unit width.
It is wrong to assume that standardization was accepted without
criticism. There may have been talk of the norms voluntary adoption27 by the kitchen industry, yet it was questioned from different
sides. The main point of criticism was and still is the 55 cm width of
the niche, which did not comply with the general construction
model.28 At the same time, manufacturers and architects were disturbed by the preference for appliances with a width of 55 cm in
other words, for products manufactured in Switzerland. The debate
between advocates of the 55 cm and those for an ISO norm of 60 cm
led to a real dispute about norms that climaxed in the eighties. This
amounted to a split of the then Kitchen Association and the establishment of a cartel commission, which considered a violation in this
regard to be a breach of cartel law.
In the mid-seventies, the VSFE, or Verband der Schweizer Fabrikanten von Einbaukchen [Association of Swiss Fitted Kitchen
Manufacturers], developed out of the SINK. Members of the VSFE,
companies such as Forster, Franke, or Therma, produced in accordance with SINK dimensions. In 1983, a second kitchen association
split of from this. The VFMK, or Verband zur Frderung der
Modernen Kche [Association for the Promotion of the Modern
Kitchen], clearly distanced itself from the Swiss norm and took up
contact with importers of kitchens and appliances. It kept the discussion on norms and cartel violations going. In the course of the
European harmonization of norms in the mid-nineties, the two opposing parties reunited in 2000 into a single association, the KVS, or
Kchen-Verband Schweiz [Swiss Kitchen Association]. Today there
is an open and pragmatic attitude regarding European or Swiss
norms.
There was a different climate regarding this in the eighties. In
1989, the cartel commission had to deal with the SINK norm as an
obstacle to trade. The commission came to the conclusion29 that the
SINK norm might disadvantage foreign manufacturers over Swiss
manufacturers due to the different width, but justified this fact with
a variety of arguments. The SINK norm regulated the definitive use
of kitchen appliances and guaranteed compatibility independent of
brand. This, however, is not the case with foreign norms, since it is
107

really an issue of company norms, which again make compatibility


between individual brands impossible. In addition, the SINK norm
is older then the ISO or DIN norms; and for this reason, it could
not have been issue of intentional disadvantage within a comprehensive norm. The commissions letter to the Kitchen Association argued that European harmonization should comply with Switzerland.
European Kitchen Dimensions
In 1995, with the EN 1116, a European norm (EN) for kitchen
furniture and appliances30 came into being. This norm received the
status of Schweizer Norm (SN) from the SNV, or Schweizerische
Normen-Vereinigung (Swiss Norms Union). At the same time the
Swiss Measurement System SMS [previously SINK] was not designated as a recognized Swiss norm, but rather a national practice of
the kitchen and appliance industry. Thus, since 1996, there have
been two official measurement systems. SMS and norm SN EN
1116. The European basis of SN EN 1116 kitchen furniture was
developed between 1990 and 1995 by the kitchen and appliance industry in the Comit Europen pour la Normalisation [European
Committee for Standardization]. The previous German kitchen
furniture DIN norm 68901 served as the basis for this. The furnitures outer dimension generally followed a 10 cm grid. A second
more fundamental difference to the Swiss system was the fact that
fitted appliances were installed into an appliance cabinet and not inserted between the flanking cabinets. In 60 cm wide built-in appliance-furniture, the width of the fitted opening for the appliance was
about 56 cm. So much for the relative width of 60 cm. However,
widths of 50 to 90 cm are also common. For the height, different dimensions of 10 cm unit intervals are possible.
A comparison between the European system and the SMS immediately shows how clear and simple the latter is.31 DIN and ISO,
vehemently attacked in the eighties as international inadequacies,
found their official admission into the Swiss kitchen in 1996. Due to
the Free Trade Agreement, the Swiss market is now open to kitchen
furniture and appliances. Both norms exist side by side on the competitive free market. In 2001 kitchen furniture based on the SMS had
a share of one third of the market.
It is hard to imagine the land of the tenant without the fitted
kitchen. Considering the fixtures, which are mostly not very aesthetically convincing, it seems of little relevance which norm will
win the race.

108

Fitted kitchens as the new standard from


the 1960s on:
33 Unpretentiously designed fitted
kitchens in which a large part of the population still feels at home today.
34 Kitchen with refrigerator, freezer,
cooker with oven and ventilator hood,
1962. As this example shows, norm and
dimensional stability were, from the beginning, measurements that were often individually interpreted. The Swiss were the
exception.

109

1 Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Womans Home.
Or, Principles of Domestic Science (New York: Ford, 1869).
2 On the subject of organization and technical modernization of the household, see
Christine Frederick, The New Housekeeping. Efficiency Studies in Home Management
(New York, 1913), and Christine Frederick, Household Engineering. Scientific Management in the Home (Chicago, 1919). Irene M. Witte translated Christine Fredericks
writings into German and published them as Heim und Technik in Amerika in 1928 in
Berlin. Erna Meyer wrote a further instruction book on kitchen reform titled Der neue
Haushalt. Ein Wegweiser zu wirtschaftlicher Hausfhrung, which in 1929 went into its
thirty-eighth printing.
3 Therma advertisement, 1953.
4 Das Ideale Heim 24 (5 May 1950): 209.
5 Leben, Wohnen im Geist der Zeit (Winterthur, 1961): 78.
6 AEG advertisement, 1950s.
7 Das Ideale Heim 24 (5 May 1950): 209.
8 See Hans Neuburg, Einheit von Funktion, Konstruktion, Formgebung und Information, Neue Grafik 15 (1963): 238.
9 See my unpublished M. A. thesis Hans Hilfiker Annherung an einen Gestalter,
submitted to Prof. S. von Moos, Institute of Art History, University of Zurich, 1993.
10 Discussion with Hans Hilfiker, 3 September 1991.
11 Hans Hilfiker, Apparateindustrie und Kchenbau. Nach einem Referat von Dipl.
Ing. H. Hilfiker, Schwanden, an der Jahrestagung des CECED, Conseil Europen de la
construction lectro-domestique, vom 27. Juni 1967 in Montreux (Schwanden: Therma
AG, n.d.).
12 The source material of todays KVS (Schweizer Kchen-Verband) does not go back
to the early days. Even Hans Hilfiker was not able to comment clearly on this, nor
Peter Rthlin, KVSs long-time manager.
13 Letter from the VSFE to the Bundesamt fr Aussenwirtschaft (Federal Foreign
Trade Office), 22 October, 1986, KVS archive.
14 Hans Hilfiker, Apparateindustrie und Kchenbau.
15 Ibid.
16 In a statement by Peter Rthlin, former manager of KVS March 2005.
17 From a discussion with Samuel Strahm, commercial sales manager for construction, Electrolux AG (Switzerland), 1 January 2005.
18 Vom Einzelapparat zur ganzheitlich im Baukastenprinzip geplanten Kche, interview with Hans Hilfiker, Betriebsfhrung 65/30, no. 7 (July 1965): 193197.
19 Hans Hilfiker, Khlschrankbau auf neuen Wegen, Electro-Revue 57, no. 26
(1965): 13021304.
20 See Therma Jahresbericht 69/1975, 3ff.
21 Angelus Eisinger, Stdte bauen. Stdtebau und Stadtentwicklung in der Schweiz
19401970 (Zurich: gta, 2004): 228ff.
22 See the Gute Form Archive, Design Collection, Museum of Design Zurich, as
well as Peter Erni, Die gute Form: Eine Aktion des Schweizerischen Werkbundes.
Dokumentation und Interpretationen (Baden: LIT Lars Mller, 1983).
23 Ernst Ghner AG, ed., Ghner Normen (Basel, 1950): 221ff.
24 Sigmund Widmer, Ernst Ghner (19001971): Bauen in Norm (Meilen, Switzerland: Verein fr wirtschaftshistorische Studien, 2000. Schweizer Pioniere der Wirtschaft
und Technik 49), 6667.
25 Wieviel Kche braucht der Mensch? Eine Trendstudie der Schweizer Kchenbauer
zur Standortbestimmung der Kche und ihrem zuknftigen Stellenwert, 1982, KVS
archive.
26 Statement by Peter Rthlin, former manager of KVS, March 2005. Germany first
implemented a comprehensive norm at the beginning of the seventies: the first DIN
68901 norm, Kcheneinrichtungen Koordinierungsmasse fr Kchenmbel und
Kchengerte, has January 1973 as date of issue. Further editions: DIN
68901:198111, 198601. European standardization followed 198601 (EN or DIN
EN). DIN 68901:198601 became DIN 68901:199512; the current version is DIN EN
1116:200409. There are additional DINs or EN DINs for safety regulations of
kitchen fittings (furniture, appliances, shelves, work surfaces, etc.).
27 KVS files on the Swiss Measurement System SMS, Oktober 1996, KVS archive.
28 The trade journal Die Kche. Planen und Gestalten gave insight into this discussion in the sixties.
29 Cartel commission letter to the Verband der Schweizerischen Kchenbranche, 13
December 1989, KVS archive.
30 The following statements were taken from Kchenmbel Koordinationsmasse fr
Kchenmbel und Kchengerte SN EN 1116, ed. Schweizerische Normen-Vereinigung SNV (Winterthur, 1996).
31 Bruno Zuppiger, Masskoordination in der Kche: Der Stand im Jahr 2001, typescript, 2 December 2000, KVS archive.

110

Brigitte Kesselring

From Restrictive Norms to Greater


Freedom
Kitchen Planning Today

It would actually be easy. The most important factors relevant for


the planning of a kitchen and its layout in the floor plan can be specified using good common sense:
1. The budget
2. The floor plan and the location of the floor plan within the
apartment/house
3. The current offer of products
4. Ergonomics and the work processes in the kitchen
5. The individual needs of the users
Yet upon a closer look, the meaning of actually in the first sentence can be comprehended as: it would be easy, if the kitchen were
not such a complex thing and the human factor were not equally as
complex.

Upscale contemporary kitchens have long


been liberated from the corset of standardized layout models, and are distinguished
by their formal clarity and high-grade
materials (2003, Poggenpohl).

The Special Status of the Kitchen


The kitchen assumes a special status because its meaning is ambivalent from the beginning. In German the word Kche can imply
either the room, the equipment, or cuisine. All of these facets play
a role in planning a kitchen: The kitchen as a room and equipment is
the framework in which the art of cooking is applied or celebrated.
This kitchen as a whole, as equipment and philosophy, is closely
related to the technical changes and developments in materials and
furnishings on the one hand, and to the re-appraisal of values in
culture and society on the other. According to the zeitgeist and its
relative importance, kitchen planning is carried out in line with
function, lifestyle, experience, as well as social and status-oriented
concerns. In the following essay, the term kitchen will be always
understood as the room and its furniture, including appliance furnishings.
The kitchen assumes a special status within the apartment or
house because, contrary to all other rooms except the bathroom/
wc it is not a freely definable living space, but is closely linked to
the building services and entire mains network. Thus the supply and
disposal of water, electrical connections, gas, heating, and ventilation
systems are part of the basic planning from the beginning. Designing
the kitchen is thus of central planning importance in the development of the entire ground plan and architectural concept.
113

12 Kitchen planning yesterday and today:


the playful, haptic qualities of this cardboard-and-glue model from the 1970s
have been replaced today by computergenerated views that with a click of the
mouse can be altered to create a new
variant of the desired end-product.

Another special feature affects Switzerland: traditionally, complete kitchen furnishings including all appliances are part of a rented
apartment. As early as the fifties this had consequences on the development of authoritative norms, since in the course of growing industrial production, manufacturers of furniture and appliance were
dependent on a coordinated system of dimensions.1 There are other
basic conditions in this so-called rental segment than in private
housing architecture. Thus, investors, developers, and decorators are
more conservative and reserved when it comes to converting to new
residential forms and apartment furnishings: safe, measurable values,
cost and usage ratios, experience, durability, and rate of return are
considerations that have priority. Buildings are constructed for
anonymous users, the decision makers will not live in those apartments.
Private construction, meaning single-family houses and condominiums, however, is informed by individual values and attitudes,
individual needs and demands, because the decision maker is also
the user. Respectively, other standards and requirements have to be
taken into consideration during the planning.
In Switzerlands neighboring countries, for example in Germany
or Austria, the kitchen is an arrangement like any other, and is
regardless whether it is a rented apartment, condominium, or private
home purchased individually. The kitchen here is subject far more
to the pressures of marketing and consumption, since manufacturers
have to advertise to win the favor of a broad consumer base. That
only works if there is an attractive offer: attractive regarding modern
appearance and affordable prices in the rental sector; at the luxury
level, appearance, quality, and market image matter. The kitchen also
has a short life span in the rental segment. It will not be used forever
and, in Switzerland at least, it is not designed according to quality
standards to last for decades. Kitchen parts complete with appliance
furnishings, so-called kitchen blocks, are offered in this segment by
trade markets or the do-it-yourself track. There are thus very different standards at the quality and planning level in these markets.
Minimum standards at the lower price level and, as in the Swiss market, high standards in the luxury segment.
The Human Being as a Factor of Influence
Looking for the important factors relevant for the planning of a
kitchen and its arrangement in the floor plan, the human ultimately
proves to be a central factor of influence: kitchen furniture is not a
one-stop product, but a complex system with numerous responsibilities.

1. The kitchen is a central part of the entire home concept and has to
be considered during the development of the floor plan.
As a rule this is one of the architects responsibilities.
2. The kitchen is not an arrangement that can be placed freely or at
will, but part of a buildings services and firmly linked to the entire installation network (water, electricity, gas, ventilation, etc.).
The architect and building planner are responsible for placement
and the type of connections. The connections themselves are
subject to their own norms, in some cases, also official regulations.
114

3. The kitchen consists of furniture elements and appliances that are


combined or assembled and, therefore, their dimensions have to
correspond. As a rule, they are industrially manufactured.
This is the responsibility of the Kitchen engineers (furniture) and
appliance manufacturers, as well as associations, other higher institutions, and legislators. The technical detail planning is as a
rule carried out by the kitchen technician.
4. The kitchen is individual, its basic composition is defined in detail
by the developers.
The architect or interior architect, the kitchen sales staff, appliance sales staff, the kitchen planner and/or the kitchen technician, and often combinations thereof, are responsible for this.
5. The central function of the kitchen is cooking. Cooking is a craft,
a culture, it can be a hobby or a profession, a necessary evil or
daily ritual, a lonely procedure or social event.
The users and planners are responsible for anchoring these in the
kitchen plan.
6. The kitchen is a multi-functional room, is a work place, home,
and living space at once, and this for either many or one person.
The relative importance of the kitchen is influenced by individualism, family, family size, society, and culture.
The kitchen is used in daily life by the user. The requirements are
constructed by the developer.
Another concept develops according to how attitudes regarding living, the kitchen, and cooking are understood and how interesting
they are. There are also ergonomic, planning, technical, and standards issues, budget limitations, and experience, all of which have
3 A continuous work surface frames this
generous kitchen ensemble.

115

played a more or less unchanged role in kitchen planning for


decades. Some of these are in a state of transition, as basic conditions
and demands have changed. These include the growing dimension of
people themselves, which has long affected the strictly defined work
height, or new cooking practices and methods, which have questioned traditional standard kitchen equipment or set other points of
focus in the work procedure. In order to gain a current insight into
common principles as well as general valid basic regulations and
changes, effective standards were established. Secondly, various specialists integrated in the planning process were questioned about
current trends and problems in kitchen planning.
Standards
A different understanding of the womans role was a triggering
factor in the twenties, as well as a new lifestyle resulting from the
development of low-cost housing, the rationalization of kitchen
procedures, and kitchen planning. Yet today it is new cooking practices, equipment technology, changed family structures, lifestyle,
and nutritional habits which influence the kitchen plan. In 1926
Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky developed the Frankfurt Kitchen.
Standardized, reduced to 65 sq. ft., and absolutely function-oriented, it became the symbol of modern kitchen planning. In comparison, todays modern kitchen construction is distributed over a
larger area, is generous in individuality and function, and is cut with
sensory comforts in mind.
Both are based on an optimized work procedure, yet they are divided by eighty years of norm developments, standardization, and
revolutionary developments in household technology, home appliances, small appliances, materials, and in the entire purchasing and
food area. In the fifties and sixties as a result of industrial production different, more or less authoritive regulations or norm systems were created for the kitchen.2 In Switzerland, furniture and appliance fitting dimensions were coordinated early on and defined by
a general grid width and height (the SINK norm, today SMS).3 In
other European countries, unified width dimensions were established (the Euro norm, which is based on a 60 cm grid width); and
height partitioning, and fitting dimensions are, even today, largely
subject to manufacturer-specific norms or recommendations. One of
the reasons for this is the fact that in Germany, for example, kitchen
manufacturers often integrate single appliance brands firmly in their
product range. Secondly, appliance manufacturers like Bosch or
Miele have become kitchen suppliers themselves.
In the planning area, harmonious minimum standards were defined and oriented to the work rhythm in the kitchen (adjusted for
right- or left-handed persons). Today, the zones are divided into the
following function centers:

Stock
Storage
Sink area
Preparation area
Cooking and baking

116

From standardized and minimal to free and


open:
45 Margarete Schtte-Lihotzkys Frankfurt Kitchen; the kitchen for a household
without domestic help, exhibited in 1927
as a model kitchen in the Neuzeitliche
Haushalt [Modern Household] exhibition in
Frankfurt am Main. Layout with path diagram; view.
6 The kitchen as an assemblage of freely
combinable elements for a loft-style apartment. High-grade workmanship with
matte-finished fronts, panelled shelving,
and chrome trim (2005, the Esprit model
from the Syle series, Sanitas Troesch).

7 A kitchen design that optimally conforms to the workflow saves time and
energy. Below, an optimized configuration
subdivided into work centers according
to the Dynamic Space concept (2003,
Blum).

117

Kitchen Types
The kitchen is typologized according to standard floor plans that
have existed since the first norms and which are today seen as
classic solutions. These are based on optimal work procedures via
the logical position and sequence of the individual function centers,
as well as a defined minimum gap between these individual zones.

Single-Wall Kitchen: all functions in the smallest space; linear


workflow. Surface area: approx. 65 sq. ft. Suitable for small
households of three persons or less.

Galley or Corridor Kitchen: Compact design solution with additional work surface, minimum dimensions of 2 x 4 x 2 ft. (depth
of cabinets x traffic area x depth of cabinets). Short work paths
and lots of storage space. Surface area: approx. 86 sq. ft.

10

L-Shaped Kitchen: very popular and widespread kitchen type


with a functional, ergonomic arrangement. The work centers are
arranged in terms of function and sequence. Surface area: approx.
86108 sq. ft.; with dining area: 108 sq. ft. min.

11

U-Shaped Kitchen: the basic plan for luxury kitchens in the


private home segment, generously equipped with furniture and
appliances. Surface area: approx. 108130 sq. ft.

12

G-Shaped Kitchen: this development of the U-Shaped type is a


popular standard of live-in kitchens either wholly or partially
open to the living area. Surface area: approx. 130150 sq. ft.

13

Island Kitchen: the foundation of modern kitchen designs, with


separate cooking island, appliances, and work area on one wall,
and storage area. Installing plumbing and ventilation for the island can be tough. Surface area: 161 sq. ft. min.

118

These basic types are to really be understood as minimum standards,


which should always be open to changes and new philosophies over
time. Unfortunately this is rarely the case, and they are far too often
installed on a 1:1 basis.
At the beginning of the eighties, Otl Aicher caused a mini revolution when he approached planning from an entirely different angle, by making a trend survey commissioned by the German kitchen
manufacturer Bulthaup, and by his own intense personal involvement in the subject. He went to professionals, housewives, and
restaurant cooks, interviewed and observed them, and developed
from this The Kitchen for Cooking.4 This was not just meant for the
right organization of work and the right tools in the kitchen, but
also the fun of this work, the joy of cooking. A new quality, which
paved the way for emotions and individual practices, for possibilities
of change and development. The focal point of his kitchen is a work
table, a kitchen island where one could work in a standing position,
and where two or three people could work and communicate at an
equipped and ordered workplace. Left of this is the sink and tableware area, to the right, provisions and supplies, refrigeration and
oven, at the back, the cooker and cooker hood ventilator. Tasks are
thereby limited to the central area around the preparation table. This
kitchen for cooking can be realized with as little as 97 sq. ft. and

washing

cooking

94.3 sq. ft.


storeroom L
provisions

storeroom G

preparing
countertops

cooking
washing
cleaning
dishwashing

roasting
refrigeration

storeroom L
provisions

preparing

storeroom G
dishes

16 Free-standing, freely combinable elements are the basis of Bulthaups system


20. Since 1992 the classic kitchen workbench has served as a control center for
coordinating all other important work areas
(2002, Bulthaup).

119

roasting
refrigeration

countertops

1415 Kitchen with cooking island after


Otl Aicher, open to the living room. Two
variants, one with the smallest possible
surface area of nearly 100 sq. ft., the other
with a more ample area of almost 130 sq. ft.

123.7 sq. ft.

today is still a good starting basis for the concept of an open largescale kitchen. Bulthaup developed a kitchen workbench which they
presented and have since modernized in stainless steel in the system 20 product series.
The transformed philosophy brought on by the discussion on
cooking practices and tools, the orientation toward the professional
sector and the inclusion of the user or several users triggered much,
which now thirty years later, is just beginning to get established as a
wider standard in the private sector.
Orientation toward the users work procedures and demands and
his or her (cooking) practices
Orientation toward the professional sector, which sets the tone
for the furniture, materials, equipment and cooking
The kitchen in the rental segment remains oriented toward an average of the familiar standards.
Storage Space and Ergonomics
The new relative importance of the kitchen and cooking, a new outlook on habitation, and the opening of the kitchen into the living
space have made the idea of storage a central issue over the past few
years. For decades the need to maximize storage had kitchen furniture rising to the ceiling. The more design and lifestyle values became a priority, the more the volume of massive cabinets were
placed in question. Yet where to put the pots, pans, and dishes,
cutlery, tools, small appliances, and other various assorted goods?
In 1998/99, Julius Blum GmbH in Austria tackled the issue and
commissioned the Institut fr kotrophologie [Institute of
Domestic Science] in Kranzberg (D) to perform a study that would
establish a households need for storage. On this basis, a so-called

17 A kitchen planned and equipped in


terms of kitchen zones saves time and
25 percent of workflow (2003, Dynamic
Space , Blum).
18 Full extension inner pull-outs make
optimal use of space, provide easy access,
and a complete overview of contents
(2003, Dynamic Space , Blum).

120

storage planner was developed, which could be used to ascertain


individual space requirements in a number of trays, pull-outs, and
drawers.5 Further developments in cabinet design have led to a much
higher level of usability in recent years. Instead of maximizing storage by using as many cabinets as possible, today the issue is how to
most intelligently use and organize the units themselves. The results
are significant: as Blums studies reveal, as much as 55 per cent more
storage space can be gained via pull-out with higher back and side
walls. This, and sophisticated dividing systems can put an end to untidy chaos and create more space.
Ergonomics has played a central role here, but this involves
more than optimizing common work procedures in terms of work
paths. This wider spectrum is expressed in work heights differentiated by task, different supply levels that are equipped according to
frequency of use, and greater possibilities of oversight and access.
None of these issues is new, but our awareness of them can be renewed. Mainly the work-height, which is standardized at just under
three feet, is now adapted to the user and often to specific tasks in
individualized kitchen construction. Due to humans increased
height, there is an effort being made to raise even standard dimensions (recommendations in the context of various norms systems).
A basic rule applied to establish individual dimensions: in a comfortable, upright position, bend the arm 90 and measure the distance to the floor; subtract six inches, and the correct work-height is
established. If several cooks are cooking in the same kitchen, use
their average distance to the floor. AMKs6 ergonomics planner is
also a useful basis for determining the optimal access height of top
cupboards.
Work surfaces are located between the preparation/sink area and
the cooking area, and according to current guidelines should be at
least 23 in. wide. Cooks appreciate every extra inch and found a
minimum dimension of 40 in. ideal. Work-depth plays a role here as
well: with deeper surfaces of 29 or 32 in. (standard = 24 in.), work
can be shifted to the back; this saves space and saves having to step
to the left or right. A welcome side effect, the increased depth allows
for more storage in the cabinets below and more headroom under
overhead cabinets (if available).
Since most households began installing dishwashing machines,
the sink has evolved into a preparation area or been reduced to a single, large basin. The user will opt for the one or the other tendency
depending on his or her philosophy. In numerous models the fittings, with their standard curved, high-spout faucets, display the
functional and formal qualities of a professional kitchen. The high
faucets have pull-out heads, and with long handles rather than rotary knobs they are easy to use. The waste disposal system below is
available both with and without a waste-separation function. The
garbage bags should be fillable to capacity and without obstruction.
Provided there is enough room, it is better to install the waste disposal system beside the sink rather than under it.
With the further optimization of kitchen work in mind, the
Julius Blum GmbH like Christine Frederick7 before them recently conducted a line study of work processes in a modern kitchen
spread out throughout the day or over the course of a week. The
results showed the paths, time, and strains on the human body in
stooping, reaching, turning, putting away, and clearing space. These
121

were analyzed and compiled into a total concept for modern kitchen
design under the term Dynamic Space. The most important principles of such design are:
Include sufficient storage space (based on demand assessment
and checklists)
Plan the kitchen in terms of five zones (stock, storage, sink area,
preparation area, cooking/baking)
Avoid doors in lower cupboards (drawers and pull-outs obviate
unnecessary stooping and clearing)
Include fully extendable pull-outs (these provide unrestricted
overview and access)
Bulk supplies should be stored with their specific purposes in mind.
By organizing these five function zones according to lifestyle and
household dimensions, each individual zone can be furnished and
be functional as a work center of the shortest possible work
paths.
Current Aims and Tendencies
In accord with its growing significance, the kitchen is increasingly
being situated in a preferred location within the floor plan and no
longer banished to the nether regions. Views and relation to the rest

19 Deeper working surfaces allow one to


work further back or to install a depot deck
with extra storage space (2003, Sanitas
Troesch).
20 The system 20 water source is designed
for ergonomic cleaning and preparation,
even in terms of its material. Stainless steel
is both hygienic and a classic in day-to-day
kitchen life (2003, Bulthaup).
21 The stainless steel fittings are based
on those used by professionals and allow
for more functional rinsing, preparing, and
cooking (2004, Kludi).
22 The Eisinger Block program consists
of different work blocks that can be combined to create an entire kitchen or installed individually to supplement an existing one. This washing-preparation block
contains a dishwashing machine and a KEA
Motion 600 waste separation system
(2004, Franke).

122

of the interior and exterior and the integration in the home environment have become important planning factors.
Making the kitchen into a living space requires a new living quality from arrangement of the home and its total concept. Pull-outs
that extend gently and quietly and close on their own, or noise-absorbing buffers on the doors are marks of a new comfort level for
furniture. Noise reduction is an important issue for furniture and
appliances.
The lighting concept of a room today needs to take into account
both functional and atmospheric lighting modes. Modern lighting
systems, mini fluorescent tubes, or halogen light systems, produce
white, glare-free light where it is needed, and the ambience of the
room is showcased. Voluminous cabinets are built into the wall and
appear as a seamless surface; massive wall units give way to transparent glass panels, and the ceramic tiles in the typical Swiss niche have
long been replaced by glass or other plain surfaces.
Todays kitchen usually has more than one cook in it, and ergonomics plays an enormous role. Ovens at eye-level, dishwashers
installed at a more comfortable height or in upper drawers, refrigerators with individually defined cooling zones, waste disposals with
functional separation systems, and new features under the sink have
displaced earlier basic elements of kitchen design. In the cooking
area, burners arranged in a row are far more functional than the tra-

23 These integrated dishwashing drawers


can be installed individually, either on top
or next to each other, depending on individual needs. The ergonomic positioning
prevents irritating stooping (2004, Bauknecht).
24 Blumotion is a concealed built-in technology that allows drawers, pull-outs, and
cabinet doors to be closed quietly
and easily, with perfect movement (2002,
Blum).
25 By combining the chassis with the
wall unit, the Slide system redefines the
hutch. The glass panels can be shifted
sideways (2005, Leicht).

123

ditional square. Fixed shelves will no longer be welcome in lower


cupboards.
Cooking and consumption habits have changed, and this goes
for appliance technologies and materials, too. A growing consciousness of healthiness and freshness in produce and foodstuffs on the
one hand, and increasingly sophisticated menus on the other have
transformed cooking and our attitudes toward it. Likewise, with
travel to far-away lands becoming more common, entirely different
cuisines have been discovered. The introduction of the wok to the
European kitchen is just one example of this. Following the microwave, high-pressure steamers are becoming increasingly popular
and are finding their way into standard kitchens. Cooking is being
shifted more and more from the stovetop to the steamer, which
leaves nutrients intact and guarantees perfectly cooked food in very
short time. In return the demand for hygienic, functional preparation areas and surfaces is increasing.
A further development affects things that must be stored in the
kitchen: tools, pans, knives, cutlery, dishes, and other devices and
utensils. The earlier propensity to hoard and collect is increasingly
giving way to clearing out. Concentrating on what is really needed
and disposing with unnecessary ballast will affect kitchens, too.
The quantity and design of storage spaces are constantly being
altered.

26 Induction cooking is a professional feature. By way of induction coils, the heat is


produced directly in the pan and the cooking surface remains cool. This technology
allows for quick, reliable cooking at very
fine degrees of temperature (2003, V-Zug).
27 Asian cuisine has transformed everyday
life in the European kitchen. Here the induction field has been shaped for a wok
(2004, Electrolux).
28 Cooking with steam can be done
with low or high pressure. The Imperial
Steamer is the classic high-pressure machine (2003, Miele).

124

Practical Viewpoints
Only actual praxis can show to what degree individual ideas, design
concepts, and theoretical demands can be combined. For this reason,
I have interviewed a number of kitchen design specialists. Their responses demonstrate how different occupations foreground different aspects, which should all ideally be combined in practice.

The Architect: Martin Lanz, architect ETH/SIA8


The spatial organization of kitchen, dining, and living space is of
central importance in floor plan development. Living space has
become a spatial experience in the last few years. Since the early
eighties, room units have been unified and become interchangeable.
Detail planning develops from the form of the room.

2930 Kitchen with open entry to the living room (Meyer, Moser, Lanz Architekten,
Zurich): Floorplan; view.

The Interior Architect and Designer: Kurt Greter, interior architect


VSI/SDA9
The kitchen and dining area together create the core of the home.
The kitchen stands for warmth, spending time together, enjoyment,
handiwork, recreation, and relaxation. It is a workshop that each
user comes to with his or her own needs and requirements. The
whole process of shopping, storing, serving, refrigerating, and stocking food has been a stepchild of design. To that extent locating the
kitchen near the entryway plays an important role: entry, cooking,
serving can quite easily be combined into a unity.

3132 Open kitchen in an attic apartment


(Entwurfsatelier Kurt Greter, Zurich):
Floor plan (1 entry, 2 cloakroom, 3 kitchen,
4 serving area, 5 washing/work room,
6 dining, 7 living); view.

125

3334 Kitchen island with a concrete


work surface combined with steel furniture
in colors from the color collection (2005,
Forster): View; floor plan.

The Architect and Product Manager: Sara Kruchi, architect FH10


Architect specifications are often so defined that the manufacturer is
left only with the details of executing them. Architectural planning
is often given over to draftspersons who simply follow current
standards: the Swiss Norm Association, Neufert, the SMS system.
You can see from the plan whether the kitchen was designed with
passion or simply according to these general guidelines. Materials
that serve both function and design play an important role: steel,
chrome, granite (depending on the porosity), cement, artificial stone,
and glass all fulfill hygienic and aesthetic requirements.

The Kitchen Specialist: Thomas Wiesmann11


The most important factor in designing a kitchen is being able to
listen: the client, the user, and his or her needs are the crucial things.
Not everyone can cook in all kitchens, which is why I use an extensive questionnaire to find out what the clients requirements are.
These have developed considerably in the last twenty years, not least
due to changes in household structure: we now have very mobile
people who live and work in different places, others who are single
but entertain guests frequently, and there has been a boom in the
fifty-and-over generation. How many people will be cooking in the
kitchen, whether a man or a woman will be the primary user, and
what habits they have are all parameters that must be taken into account in the design concept.

3536 Ideal kitchen solution with a functional center joined to a kitchen island
(2004, Wiesmann Kchen, Zurich): View;
floor plan.

126

The Interior Design Draftsperson: Anna Wenger12


The builders play a central role since they must decide whether
they want an open or closed kitchen or whether to create a hybrid
with sliding doors. Open kitchens, where you work facing the room
and not the wall, are ideal. This way you can communicate with
your guests or family while cooking and do not have to turn your
back on them. Extra deep work surfaces are more comfortable and
also quite important. It is important to have sufficient space between
the stove and the sink, where the major part of preparation takes
place.

37 The voluminous provisions and utensil


cabinets are set in a frame and together
with the special kitchen island take on living room character (2004, Sanitas Troesch).

The Kitchen Engineer: Peter Hausheer13


What is crucial is the development and execution of the most
widely applicable standards and guidelines for an ergonomic, functional, and comfort-oriented kitchen plan and interior design. Ergonomics and traffic flow need to be taken into account more in the
planning stages. Kitchen islands without plumbing make it necessary to find solutions and often require feats of engineering, for ventilation for example. What is clear is that while the number of appliances in kitchens has increased and furniture has decreased, most errors are made in installing machines optimally according to workflow. Technical documentation from manufacturers are good sources
of information.

38 The Claro model is cut for perfect


ergonomics. The cooking range and ventilator are height-adjustable (2005, Piatti).

127

So what?
There are ergonomic, design, and engineering principles that have influenced kitchen design for decades.
The execution of a design takes place more or less strictly, more
or less creatively, and more or less practically and is dependent
on the human being as a factor of influence.

Tried-and-true, praxis-oriented measurement systems make planning considerably easier. Particularly when combining furniture and
appliances, appliance installation according to the SMS system is
simple to plan and guarantees universality.
Kitchen planning is quite individual. In designing a kitchen, cooking
plays a role.
Depending on who is designing the kitchen (architect, interior
architect, kitchen engineer, designer, or developer), the same
basic requirements for the same floor plan will produce different
results. An exception to this is in standardized home building and
the building of rental units.
Someone who loves to cook will design a kitchen differently
from someone who (only) loves to eat.
Current systems of standards provide the foundations for planning
standard kitchens. Technological developments, changes in values,
new determining factors from the environments have little influence
on these foundations and when they do it is after considerable delay.
Individual know-how and the quality of the planner are decisive factors here. Otl Aicher commented in 1982 in the foreword to his
book Die Kche zum Kochen [The Kitchen For Cooking]: Designers who do not cook should not be let near kitchens.14 The same
thing should hold for planners.
The value of the kitchen and of cooking as well as that of nutritional
habits have a decisive influence on planning.
The basic value of a kitchen is defined at the room layout stage.
In the planning and designing of details, individual cooking and
eating habits as well as aesthetics must play a decisive role.
There is really nothing keeping a planner from following ergonomic
principles: kitchen manufacturers and suppliers offer many versatile
options for the actual execution of a kitchen plan, including fully extendable drawers and pull-outs, height-adjustable bases, wider
openings for doors, and diverse types of furniture and organization
systems. In practice, however, the fundamentals are often neglected,
whether out of ignorance or because budget or aesthetics are given
preference. That is when people forget that the kitchen is a workshop, to be used day in, day out and over the course of decades.

128

1 See Christina Sondereggers essay in this volume.


2 The Bauentwurfslehre by Ernst Neufert (19001986), first published in 1936 and
available in English as Architects Data, set the trend here in many ways. It was an
epochal work and is still referenced today in every architectural office to verify room
dimensions. See also: Walter Prigge, ed., Ernst Neufert: Normierte Baukultur im
20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 1999).
3 The SINK norm, based on a grid width of 55 cm. and a height partition of 1/6th,
was developed in the sixties and was then adopted by the entire industry. The first
signs of standardization can be found as early as the thirties (in the dimension harmonization of gas appliances). In 1996, it was renamed SMS (Schweitzer Mass System, or
Swiss Measurement System) without any changes to its technical contents. See also
Christina Sondereggers essay in this volume.
4 Otl Aicher, Die Kche zum Kochen: Das Ende einer Architekturdoktrin (Munich:
Callwey, 1982). The publication is based on comprehensive studies developed for
Bulthaup, but at the same time also on Aichers own passion for cooking.
5 For details, see http://www.blum.com, or http://www.dynamicspace.com (accessed
31 May 2005).
6 For more information about the ergonomics planner see http://www.amk.de (accessed 31 May 2005).
7 Frederick, whose numerous publications at the beginning of the twentieth century
were a decisive force for rationalizing the household, conducted a kind of line study in
1922 to research traffic paths for different arrangements of kitchen furniture. See Eva
Scheid, Heim und Technik in Amerika, in Oikos: Von der Feuerstelle zur Mikrowelle. Haushalt und Wohnen im Wandel, ed. Michael Andritzky (Giessen: Anabas,
1992): 8692.
8 Martin Lanz, Architect ETH/SIA, Meyer, Moser, Lanz Architekten AG, Zurich.
Specialization: new construction and renovation in all property segments.
9 Kurt Greter, Interior Architect VSI/SDA, Entwurfsatelier Kurt Greter, Zurich.
Specialization: architecture/interior architecture, office planning, furniture design.
10 Sara Kruchi, Architect FH, Product Manager and Exhibition Planner, Forster
Kchen, Arbon, Switzerland. Specialization: exhibition planning, kitchen design, and
product development.
11 Thomas Wiesmann, proprietor, Thomas Wiesmann Kchenstudio, Zurich. Specialization: individual kitchens in the luxury segment.
12 Anna Wenger, interior design draftsperson, kitchen and exhibition planner, Sanitas
Troesch AG, Bern.
13 Peter Hausheer, Director of Product Technology, Bruno Piatti AG, Dietlikon,
Switzerland. Specialization: product development, training of engineers and planners,
member of the Engineering Board, Swiss Kitchen Assocation (KVS).
14 Aicher, Die Kche zum Kochen, 6.

129

Marion von Osten

Ghostly Silence
The Unemployed Kitchen

Advertisement for Electrolux refrigerators,


1951 (France).

Whatever happened to those silvery worlds where seductive, smiling


models with perfectly polished nails softly pressed the buttons on
the dishwasher or where thirty-something token men in aprons enjoyed a glass of red wine with their girlfriends while cooking together? Whatever happened to those worlds of images that once advertised a new, rational, yet comfortable, large-family-style domesticity that nevertheless bristled with the sex appeal of single life and
on every corner proclaimed the new joys of cooking, the perfect
hobby for both men and women? These feel-good kitchen figures
have disappeared from the image worlds that once graced the pages
of trade magazines. In their place have come multi-media walls, mobile telephones, and flat screens with relaxed people consuming or
communicating with or in front of them. The new kitchen, with its
weekend warriors fiddling with pots and pans like sous-chefs, brandishing knives like butchers, and abusing the chopping block
while under a cloud of steam the size of a cafeteria kitchen the consomm simmers away has left us.
As a private detective of kitchen imagery I would like to be able
to discern a system here, because the modern kitchen has a very special (visual) history of suddenly appearing and then just as unexpectedly going away. If at first there were only occasional, oddly mechanized, and isolated household machines slowly but surely enlarging
the archive of Sigfried Giedion at ETH Zurich, these were quickly
replaced by innovatively designed and practical single appliances
operated by increasingly cheerful homemakers appliances that
with time found their way into design collections in museums, scrap
heaps in unincorporated areas, or lots in flea markets. For by now
the kitchen was being sold as the classic ensemble, an indivisible
unity whose functionality was spruced up for the especially successful housewife-family in the form of the live-in kitchen, the kitchen
bar, and eventually the omnipresent fitted kitchen. For the time being, the kitchens final incarnation in this chain of iconogenesis is the
now well-known professional kitchen for home use a space for
spending free time and leisure, rather than work, that is not only
capable of being attractive to men, but is intended and permitted to
be so, too.1
Even when diverse historical and contemporary appliances and
kitchen designs continue to be supported and used and advertised in
the high-grade kitchens shown in trade journals, it is more conspic131

1 High-grade, open, and sexy: the kitchen


as a design investment for the svelte and
trend-conscious new moderns of today.

uous than ever that the new communication technologies have now
taken the lead and are supplanting the beautiful new image of the
kitchen.
Does this anti-kitchen trend in advertising result simply from
shrewd business decisions being made in the upper echelons of
multinational corporations and so-called saturated markets?
Or can the disappearance of kitchens from our everyday image
worlds be explained by those reports from the social sciences that
indicate that the majority of people in the twenty-first century
tend to avoid housework more than any other kind of work? In
any case, this was the conclusion that Arlie Russell Hochschild
came to in a study conducted in the nineties in the United States,
according to which more and more white-collar men and women
felt overwhelmed by their private life, i. e. cooking, household
maintenance, their relationship, and child-care, while everyday
life in the workplace was viewed as a well-organized structure in
which, provided one behaved appropriately, one could count on
recognition and personal advancement.2 It was a world that, unlike the home, seems to function; where there are equal opportunity laws in place; where you get promoted and have legal recourse against discrimination, etc. Even if this might be more
promise than reality, the jargon of attentiveness to workers needs,
an accomplishment of the workers movement, does not exist at
132

all in the home. People do not get promotions not to mention


year-end bonuses or guarantees against discrimination for
preparing meals, pushing the vacuum cleaner around, or changing
diapers.
Even to begin thinking about the kitchen as both workplace and
employment relationship involves considering what value such
work has in everyday life and how it has changed through history.
Furthermore, kitchen labor as various Bulthaup representations
would have it is inextricable not only from the histories of other
forms of household labor, but from the fact that the kitchen played
a central role in developing a certain image of femininity as a standard of modernity. It is for this reason, too, that housework has
come to be perceived as a burden. The effort to abolish it has as
long a tradition as does the effort to valorize it as womans natural workplace. As I would like to show, attempts at abolishing
housework are, on the one hand, grounded in the rationalization
and mechanization of the work process, in fantasies of total automation, and, on the other hand, in the gendered division of labor,
as well as the spatial separation of the public and, private spheres
and their differing social valuations.
From a distance, the history of the rationalization and technologization of housework reads as strikingly as that of its disconcerting abolishment. The kitchen is thus invested with a very special
significance, as a site for playing out various techno-fantasies that
project as a reverse image the formal economy of gainful employment into the informal space of housework and family care.3 Furthermore, the unpaid labor at home and the serving, cooking for, and
care of the husbands, children, and other family members has been
viewed ever since the first womens suffrage movement in the nineteenth century as the core mechanism in the oppression of servants
and women. To free them of this burden remains a central aim of
feminism and other emancipation movements. As in other areas of
the work world, here, too, great store was set in the potential of
technological innovation for resolving gender and class inequalities
a prospect that today has been refuted by numerous studies. For
despite the high-tech kitchens and double-income households, up
to ninety percent of housework is still done by women; and around
the world it is increasingly being outsourced to people primarily
women who are migrants or immigrants.4
2 L. Van Hoesen, Apple Parer and Slicer,
1855 (United States).
3 The Packaged Kitchen, 1940s. Original caption from the British Council:
Small Packet kitchen fitment for use in
converted flats. These fitments are delivered in crates ready for assembly. When
erected the fitment includes gas cooker,
refrigeration, gas water heater, stainless
steel sink and cupboard accommodation.

133

But this fact, too, is disappearing, becoming invisible and losing


its status as a political fact and prevalent image. In order to be able
to comprehend these invisibles and visibles of the kitchen on the one
hand and the activities that take place in it on the other, we need to
look back at the history of its radical revaluation through mechanization, rationalization, and technologization, back to the time of
the so-called servant crisis, when housework was to be redefined
in terms of factory labor in order to both accelerate and reduce it.
The Mechanical Bride
According to Judy Wajcman5 the ideology of the happy nuclear
family and the reduction of paid and unpaid household labor (unpaid workers generally included unmarried daughters, aunts, and
grandparents) meant that the housewife was responsible for all the
work one of the most devastating changes in the organization of
housework. The greatest reduction in household workers in uppermiddle-class families took place in the 1920s. This resulted from a
process that began in the nineteenth century, when male servants
were increasingly drawn into the industrial labor market and replaced by female servants in households. The maid question was
presented in womens magazines of the time as a moral issue, since it
apparently called into question the stability and sanctity of the
bourgeois home. On the other hand, the maid question quickly

4 Visually representing a repetitive work


process by means of wire models: motion
studies by Lilian M. and Frank B. Gilbreth,
around 1912.
5 Preparation, Restoration: double-page
spread from the Kitchen Planning brochure
of the U.S. company Kitchen Maid, 1930.

134

became a political issue when socialists discovered household labor


as a political subject. In fact, the reduction in numbers of paid and
unpaid household workers can be explained by fundamental societal
changes in capitalist societies by which the service economy of the
nineteenth century was transformed in the circulatory system of socalled Fordism into a commodity-producing and -consuming society, in which all classes were to be integrated. According to contemporary theorists of technology and architecture, it was above all the
disappearance of household employees that fueled the rationalization and technologization of housework.
The mechanization of housework first took place in the United
States and initially comprised cleaning procedures: the washing and
ironing of clothes; the washing of dishes, carpets, and furniture; and
from there to the mechanization of heating and cooling processes. In
Europe, the onset of industrialization brought with it the transition
from manual labor to mechanical labor and the first factories for
mass-production. Automatized mechanisms were coordinated following scientific analyses, above all in order to synchronize them
with the workers body. The reorganization and optimizing of
work procedures, manifested in both the assembly line and the scientific mode of management (in the Taylorist system), were geared
toward an acceleration of the workflow in order to achieve the production of more items in less time. It was believed that this accelera-

135

tion could be achieved by improving the organization of habitual


work processes, by resequencing them according to rational principles, and disciplining the workers body with the appropriate training. Important advocates of this optimization doctrine were Frank
and Lilian Gilbreth, who used photography to record motion and
translated these studies into three-dimensional models that were
then introduced into the training of workers in factories in order to
teach them how to move more efficiently. The methods for developing this motion path model were applied by Lilian Gilbreth to the
workflow in the kitchen and are used to this day in kitchen rationalization models.
The mechanization of the household in the nineteenth century
took place in the United States in conjunction with the womens
suffrage movement. One of the most important advocates of household rationalization was Catherine Beecher (18001878), who like
many American social reformers around the time of the Civil War
came from a family of New England Puritan preachers. Together
with her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Toms
Cabin, Beecher wrote the textbook Domestic Economy. She advocated the professionalization of household activities and introduced
the teaching of home economics as a scientific discipline. In another
book written by the two sisters, The American Womans Home
(1869), they write: Every human being, [according to the Declaration of Independence], stands on the same natural level with every
other . . . there are no hereditary titles, no monopolies, no privileged
classes . . . [t]he condition of domestic service, however, still retains
about it something of the influences from feudal times.6 As
Catherine Beecher understood it, the burdens of the . . . housekeeper were to be borne without butlers, maids, or slaves. The
consequence of this was that housework was to be organized more
efficiently. The comfort and privileges of the upper middle class and
the patriarch were to be maintained. Marriage and housekeeping
were still seen as desirable lifestyles, but a combined labor model
would require new relations among family members. The deprivatization of housework and even the redefinition of the woman as an
active public figure were, as various documents show, a strange,
even repellent idea.7
Beecher imagined her chosen ideal, the American nuclear family,
reorganized as a small, private factory. For the new democratic
way of life brought on by the reorganization of housework and later
by the development of increasingly sophisticated appliances would
now make it possible to replace domestic servants, which included
former African-American slaves. The housewife was to be the manager of this new, private factory, which would in turn professionalize housekeeping.
The tenets of optimizing household management and the
attempt to scientifically conceptualize housework eventually led
to an architectural reorganization of the household as well, putting
the modern housewife more and more at the center of her responsibilities. The results of motion and workflow studies conducted
by the Gilbreths and other management scientists were converted
into architectural models and designs that followed the principles
of making housework more efficient and improving hygiene. In
the 1920s in Europe, Social Democratic Germany saw the first
functional designs of the New Building, such as, for instance,
136

Numerous publications and exhibits


throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s
were meant to inform a wider public about
household rationalization. Margarete
Schtte-Lihotzkys Frankfurt Kitchen
served as the model for a great many ideal
kitchens to come. Die praktische Kche
[The practical kitchen] an exhibition at the
Gewerbemuseum Basel [Basel Museum of
Arts and Crafts], 9 February16 March,
1930.
6 Kitchen by Rudolf Preiswerk.
7 Advertisement from the Basler
Nachrichten 277 (1930). The drawing is
based on the photograph of Rudolf
Preiswerks kitchen.

J. J. P. Ouds model kitchen design in the 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung


in Stuttgart.
The Viennese architect Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky (18972000)
was one of the first architects to consider the needs of gainfully employed and single women with families in her designs. Likewise beholden to functionalism, Schtte-Lihotzky sought to rethink the relationship of housework and family care to processes of industrialization and designed not only apartments for bachelor women, but
daycare centers and the famous Frankfurt Kitchen. SchtteLihotzky was among those social reformers and architects who
through optimized workflow in the household and improved design
aimed to enable women to enter the working world and take part in
the industrial production process.8 Schtte-Lihotzkys exemplary
Frankfurt Kitchen has been highly influential; and along with
similar efforts by her male colleagues comprised a socio-technological project for reform.
The Frankfurt Kitchen was a good example of the problem
facing these attempts at an emancipatory design, which anticipated
modern mass-housing projects. Shortening workflow paths did little
to alleviate the situation of the housewife, who still had to conduct
this work by herself, even when she was gainfully employed outside
the home. Kitchen work continued to be professionalized and functionalized, and at the same time this gave rise to the idea that if it

were not managed rationally, it would be an unbearable burden, a


waste of time, to be gotten over with as quickly as possible. The
housewife was instructed to conduct herself in this rationalized
kitchen with corresponding practicality, rationality, and knowledge.
The modern woman had to keep her appliances in running order,
was particularly expert in home economics, and possessed a functional, practical taste that had no patience for bric-a-brac, curlicues,
and kitsch. Efficiency, directedness, and industry now were to be
fully internalized. A bad conscience was the immediate response
when she neglected to clean the windows as scheduled, wash the
dishes immediately after dinner, or fail to perform optimally at both
her job and housework without considerable effort. Although they
attended to the image of an efficient, time-saving homemaker/employee, modern architectural social engineering entirely ignored the
causes behind the gendered division of labor and traditional gender
137

relations in a single-income household, and thus in some ways


ended up institutionalizing them spatially.9
Management scientists, architects, and engineers mechanized
and, later, technologized the household in an effort to rationalize
away the vernacular activities that took place in it, since these
were seen as burdens and not authentic labor in terms of an industrial society. As everyone knows, housework itself was by no means
done away with. The attempt to abolish or accelerate certain activities is subject to what Foucault describes as a fundamentally negative principle: it purports to conserve time while simultaneously creating more and more new work procedures.

8 Low-lying oven drafts are inconvenient


and waste space. Position steam-catch over
the burners.
Standardizing efficiency by the book: illustration from Ernst Neuferts indispensable
Bauentwurfslehre [Architects Data].

Twelve thirty and the spinach still isnt done!


The mechanization and rationalization of the kitchen and washing
procedures formed the basis for the widescale technologization of
housework in postwar Europe. The food industry expanded and developed new, timesaving meals that soon took over supermarkets
and freezers. Beginning in the sixties, the white technologies refrigerators, stoves, washing machines were extensively marketed in
new ways. Television brought the days events, along with news of
new products, to the housewife, who in accordance with modern urban planning spent her days alone in a detached house in a brandnew suburban development. The practical household appliances
for the new consumer/homemaker washing machines, vacuum
cleaners, etc. were and still are developed primarily by male designers.10 The housewife, in fact, was a unifying force for commodity production and marketing, the central arenas of national
economies following the war. Seemingly liberated from housework
through the reorganization of the household and new technologies,
she now increasingly worked at so-called womens wages in
production facilities, manufacturing the commodities she was meant
to go out and buy.11
Time-budget studies show that mechanizing and technologizing
housework has never succeeded in substantially reducing it. Household technologies have indeed increased the productivity of housework, but have been accompanied by mounting expectations of the
role of the housewife, so that the housewife is encumbered with
even more work, most of it now having to do with household management. There emerged a number of new tasks that, while not particularly strenuous physically, were as time-consuming as the activities they were supposed to replace. Beyond housework itself, diverse studies have shown that household technologies reinforce the
traditional division of labor in heterosexual couples and bind
women even more firmly to their traditional role. This is due,
among other things, to the fact that these technologies are used to
privatize rather than collectivize work and thus prevent any redistribution of housework.
The combined labor model common today, according to which
all family members take part in the running of the household, has
never substantially fostered mens participation in housework, not
even in rationalizing it by casting housekeeping as a kind of economics. According to Judy Wajcman, the increasing technologization of the home actually overrides attempts to distribute housework more equitably, and the time that men spend on housework is
decreasing. In addition, the relation of men and women to house138

9 Film stills from a commercial for Findus


spinach by Roco Frisco, 1961.

hold technology needs to be understood in terms of their respective


relations to housework and machines. Cultural notions of masculinity emphasize competency in the use and repair of machines.
Mechanical competency has traditionally been a component of
manliness since it demonstrates control over the physical environment. While women are able to utilize machines in the traditional
sense, especially those that have to do with the kitchen and with
cleaning, this is not viewed as technical competency.12 Finally, the
rationalization and effectivization of housework has substantially
contributed to embedding the role of woman in it. At the same
time, the managerial science analysis of housework is informed by
another negative dynamic, inasmuch as the work conducted is
viewed as something to be gotten rid of and thus remains unattractive.
Men who wrote on the issue of the household in the fifties, sixties, and seventies obstinately maintained the idea that as a result of
household technologies housewives hardly had to work anymore.
At the end of the fifties, sociologist Talcott Parsons argued that industrialization had relieved the family system of many of its functions so that the only function it had left was that of consumption.13 The function of the woman was now reduced to socializing
the children and stabilizing the adult personality. Housework,
cleaning and washing, and preparing food, i. e. the kitchen, were no
longer considered jobs by Parsons since he viewed them as completely automatized. Human activity was thus made invisible by
machines.
The Good Companion
Against this background, beginning in the sixties, the woman was
granted an emotional function a counterweight to the more serious, rational, masculine world of gainful employment. Home139

10 Advertisement for Prometheus ovens.


11 Advertisement for Gallay dishwashers.

making was increasingly understood in terms of the womans affection for her family. Catherine Beechers early efforts to objectify housework and recognize it as a job were reversed in the
course of technologizing the household. Now that women were
seemingly freed by technology from having anything to do, and
instead found themselves according to the logic of the technologizers in a kind of involuntary state of leisure or unemployment,
emotional tasks were foregrounded: decorating the house and providing a cheerful ambience, being a supremely loving and caring
wife and lover, being a new, pedagogically revaluated kind of
mother, and raising children in general. Structural transformations
of the new household labor force were accompanied by an ideology of what it meant to be a housewife. For in the course of industrialization, housework passed through all the stages of restructuring that a company would and was just as much affected by the
technology crisis of the sixties and seventies. This manifested itself
in the kitchen as well, which was now no longer a purely functional space but became again the warm and cozy hearth to which
one could retreat after the days work was done. Being a housewife, as cookbooks and guidebooks of that generation make clear,
was linked to a new social role, that of the waiting, loving, and
nurturing woman.14 A womans qualifications were now social in
nature and no longer couched in terms of Fordism and the science
of management. The performative feat of being a housewife can be
understood to be what Foucault termed a technology of the self,
which holds its subjects to adhering to the appropriate norms, or,
in the case of the housewife, to interiorizing them so thoroughly
that they are no longer recognized as norms.
On the one hand, genders and gender dichotomy are structured
by the separation of public and private spheres and of paid and unpaid labor. On the other hand, the private arena is no less disciplinary in its effects on the subjects acting within it. Just as the Taylorist factory produced the male worker, industrialization created
the female domestic worker. The invisible work in the home was
subject to a far more massive gender affliction than industrial paid
labor, which may have been marked as masculine but nevertheless
promised access for the other sex. Housework, by contrast aside
from the now vanishing images of men who cook, cited at the beginning has never been seen as an attractive field for socially integrat140

The Kitchen of Tomorrow: model kitchen


of the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Co., 1943,
designed by H. Creston Dohner.
12 Kitchen area: covered appliances;
sunken, retrievable cooking pots in the
stove; glass-walled oven (left); generous
picture window, to bring the outdoors
inside and provide perfect lighting conditions.
13 Living/dining area: The Kitchen of
Tomorrow comes to life: by folding the
dining table back into the wall, the full
floor area of the dining alcove immediately
becomes available for play pen, games,
sewing or other activities. Libbey-OwensFord had created the Kitchen of Tomorrow in order to help point the way
toward building a better post-war world.

ing the sexes. Nor have household activities such as raising children,
caring for the elderly, and preparing food in the kitchen been viewed
as productive activities, although they are all life-support systems in
the truest sense of the word.
The cynical abolishment of housework can be read as the history of disregarding activities that have been naturalized as feminine and as the expression of an abstract and normative concept of
work that ignores everything that does not promise to increase productivity.15 For even the technologization of the household entirely
interiorized the principle that all activities can be optimized in
terms of an industrial science of management. The quantifiable job
performance of industrialization was thus meant to be mirrored in
the labor taking place in the home. The rationalization of housework served to anchor in modernity a new, rationally-acting labor
subjectivity and to project a new woman to be recognized by the
regime of labor and the patriarchy. In the post-modern era she has
been redesigned as an emotional role model and even today women
are steadfastly assumed to have more social competence. The image
of the housewife who cheerfully and lovingly does her job each day
without a boss or commander remains stable and operative. Only in
the seventies did women begin calling at the top of their lungs for a
general strike.
With the new womens movement in the seventies, voices were
raised above all against the assumption that only paid labor, especially that of industrial production, counts as work. The productive
combination of child raising, consumption, and housework on the
one hand and gainful employment on the other was abrogated, and
this was expressed in calls for money for housework. According
to Elisabeth Stiefel, a feminist economist from Cologne, the respective analyses and critiques of reproduction advanced by feminist
economists against the paradigm of industrial production were just

14 Grim, isnt it?: the fully automated


Postwar Faucet Kitchen a self-parody
from U. S.-American industry circles, 1940s,
(following double-page spread).

141

15 Cover of Lilo Auredens What Men Like


to Eat (1954).
16 Advertising poster for Satrap Household Appliances, COOP Schweiz, 1970.

as mired in our commodity-producing system and its theories as


was the so-called womans career itself. For the concept of household production that was advanced by the womens movement in
order to draw attention to the significance of household labor, excluded per definition everything that could not be rendered anonymously by third parties, which is to say, equally by way of the market.16
And neither the old nor the new image of the kitchen says anything about cleaning, about shopping, or about meeting with friends
and lovers or any of the other social activities that take place at
home. There are for example kitchens that have seen the planning of
cultural and political revolutions, and kitchens that have never seen
a meal whipped up in five minutes flat at all.
The depreciation of housework as a lesser occupation and the
modern conception of the career has thus seduced feminists as well
into accepting the regime of paid labor as a preferred emancipation
project into which the emancipated feminine subject should be integrated in order to demonstrate her social equality. The entry into the
work force by women in western industrialized countries remains
an unevenly bought emancipation, one that has given rise today to a
whole chain of new social hierarchies.17
In contrast to unpaid housework and regardless of how it is organized (as freelance, temporary, part-time, or full-time), paid labor
144

in western societies today is more than ever considered a guarantee


for social integration and for safeguarding ones status.
The depreciation of informal housework and caretaking is accompanied by a specific lifestyle and a politics of efficiency. Working and living are conceived of today in terms of an entirely new
productive relationship, one in which private undertakings are economically oriented. As sociologists have noted, this involves managing ones private life like a company in order to make the time spent
on living and working as productive as possible.18 The go-getting
men and women who no longer either can or want to take care of
their households are instead required to educate themselves for the
rest of their lives or to sell their flexible labor on a deregulated job
market. In this context, the kitchen has turned into a social meeting
place just as it once became an assembly line. A place not just for
grazing but for chatting about business, one that is no longer just an
extension of the living room but likewise an antechamber to the office as kitchen designers are trying to sell it to us now. And so in
the already faded picture of our hobby chefs we find not only displaced housework and its history of oppression but also new forms
of gainful employment inscribed backwards and illegible a smiling specter.

17 Man, Marx says nothing about


housework: poster for the Money For
Housework campaign, 1970s.

Further Reading
Boudry, Pauline, Brigitta Kuster, and Renate Lorenz, eds. Reproduktionskonten flschen! Heterosexualitt, Arbeit & Zuhause.
Berlin: b_books, 1999.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of


Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Cockburn, Cynthia. Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological
Change. London: Pluto Press, 1983.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz: The Industrial Revolution in the Home:
Household Technology and Social Changes in the Twentieth Century. Technology and Culture 17 (1976): 123.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of
Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave.
New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977.
Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution
to Anonymous History. New York: Oxford University Press. 1948.
Reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1969.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization
of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1983.
145

Kurz, Robert, Ernst Lohoff, and Norbert Trenkle, eds. Feierabend!


Elf Attacken gegen die Arbeit. Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag,
1999.
McLuhan, Mashall. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial
Man. New York: Vanguard Press. 1951. Reprint, Corte Madera, CA:
Gingko Press, 2002.
Wajcman, Judy. Feminism Confronts Technology. University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.

18 Fuck Housework: poster for the


Money For Housework campaign, 1970s.

1 The relation between masculinity and the kitchen is traditionally epitomized by the
occupation of the professional chef, which nowadays includes that of the television
chef as well. Cooking was never exclusively the domain of women, but involved the
distinction between a public and paid male profession and an unpaid, private female
condition. If kitchen designs before were oriented to women, they now are conceived with the male professional chef in mind.
2 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home
Becomes Work (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997).
3 The rationalization, mechanization, and technologization of the kitchen should not
be understood as a purely technological phenomenon. On the contrary, every analysis
of the technologization of household activities is linked to an ideological history that
idealizes this space, the home, as the place of personal freedom, leisure, and absence of
discipline for the gainfully employed, married man.
4 If the formal and informal sectors are considered together, it becomes clear that
women globally work far more than men. This has been proven statistically by various
international surveys, but is rarely discussed. An immigrant woman household worker
cannot afford to hire a cleaning lady, just as single working mothers cannot (see Lydia
Potts, Migrantinnen im Weltmarkt fr Arbeitskraft, in Heute hier Morgen fort:
Migration, Rassismus und die (Un)Ordnung des Weltmarktes, ed. Arbeitsgruppe 501
[Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Informationszentrum Dritte Welt et al., 1993], 8487,
and Mascha Madrin, Der kleine Unterschied in hunderttausend Franken, Widerspruch (Zurich) 16, no. 31 (July 1996): 127142.
5 See Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).
6 Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Womans Home.
Or, Principles of Domestic Science (New York, Ford, 1869): 318.
7 See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002): 9.
8 In the Socialist utopias of One Kitchen Houses in Red Vienna, first attempts were
made to collectivize housework and deprivatize the kitchen. This would enable
women to pursue careers as factory workers, secretaries, or telephone operators.
9 Due, paradoxically, to their having the multiple burdens of housekeeping, child care,
and career, women today are still considered supplemental wage earners (supplemental to the male single-income). Even today, on account of their working overtime for society, women around the world earn less than men.
10 See Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA and London:
The MIT Press, 1981).

146

11 See Cynthia Cockburn and Ruza First-Dilic, eds., Bringing Technology Home:
Gender and Technology in a Changing Europe (Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 1994).
12 Cynthia Cockburn, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (London: Pluto Press, 1983).
13 Talcott Parsons, The American Family: Its Relations to Personality and to the Social Structure, in Family Socialisation and Interaction Process, ed. Talcott Parsons and
Robert F. Bates (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956): 333.
14 See Ruth Schwartz Cowan, The Industrial Revolution in the Home: Household
Technology and Social change in the Twentieth Century, Technology and Culture 17
(1976): 123, and id., More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology
from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
15 See Hannah Arendt, Labor and Fertility, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958): 101109.
16 See Elisabeth Stiefel, ber den Zwiespalt zwischen globaler konomie und der
simplen Sorge fr das Leben, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft (Bonn) 3 (1998):
299309, as well as Elisabeth Stiefel and Marion von Osten, ArbeitArbeitArbeit und
was kommt danach? in Das Phantom sucht seinen Mrder. Ein Reader zur Kulturalisierung der konomie, ed. Justin Hoffmann and Marion von Osten (Berlin: b_books,
1999): 157167.
17 See Bettina Heintz, Eva Nadai, Regula Fischer, and Hannes Ummel, eds. Ungleich
unter Gleichen: Studien zur geschlechtsspezifischen Segregation des Arbeitsmarktes
(Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus, 1997), as well as Brigitte Young, Asynchronitten der deutsch-deutschen Frauenbewegung, PROKLA 94, 1, no. 24 (1993):
4963.
18 Ulrich Brckling, Susanne Krassmann, and Thomas Lemke, eds., Gouvernementalitt der Gegenwart. Studien zur konomisierung des Sozialen (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1999).

147

Ren Ammann

To Table! To Table?
In order to understand at what point appliances became necessary in the
kitchen and cutlery was required on the table, we must go a long way back
to the beginnings of mankind.

Cooking, but how? The long road

Stone-age Native American menu 12,000 years ago:


Roasted snails
Ragout of snakes and lizards on chili peppers
Cactus figs
In the beginning there was carrion. The first creatures related to
modern-day human beings subsisted on the flesh of dead animals.
The oldest traces to date of human consumption were found in
Kenya on antelope bones. The one-and-a-half-million-year-old
skeleton sections are marked by incisions that could not have been
made by the teeth of lions or hyenas. Early human beings must have
chewed on the bones, possibly to get at the marrow. And, indeed,
pre-human tools were found near the bones thin, razor-like splinters produced by hitting rocks together. Researchers have discovered
that these could even have been used to cut elephant hide.
Apart from an antelope, these early humans, who had settled for
a short time on a river bank, had eaten two pygmy hippopotamuses,
giraffes, zebras, a pig, and a catfish. The researchers found neither
hunting weapons nor animal traps. They conclude from this that our
ancestors followed the herds on their migrations through the
African plains and collected the flesh of dead animals. The way our
ancestors ate and the fact that they searched for food in order to eat
it at a later time was decisive for the evolution of humankind. For
this reason humans learned to walk upright since they needed their
hands to collect food and to carry it back to their living site. Moreover, the upright gait helped ancestors to spot lame animals and circling vultures. Their hands were free to use tools and to separate the
meat from the bones.
Did they eat roots? Did they consume herbs and other plants?
There was no evidence of this at the site where the antelope bones
were found but this does not necessarily prove anything. Pods and
other vegetable remains are not preserved for as long as bones are.
What the bones do tell us is that our ancestors had not yet discovered fire as a method of roasting or cooking. The first signs of fire
use show that this revolution in food preparation took place at
around the same time in both China and France about half a million
years ago. Thanks to fire, food could be made tastier and more easily
149

digestible. Moreover, fire killed bacteria and parasites. Culinary


history, if not history in general, thus began with the taming of fire,
as Jacques Barrau, Director of the Muse de lHomme in Paris, once
wrote.
Thus, there was now fire. The first cooking utensil was probably
a stick. However, it would be a few hundred thousand years before
cooking pots were invented. Our ancestors used tortoise shells,
mussel shells, or ostrich-egg shells to simmer their food. Cooking
without a pot is possible if one digs a hole in the ground and places
the meat or the vegetables between hot stones and then covers the
hole so that the steam does not escape a great leap for the culinary
arts. One could also place different grasses on top of the meat and
see how they tasted.
Another method was developed by the Native American tribes.
After killing an animal, they dug a hole roughly the size of the carcass. They then lined the hole with the skin from the animals back
before pouring in water and adding the meat. Hot stones were then
held in the broth until the meat was tender. Quartz was the best
type of stone for this form of cooking, and in order to hold the hot
stones in the water the early Native Americans used either a sheaf of
bound sticks or a wooden spoon cooking utensils that are still
used today.
The use of fire had far-reaching effects. The fact that cooked
food could be chewed much more easily than raw food ultimately
meant that a massive set of teeth was no longer needed. Over time,
the size of the jaw and the teeth was reduced, and as a result our ancestors were able to develop a form of communication and thus
more complex social relations. In short, the word came into being.
Extrapolating from evidence of larynx formation at the time, researchers have suggested that one of the first words uttered by one
Homo sapiens to another approximated a guttural growl. In contrast
to his ancestor, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens was a hunter!
Some ten thousand years ago, hunter and gatherer peoples
adopted a sedentary existence, devoting themselves to agriculture
and handcrafts (the oldest clay cooking pots are arguably as old as
this sedentary form of life.) This process altered the very roots of
human society: the larger the settled groups became, the more dependent they were on the fields they planted with rice, wheat, and
potatoes. For the first time, food was not equally distributed. For
the first time there were those who lived from a surplus and those
who suffered shortages. The transition to agriculture marked the
transition to a class society in which rich and poor soon developed
different habits of cooking and eating. At the beginning of the
eighth century, a law in Ireland stipulated, among other things,
how children given into fosterage were to be nourished: The
children of the lower classes are to receive just enough porridge of
oatmeal and buttermilk or water, to which old butter is to be
added. The sons of the upper classes are to receive a good amount
of porridge made of barley and fresh milk with fresh butter. The
sons of kings receive porridge of wheat meal and fresh milk with
honey.
In biblical times the people in what is now Israel ate locust soup
and boiled sheep tails, wild flowers dipped in honey and, due to
their preference for spicy vegetables, were known as garlic eaters.
Biblical cooks mixed mint and mustard and created marinades of
150

thyme, salt, and sesame. In the mornings the peasants ate wheat
cakes, and in the evenings they drank whey (Qom) from wooden
cups. On stoves fuelled with animal dung, they cooked lentils as a
soup, mush, or braised in honey. The only crops that grew plentifully in the area around Jerusalem were olives and vines. Archeologists have found hundreds of grape presses. Wine was conserved
with raisins, honey, cardamom, and fruit juice. But not everyone
could afford good juice. Many drank tamad, which was made from
grapes that had already been pressed. When Jesus was on the cross, a
soldier gave him a sponge soaked in this crude beverage. Luther
translated the word tamad as vinegar.
Eating with what?
Simple luncheon (Switzerland, mid-twentieth century):
Soup
Lung ragout
Potato pieces
Dried fruit or salad

Luncheon for the more demanding palate (Switzerland,


mid-twentieth century):
Soup
Cheese pastry
Meatloaf
Mashed potatoes
Mixed vegetables
Fruits
The ancient Swiss ate the same things as their neighbors: porridge,
stew, and bread. And with what? There are three possible methods:
with their hands, as has been done since time eternal; with chopsticks, a tradition reaching back three thousand or four thousand
years; or with a fork, a practice some three or four hundred years
old. With the exception of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, hands
were used for eating the world over at least until the sixteenth century. The majority of the worlds people still eat this way, using the
right hand for input and the left hand for output. The oldest chopsticks in existence are made of ivory and were found in the ruins of a
Chinese palace from the Zhou dynasty dating back to the eleventh
century B. C. Anyone eating with chopsticks eats without weapons.
It was common practice in many societies to discard ones weapons
before eating. In China one ate only with chopsticks, never with
knives.
In former times, the Swiss usually ate with their hands, at best
with a spoon and a knife. Forks did not exist. The German word for
spoon derives from the verb describing the slurping of stew. Even
when a meal was shared with guests, each person sharing in the meal
had to bring their own spoon, which was at that time carved of
wood. In the sixteenth century, Swiss men carried not only a spoon
with them but also the Schwyzertolch the Swiss knife. Like all
knives at the time, it had a sharpened point, and after cutting it was
used to skewer the portion and transport it to the mouth. After use,
the knife was wiped clean on either the tablecloth, if there was one,
or on the trousers before being put away.

152

As is the case today, every Swiss man possessed a knife at this


time. This was remarked on by Michel de Montaigne when he wrote
in 1580: A Swiss never eats without a knife, which is used to take
the food so that the bowl is not touched by the fingers. It is only
since the nineteenth century that eating exclusively with a knife has
been considered unrefined, at least at the table. While Swiss men
carried the Schwyzertolch, Swiss women carried a utensil holder
containing a small knife and an early form of spoon along with their
Ridikl, or handwork bag. Neither the mens nor womens implements could be kept free of rust at this time. The first cast-iron knife
blade was manufactured in Chesterfield in England in 1781, and
rustproof table utensils, which no longer carried a bitter aftertaste or
required constant cleaning, first became available in 1913.
Of the three most important utensils spoon, knife, and fork
the latter has had the shortest career. The fork first appeared as a
kitchen utensil in Homeric times, in the eighth century B. C. Initially it had five prongs, which formed a circle. The Romans used a
similar utensil to extract the snail meat from its shell. However,
opinions have tended to differ throughout history as to whether the
fork was really necessary, as witnessed by a visitor to Venice in the
eleventh century. The Doge of Venice, Orseolo II, had a Byzantine
wife, writes the visitor, She does not touch any food with her fingers; the eunuchs had to cut her food into precise pieces, which she
then placed in her mouth with a two-pronged fork. This practice,
initially sniggered at if not ridiculed, became established in Venice in
the sixteenth century and then spread throughout the rest of Italy,
initially in the courts and then throughout the rest of the population. It must be said that the fork did not always win over emperors
and kings. The French king Louis XIV (16831715) refused to use a
fork and forbade his princes to eat with forks in his presence. His
wife, Elisabeth Charlotte dOrlans, also known as Lieselotte von
der Pfalz (16521722), wrote to Germany: I have never heard of
such a thing; in my whole life I have eaten only with my knife and
my five fingers.
However, Lieselotte von der Pfalz was unable to stop the forks
triumphal march. The utensil made its way throughout the world in
the luggage of conquerors and colonialists and became socially desirable. Formal dining required its use, and this remains the case, at
least wherever French and English the languages of the former
colonists are spoken over dinner. However, if one is speaking Indian or Swahili, it is quite permissible to use ones fingers, as our ancestors did. And, as if by the force of some belated revenge of the
colonized, the former conquerors are now changing their manners.
Now they disdain prongs and silver, serve finger food, and reach
greedily for appetizers. With both hands. Including the left one.

153

Further Reading
Mellinger, Nan. Fleisch: Ursprung und Wandel einer Lust. Eine kulturanthropologische Studie. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2000).

Mller, Susanna. Das fleissige Hausmtterchen: ein Fhrer durch das


praktische Leben fr Frauen und erwachsene Tchter. 1860.
(Reprint, Zurich: Zeller, 211921).
Nietlispach, F. 200 Mittagessen. (Olten: Selbstverlag J. Nietlispach,
n.d.).
von Paczensky, Gert and Anna Dnnebier. Leere Tpfe, volle Tpfe:
Die Kulturgeschichte des Essens und Trinkens. Munich: Knaus, 1994.
Pini, Udo. Das Gourmet-Handbuch. (Cologne: Knemann, 2000).
Radel, Jutta and Margrit Hug. Hllisch gut: Himmlische Gerichte
aus dem Alten und dem Neuen Testament. (Frauenfeld: Waldgut,
1994).
Richardson, Matthew. The Penguin Book of Firsts. (London: Penguin, 1998).
Schmidt-Leukel, Perry, ed. Die Religionen und das Essen. (Kreuzlingen: Hugendubel, 2000).
Vamosh, Miriam Feinberg. Food at the Time of the Bible: From
Adams Apple to the Last Supper. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2004).
Zuckerman, Larry. The Potato: From the Andes in the Sixteenth
Century to Fish and Chips. The Story of How a Vegetable Changed
History. (London: Macmillan, 1998).

154

Select Bibliography

Overview

a) Contemporary
Andritzky, Michael, ed. Oikos Von der
Feuerstelle zur Mikrowelle: Haushalt
und Wohnen im Wandel. Giessen: Anabas, 1992.
FEMAIL Fraueninformationszentrum
Vorarlberg e.V., ed. Brennpunkt Kche:
planen, ausstatten, nutzen [exhibition
catalogue]. Feldkirch: Frauenmuseum
Hittisau & Heimatmuseum Schruns,
2001.
Mielke, Rita. Die Kche: Geschichte,
Kultur, Design. Berlin: Feierabend, 2004.
Miklautz, Elfie, Herbert Lachmayer,
and Reinhard Eisendle, eds. Die Kche:
Zur Kulturgeschichte eines architektonischen, sozialen und imaginativen
Raums. Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar:
Bhlau, 1999.
Rinke, Bettina and Joachim Kleinmanns,
eds. Kchentrume: Deutsche Kchen
seit 1900 [exhibition catalogue]. Detmold: Lippisches Landesmuseum Detmold, 2004.
b) Historical
Lbbert-Griese, Kaethe, et al. Die moderne Kche. Hildesheim and Darmstadt:
Werkhof Arbeitsgemeinschaft Die
moderne Kche e.V., 1956.
Deutscher Werkbund Bayern, ed. Die
Kche. Munich: Winkler, 21965.
Home Economics, Technology, Sociology,
Criticism

Arbeitsgemeinschaft Hauswirtschaft
e.V. / Stiftung Verbraucherinstitut, ed.
Haushaltstrume. Ein Jahrhundert
Technisierung und Rationalisierung im
Haushalt. Knigstein im Taunus:
Langewiesche/Kster, 1990.
Cockburn, Cynthia. Brothers: Male
Dominance and Technological Change.
London: Pluto Press, 1983.

157

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. The Industrial Revolution in the Home. Household Technology and Social Changes in
the Twentieh Century. Technology and
Culture 17 (1976): 123.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. More Work
for Mother: The Ironies of Household
Technology from the Open Hearth to
the Microwave. New York: Basic
Books, 1983.
Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes
Command. A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948.
Hirdina, Heinz. Rationalisierte
Hausarbeit: Die Kche im Neuen
Bauen. Jahrbuch fr Volkskunde und
Kulturgeschichte 16 (1983): 4480.
Meyer, Erna. Der neue Haushalt: Ein
Wegweiser zu wirtschaftlicher Hausfhrung. Stuttgart: Franckhsche Verlagsanstalt, 1926.
Meyer, Sibylle and Eva Schulze, eds.
Technisiertes Familienleben. Blick
zurck und nach vorn. Berlin: Bohn,
1993.
Meyer, Sibylle and Eva Schulze. Technik
im Familienalltag. Zurich: VontobelStiftung, 1993.
Museum fr Kunst und Kulturgeschichte der Stadt Dortmund ed. Beruf
der Jungfrau: Henriette Davidis und
Brgerliches Frauenverstndnis im
19. Jahrhundert [exhibition catalogue].
Oberhausen: Krumbeck / Graphium
press, 1988.
Schtz-Glck, Irmgard. Wohnen und
Wirtschaften. Haushaltsfhrung, Einrichtung und Pflege des Haushalts.
Stuttgart: Franckhsche Verlagshandlung, 171969.
Siegrist, Hannes, Hartmut Kaelble, and
Jrgen Kocka, ed. Europische Konsumgeschichte: Zur Gesellschafts- und

Kulturgeschichte des Konsums (18. bis


20. Jahrhundert). Frankfurt am Main
and New York: Campus, 1997.
Silbermann, Alphons. Die Kche im
Wohnerlebnis der Deutschen. Eine
soziologische Studie. Opladen: Leske +
Budrich, 1995.
Stahl, Gisela. Von der Hauswirtschaft
zum Haushalt oder wie man vom Haus
zur Wohnung kommt: Die konomie
des ganzen Hauses und die konomisierung der Hausfrau. In Wem gehrt
die Welt? Kunst und Gesellschaft in der
Weimarer Republik [exhibition catalogue], 87108. Berlin: NGBK, 1977.
Tornieporth, Gerda, ed. Arbeitsplatz
Haushalt: Zur Theorie und kologie
der Hausarbeit. Berlin: Reimer, 1988.
Wajcman, Judy. Feminism Confronts
Technology. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.
Architecture, Design, Planning

The Modern Kitchen Working Group


(AMK) has published extensive primers
on kitchen design, such as Das grosse
Kchenhandbuch [The Big Kitchen
Handbook]. They are primarily oriented
to professionals and for that reason are
not listed here. Numerous manufacturers of kitchens and appliances provide
planning directions and design examples
on their websites, which for obvious
reasons are generally concentrated on
their own array of products.
Aicher, Otl. Die Kche zum Kochen.
Das Ende einer Architekturdoktrin.
Munich: Callwey, 1982.
Arbeitsgemeinschaft Die Moderne
Kche e.V., ed. Ratgeber Kche.
Mannheim, 2004.
Gewerbemuseum Basel, ed. Die praktische Kche [exhibition brochure]. Basel:
Bhm, 1930.
Haselsteiner, Edeltraud. Frauentrume
Kchen(t)rume. Architektur & BauForum 33, no. 3 (2000): 132139.
Hegger, Manfred and Rainer
Sthrmann, eds. Wohnen und Wohnungen bauen [exhibition catalogue].
Stuttgart: Architektenkammer BadenWrttemberg, 1993.
Die Kche: Ihre Planung und Einrichtung. Stuttgart: Hatje, 1954.
Khne, Gnther. Kchen schn und
praktisch. Bauwelt (supplement 17),
1954.
Mayer, Hans-Werner. Kchen-Lexikon.
Darmstadt: Die Planung, 2002.
Verband Schweizerischer Fabrikanten
von Einbaukchen VSFE ed. Das

Schweizer Kchen-Handbuch. Eine


Dokumentation der Schweizer Kchenbauer. Zurich: VSFE, 1985.
Specific Aspects

Hellmann, Ullrich. Knstliche Klte:


Die Geschichte der Khlung im
Haushalt. Werkbund-Archiv, Vol. 21.
Giessen: Anabas, 1990
Noever, Peter, ed. Die Frankfurter
Kche von Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky.
Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1992.
Orland, Barbara. Wsche waschen: Technik und Sozialgeschichte der huslichen
Wschepflege. Reinbek/Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1991.
Zec, Peter and Vito Orazem, eds. ber
den Herd: Eine kleine Kultur- und Designgeschichte der Kochstelle. Essen: Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen, 1995.
Journals

While the kitchen now seldom attracts


attention from architectural trade journals like Architektur aktuell, Bauwelt,
or Werk, Bauen + Wohnen, it is a regular
topic in popular home magazines like
Ideales Heim, Schner Wohnen, etc. and
in daily newspapers. In addition, there
are numerous special issues on the market (e.g. Trendmagazin Kche & Bad),
albeit of varying quality. DMK is one of
the rare trade journals devoted exclusively to the kitchen.
Die Kche. Fachzeitschrift fr die Planung und Gestaltung von Kche und
Haushalt. 1966 Vol. 23, no. 3 (June
1988) (published 19821983 as Kche +
Bad, and 19831988 as In: der Innenausbau heute).
DMK. Die moderne Kche. Vol. 1,
19581959 present (Vol. 1 published as
Schriften der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Die
Moderne Kche e.V.).
Die Kchen-Zeitung. Vol. 1, 2001 to
present.
Online Resources

http://www.amk.de/ AMK Arbeitsgemeinschaft DIE MODERNE


KCHE e.V. (The Modern Kitchen
Working Group)
http://www.kuecheninfo.net Online
information and service platform dedicated to the kitchen.
http://www.vkg.de VKG Vereinigter Kchenfachhandel (United
Kitchen Equipment Dealerships).
http://www.slowfood.com Slow Food
International union for the protection and promotion of traditional
food and gastronomy.

158

Further Reading

Andersen, Arne. Der Traum vom guten


Leben. Alltags- und Konsumgeschichte
vom Wirtschaftswunder bis heute.
Frankfurt am Main and New York:
Campus, 1999.
Breuss, Susanne and Wien Museum, eds.
Die Sinalco-Epoche. Essen, Trinken,
Konsumieren nach 1945 [exhibition
catalogue]. Vienna: Czernin, 2005.
Faller, Peter. Der Wohngrundriss.
Stuttgart and Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2002.
Flagge, Ingeborg, ed. Geschichte des
Wohnens. Vol. 5: Von 1945 bis heute.
Aufbau Neubau Umbau. Stuttgart:
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999.
Khler, Gert, ed. Geschichte des
Wohnens. Vol. 4: 19181945. Reform
Reaktion Zerstrung. Stuttgart:
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1996.
von Paczensky, Gert and Anna
Dnnebier. Leere Tpfe, volle Tpfe.
Die Kulturgeschichte des Essens und
Trinkens, Munich: Knaus, 1994.
Petsch, Joachim. Eigenheim und gute
Stube. Zur Geschichte des brgerlichen
Wohnens. Stdtebau Architektur
Einrichtungsstile. Cologne: DuMont,
1989.
Teuteberg, Hans Jrgen, ed. Die Revolution am Esstisch. Neue Studien zur
Nahrungskultur im 19./20. Jahrhundert.
Studien zur Geschichte des Alltags, Vol.
23. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004.

Illustration Credits
Despite having made every effort to do
so, the editor was unable to locate every
single copyright owner. Upon notification, he is ready to respond to legitimate claims with the appropriate compensation.

Cover
Photograph, Friedrich Engesser
(Therma Fitted Kitchen, 1963)

Foreword
Full-page: Photograph, Ochs-Walde;
Schule fr Gestaltung Basel: Fotoarchiv
Gewerbemuseum Basel

Introduction
Full-page at the beginning: Photograph,
Elliott Erwitt, Elliott Erwitt/Magnum
Photos, Illus. 1: Photograph, Konrad
Wittmer, Suhr, Illus. 23: Photograph,
Klaus Spechtenhauser, Illus. 4: Siemens
Archive, Munich, Illus. 5: Poggenpohl
Group (Schweiz) AG, Littau, Illus. 6:
Hasso Gehrmann private archive

Vollenweider and Ammann


Illustrations illumueller.ch

Corrodi
Full-page at the beginning: Photograph,
Hans Finsler, Stiftung Moritzburg,
Halle; gta Archives/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich,
Illus. 1: Architekturzentrum Wien,
Achleitner Archive, Illus. 2: Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zrich,
Illus. 35: Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, Vol. 9, 19011902, 2005 ProLitteris, Zurich, Illus. 6: Slezsk zemsk
muzeum [Silesian Regional Museum],
Opava, Czech Republic, Illus. 7: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, Illus. 8: Architekturzentrum Wien, Achleitner Archive,
Illus. 9: Museum fr Kunst und Kulturgeschichte der Stadt Dortmund, Illus. 10: Photograph, Wilhelm Willi, Arbeiterfotobund Zrich; Gretlers Panoptikum zur Sozialgeschichte, Zurich, Illus. 11: Gretlers Panoptikum zur
Sozialgeschichte, Zurich, Illus. 1213:
Catherine E. Beecher, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, The American Womans Home.
Or, Principles of Domestic Science, New
York: Ford, 1869, Illus. 14: Klaus
Spechtenhauser private archive, Illus. 15:
Poggenpohl Group (Schweiz) AG, Littau, Illus. 16: Siemens Archive, Munich,
Illus. 17: Der Baumeister, Vol. 25, 1927,
Illus. 18: Anton Brenner, Der wirtschaftlich durchdachte Plan des Architekten,
Vienna: Ertl, 1951, Illus. 19: Photograph,
Staatliche Bildstelle Berlin, BauhausArchiv, Berlin, Illus. 20: Plan, Mia Ryffel, Illus. 2122: Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam, Oud Archive,
2005 ProLitteris, Zurich, Illus. 23:
Plan, Mia Ryffel, Illus. 24: Die Form,
Vol. 2, 1927, Illus. 25: Photograph, Collischonn; Sammlungen der Universitt

fr angewandte Kunst Wien, SchtteLihotzky Archive, Illus. 26: Photograph,


Wolff; Sammlungen der Universitt fr
angewandte Kunst Wien, Schtte-Lihotzky Archive, Illus. 27: Bauwelt, Vol.
18, 1927, Illus. 2829: Photographs, Collischonn; Sammlungen der Universitt
fr angewandte Kunst Wien, SchtteLihotzky Archive, Illus. 30: Sammlungen der Universitt fr angewandte
Kunst Wien, Schtte-Lihotzky Archive,
Illus. 31: Basler Plakatsammlung, Illus. 32: Photograph, Ochs-Walde; Staatsarchiv des Kantons Basel-Stadt, Illus. 33: Plan, Lukas Sonderegger, Illus. 34: gta Archives/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Illus. 35: Photograph, Sigfried Giedion;
gta Archives/Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (ETH), Zurich, Illus. 36:
Plan, Mia Ryffel; Sammlungen der Universitt fr angewandte Kunst Wien,
Schtte-Lihotzky Archive, Illus. 37:
Photograph, Perscheid; Sammlungen der
Universitt fr angewandte Kunst Wien,
Schtte-Lihotzky Archive, Illus. 38:
Sammlungen der Universitt fr angewandte Kunst Wien, Schtte-Lihotzky
Archive, Illus. 39: Der Baumeister, Vol.
28, 1930, Illus. 40: Schule fr Gestaltung
Basel: Fotoarchiv Gewerbemuseum
Basel, Illus. 41: Plan, Lukas Sonderegger

Spechtenhauser
Full-page at the beginning: Brigitte
Kesselring private archive, Illus. 1: Photograph, Oliver Lang, Illus. 2: Snaidero,
Majano (Italy), Illus. 3: Julius Blum
GmbH, Hchst (Austria), Illus. 4:
Forster Kchen, Arbon (Switzerland),
Illus. 5: Franke Kchentechnik AG,
Aarburg (Switzerland), Illus. 67: Photographs, Michael Wolgensinger; Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zrich,
Illus. 8: Schweizerische Bauzeitung, Vol.
67, 1949, Illus. 910: gta Archives/Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology (ETH),
Zurich, Estate of Sigfried Giedion, Illus. 11: Design Collection, Museum of
Design Zurich, Illus. 12: Klaus Spechtenhauser private archive, Illus. 13:
Franke Kchentechnik AG, Aarburg
(Switzerland), Illus. 1415: Photographs,
E. Mller-Rieder; gta Archives/Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology (ETH),
Zurich, Illus. 16: Plan, Mia Ryffel, Illus. 17: Poggenpohl Group (Schweiz)
AG, Littau, Illus. 18: Design, Pierre
Monnerat; Basler Plakatsammlung, Illus. 19: Brigitte Kesselring private
archive, Illus. 20: Audiovisuelles Archiv
MGB, Illus. 2122: Electrolux AG,
Zurich, Illus. 23: Basler Plakatsammlung, Illus. 24: Forster Kchen, Arbon
(Switzerland), Illus. 25: Photograph,
Bernhard Moosbrugger; Elisabeth
Flscher, Kochbuch, Zurich: Eigenverlag
Flscher, 71960, Illus. 26: Forster
Kchen, Arbon (Switzerland), Illus. 27:
Electrolux AG, Zurich, Illus. 2829: Audiovisuelles Archiv MGB, Illus. 30:

159

AMP/Audiovisuelles Archiv MGB, Illus. 3132: Audiovisuelles Archiv MGB,


Illus. 3335: Forster Kchen, Arbon
(Switzerland), Illus. 36: Photograph,
M+B Zurbuchen-Henz, Illus. 37: Werk,
Vol. 57, 1970, Illus. 38: Poggenpohl
Group (Schweiz) AG, Littau, Illus. 39:
Coop Himmelb(l)au; Ewe Kchen
Gesellschaft mbH, Wels (Austria), Illus. 40: Hasso Gehrmann private
archive, Illus. 41: Poggenpohl Group
(Schweiz) AG, Littau, Illus. 42: Photograph, Klaus Spechtenhauser, Illus. 43:
Image Archive, ETH-Bibliothek,
Zurich, Illus. 44: Photograph, Lukas
Sonderegger, Illus. 45: A. D. P. Architektur Design Planung, Walter Ramseier, Illus. 46: Photograph, Lukas Sonderegger,
Illus. 47: Staufer & Hasler Architekten,
Illus. 4849: Photograph and plan, Martin Sphler, Illus. 5051: Photograph
and plan, Buchner Brndler Architekten, Illus. 5253: Snaidero, Majano
(Italy), Illus. 54: Photograph, Klaus
Spechtenhauser

Khler
Full-page at the beginning: Photograph,
Leonardo Bezzola; Swiss Foundation of
Photography, Winterthur, Illus. 1: Image
Archive, ETH-Bibliothek, Zurich; Illus. 2: Snaidero, Majano (Italy), Illus. 3:
Poggenpohl Group (Schweiz) AG, Littau, Illus. 4: Photograph, Randall
Schmidt, Pattern Language, Illus. 5:
Photograph, Klaus Spechtenhauser, Illus. 6: Photograph, Randall Schmidt,
Pattern Language, Illus. 710: Photographs, Roland Halbe, Roland
Halbe Fotografie, Stuttgart, Illus. 11:
Image Archive, ETH-Bibliothek,
Zurich, Illus. 1213: Karl Richard
Krntzer, Grundrissbeispiele fr
Geschosswohnungen und Einfamilienhuser (Wiesbaden and Berlin: Bauverlag, 41976), Illus. 14: Poggenpohl Group
(Schweiz) AG, Littau, Illus. 15: Photograph, Roland Halbe, Roland Halbe
Fotografie, Stuttgart, Illus. 1619:
Bulthaup GmbH & Co KG, Aich (Germany), Illus. 2021: Alphons Silbermann, Die Kche im Wohnerlebnis der
Deutschen. Eine soziologische Studie
(Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1995), Illus. 22: Photograph, Konrad Wittmer,
Suhr

Sonderegger
Full-page at the beginning: Photograph, Friedrich Engesser, Illus. 1:
Siemens Archive, Munich, Illus. 2:
Christina Sonderegger private archive,
Illus. 34: gta Archives/Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich,
Illus. 5: Christina Sonderegger private
archive, Illus. 6: Siemens Archive, Munich, Illus. 78: Christina Sonderegger
private archive, Illus. 9: Photograph,
Wolf-Bender; Baugeschichtliches
Archiv der Stadt Zrich, Illus. 10:

Franke Kchentechnik AG, Aarburg


(Switzerland), Illus. 11: Therma
19071932. Denkschrift zum fnfundzwanzigjhrigen Bestehen der
Therma Fabrik fr elektrische
Heizung A.-G. (Schwanden: Therma,
o.J. [1932]); Christina Sonderegger private archive, Illus. 12: Neue Grafik 15,
1963, Illus. 13: Design, Atelier Halpern;
Klaus Spechtenhauser private archive,
Illus. 1415: Design, Atelier Halpern,
photographs, Friedrich Engesser;
Christina Sonderegger private archive,
Illus. 16: Christina Sonderegger private
archive, Illus. 17: Photograph, Friedrich
Engesser, Illus. 18: Christina Sonderegger private archive, Illus. 19: Photograph, Friedrich Engesser, Illus. 2023:
Design, Atelier Halpern, photographs,
Rolf Schroeter, Illus. 24: Design Collection, Museum of Design Zurich, Illus. 25: Klaus Spechtenhauser private
archive, Illus. 26: Christina Sonderegger private archive, Illus. 27: Design
Collection, Museum of Design Zurich,
Illus. 2832: Photographs, Friedrich
Engesser, Illus. 33: Forster Kchen, Arbon (Switzerland), Illus. 34: Siemens
Archive, Munich

Kesselring
Full-page at the beginning: Poggenpohl
Group (Schweiz) AG, Littau, Illus. 1:
Forster Kchen, Arbon (Switzerland), Illus. 2: Sanitas Troesch AG, Bern, Illus. 3:
Poggenpohl Group (Schweiz) AG, Littau,

Illus. 45: Photograph, Collischonn;


Sammlungen der Universitt fr angewandte Kunst Wien, Schtte-Lihotzky
Archive, Illus. 6: Sanitas Troesch AG,
Bern, Illus. 7: Julius Blum GmbH, Hchst
(Austria), Illus. 813: Bruno Piatti AG,
Dietlikon (Switzerland), Illus. 1415: Plans,
Lukas So nderegger (after Otl Aicher, Die
Kche zum Kochen. Das Ende einer Architekturdoktrin [Munich: Callwey, 1982]),
Illus. 16: Bulthaup GmbH & Co KG,
Aich (Germany), Illus. 1718: Julius Blum
GmbH, Hchst (Austria), Illus. 19: Sanitas
Troesch AG, Bern, Illus. 20: Bulthaup
GmbH & Co KG, Aich (Germany), Illus. 21: Kludi GmbH & Co KG, Menden
(Germany), Illus. 22: Franke Kchentechnik AG, Aarburg (Switzerland), Illus. 23:
Bauknecht AG, Lenzburg (Switzerland),
Illus. 24: Julius Blum GmbH, Hchst
(Austria), Illus. 25: Leicht Kchen AG,
Waldstetten (Germany), Illus. 26: V-Zug
AG, Zug, Illus. 27: Electrolux AG, Zurich,
Illus. 28: Miele AG Schweiz, Spreitenbach/Crissier, Illus. 2930: Meyer, Moser,
Lanz Architekten AG, Zurich, Illus. 3132: Entwurfsatelier Kurt Greter,
Zurich, Illus. 3334: Forster Kchen, Arbon (Switzerland), Illus. 3536: Wiesmann
Kchen, Zurich, Illus. 37: Sanitas Troesch
AG, Bern, Illus. 38: Bruno Piatti AG,
Dietlikon (Switzerland)

(Schweiz) AG, Littau, Illus. 25: gta


Archives/Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (ETH), Zurich, Estate of
Sigfried Giedion, Illus. 6: Photograph,
Ochs-Walde; gta Archives/Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich,
Illus. 7: gta Archives/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich,
Estate of Sigfried Giedion, Illus. 8: Ernst
Neufert, Bau-Entwurfslehre, Berlin:
Bauwelt, 1936, Illus. 9ai: Marion von
Osten private archive, Illus. 1011: DU,
Vol. 20, no. 238, 1960, Illus. 1214: gta
Archives/Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (ETH), Zurich, Estate of
Sigfried Giedion, Illus. 15: Lilo Aureden, Was Mnnern gut schmeckt, Munich: List, 1954, cover design, Li
Gelpke-Rommel; Marion von Osten
private archive, Illus. 16: Design, Peter
Freis; Basler Plakatsammlung, Illus. 1718: Pauline Boudry, Brigitta
Kuster, Renate Lorenz, eds. Reproduktionskonten flschen! Heterosexualitt,
Arbeit & Zuhause (Berlin: b_books,
1999)

von Osten

Last Page

Full-page at the beginning: Electrolux


AG, Zurich, Illus. 1: Poggenpohl Group

Franke Kchentechnik AG, Aarburg


(Switzerland)

(Museum of Design Zurich), Susanne


Kridlo (Deutsches Hygiene-Museum,
Dresden), Mia Ryffel, Marie Schenkov
(Slezsk zemsk muzeum [Silesian
Regional Museum], Opava), Rolf
Schroeter, Pascale Schuoler (Audiovisuelles Archiv MGB), Andrea Schweiger
(Schule fr Gestaltung Basel), Lukas
Sonderegger, Walter Stauffacher,

Dorothea Stransky, Rolf Thalmann


(Basler Plakatsammlung), Jindrich
Vybral, Ute Waditschatka (Architekturzentrum Wien), Daniel Weiss (gta
Archives/Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (ETH), Zurich), Ludek
Wnsch (Slezsk zemsk muzeum
[Silesian Regional Museum], Opava).

Select Bibliography
Full-page: Photograph, Klaus Spechtenhauser (Caf-Konditorei Ada, Neubaugasse, Vienna)

Special thanks to
Renate Allmayer-Beck, Andreas
Brndler, Letizia Enderli (Swiss Foundation of Photography, Winterthur),
Friedrich Engesser, Hans-Uli von
Erlach, Christoph Frank (Siemens
Archive, Munich), Esther Fuchs (Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zrich),
Hasso Gehrmann, Roland Gretler,
Andreas Huber, Franz Xaver Jaggy

160

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