Passages from Why I Became an Architect by Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky

Author(s): Selected and Translated by Juliet Kinchin

Source: West 86th, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring-Summer 2011), pp. 86-96
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Bard Graduate Center
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Passages from
Why I Became
an Architect
Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky
Selected and Translated by Juliet Kinchin

This translation is taken with permission from Margarete SchtteLihotzky, Warum ich Architektin wurde (ed. Karin Zogmayer), 2004
by Residenz Verlag im Niedersterreichischen Pressehaus, Druck- u.
Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, St. PltenSalzburg.
The manuscript is held in the estate of Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky,
now deposited in the archives of the Universitt fr angewandte Kunst in
Vienna. Selection and clarification of the manuscripts for the published
text in German were undertaken by the editor, Karin Zogmayer.
Supplementary Literature:
Bullock, Nicholas. First the KitchenThen the Faade. Journal of Design History 1,
no. 3/4 (1988): 17792.
Dreysse, D. W. Ernst May Housing Estates: Architectural Guide to Eight New
Frankfort Estates, 19261930. Frankfurt: Fricke Verlag, 1988.
Henderson, Susan. A Revolution in the Womans Sphere: Grete Lihotzky and
the Frankfurt Kitchen, in Architecture and Feminism, edited by Debra Coleman,
Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson, 22148. New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1996.
Noever, Peter, ed. Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky. Soziale ArchitekturZeitzeugin
eines Jahrhunderts. Vienna: Bhlau, 1996.

86 West 86th V 18 N 1

Introduction to Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky

Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky (18972000) studied architecture from 1915 to
1919 at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna under Oskar Strnad, a pioneer of
social housing design. In 1921 she began working for the municipal housing
department of the Commune of Vienna alongside Adolf Loos. In January 1926
she was called to Frankfurt to join Ernst Mays team in the municipal building
department (Hochbauamt) implementing the comprehensive program of
renovation and social housing known under the generic title Das neue Frankfurt.
Her most famous work was the so-called Frankfurt Kitchen, an integrated and
prefabricated kitchen designed along rational-space and labor-saving principles
which was installed in around 10,000 new homes. Each kitchen came complete
with a swivel stool, a gas stove, built-in storage, a fold-down ironing board, an
adjustable ceiling light, and a removable garbage drawer. Labeled aluminum
storage bins provided tidy organization for staples like sugar and rice as well as
easy pouring. Careful thought was given to materials for specific functions, such
as oak flour containers (to repel mealworms) and beech cutting surfaces (to
resist staining and knife marks).
In addition to the kitchens, Schtte-Lihotzky was also engaged in designing
schools, kindergartens, and student accommodation as part of the citys wider
civic development program. In October 1930 she and her husband Wilhelm
Schtte, a fellow architect in the department, joined Mays Brigade and
embarked for the Soviet Union to work on new industrial cities as part of Stalins
first Five Year Plan (192832). May left the Soviet Union in 1933 but SchtteLihotzky remained there until 1937 when Stalins purges made life intolerable
for foreigners. After a brief spell in Paris and London, she moved to Istanbul
in August 1938 to teach in the Academy of Fine Arts alongside Bruno Taut.
In Istanbul she further developed her interest in the design of schools and
nurseries. In 1940 she joined the Austrian Communist Party in exile, and in
December returned to Austria to work with the underground resistance. Soon
after her arrival, on 22 January 1941, the Gestapo arrested her and, although
her accomplices were executed, she was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Liberated by American troops at the end of April 1945, she resumed her career
as an architect, first in Sofia, Bulgaria, and from 1947 in Austria. Her political
viewswhich had hardened because of her war experienceswere an obstacle
to receiving major government or civic commissions but she continued to work
on small-scale projects and regularly traveled to countries in the Communist bloc

Passages from Why I Became an Architect 87

where she was engaged as a consultant. As scholars rediscovered her achievements,

her reputation began to grow. In 1980 she was awarded the Architecture Prize of
the city of Vienna, the first of many awards. In 1985 she published Erinnerungen
aus dem Widerstand (Memories of the Resistance), a memoir of her political activities.1
In 1990 she advised the Museum fr angewandte Kunst in Vienna on the creation
of two replicas of the Frankfurt Kitchen, one of which went on permanent display.
Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky died on 18 January 2000, age 103.
Juliet Kinchin

Selections from Why I Became an Architect

From pages 1056
One day, possibly spring 1922 or 1923, the phone rang in the building office of the
housing association. Hans Kampffmeyer, head of the Vienna housing department
at that time, was on the line.2 Apparently there was an architect from Breslau [now
Wrocaw, Poland] named May who wanted to see the Vienna settlements.3 Loos
did not have time to take him round, and so this was how I ended up taking him
to my private studio. . .4 In my romantic little workroom high up above the trees
of the castle gardens I had a huge pile of theoretical texts and drawings on the
rationalization of housework. May immediately seized upon these and asked if I
would write an article for the magazine Das schlesische Heim. 5 This was the first article
I ever wrote. At that point the Viennese settlements were closely bound up with ideas
and discussions about labor-saving in the home, and all the principles were already
in place that would be developed five years later in Frankfurt.
[Impressed by the work on the Vienna gypsy settlements, and by the functional
clarity of Schtte-Lihotzkys designs, May approached her in 1926 to join his team
in Frankfurt.]
From pages 11314
As soon as I arrived I hurried along to see May in the Frankfurt City Hall. The first
thing that caught my eye in his office were the large red letters on the wall behind
his desk. There it was: Keep It Short. I was stunned. But in an instant, Maya lean

88 West 86th V 18 N 1

Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky (Austrian,

18972000). Frankfurt Kitchen as illustrated
in Das neue Frankfurt 5/19261927.

figure with lively Roman featureshurried toward me and shook my hand

warmly. He immediately invited me to his home for a meal the following
Sunday, a gesture that struck me as the complete antithesis of the writing on his
wall. The next Sunday I asked the very sensible Mrs. May what I should make of
the writing. We both agreed it gave the wrong impression. But May vigorously
defended his Keep It Short, and the large red letters stayed on his wall until
we left Frankfurt together nearly five years later.
From pages 12730
The central task facing us was house building. At the very first meeting in the
main building office, May suggested to me that I focus on standardizing floor
plans keeping in mind the rationalization of housework. He introduced me
to Eugen Kaufmann, leader of the T (for Type forms) section in which all
the city housing projects were based.6 Since we wanted to keep housework to
a minimum, before we did a stroke on the designsbefore we even made any

Passages from Why I Became an Architect 89

decisions about the basic questions of where to live, where to eat, or where to
cookit all came down to the question of either the living kitchen (living
room cum kitchen), or the cooking cupboard. Basically, were kitchens for working in, or eating in?
In all the Frankfurt housingwhether low-rise housing estates or apartment
blocksthere was gas supplied for cooking. This negated any fuel savings made
by cooking and living in one and the same space when using wood and coal,
which meant turning away from the living kitchen. Also, the cooking recess
that opened directly onto the living room struck us in Frankfurt as too primitive, on account of the off-putting cooking smells. It was a long time before most
people had electric extraction hoods. The eating kitchen that was popular in
Sweden in the thirties (I was very taken with them at the time) added at least
seven or eight square meters to the living area around the table. We couldnt
afford those additional eight square meters without pushing up the cost of the
rents even further. We decided therefore to split off the living room leaving the
work-only kitchen with the following stipulations:
1. The distance from the stove, countertop, and sink to the eating area was to be
no more than 2.753 meters.
2. The floor plan was to be organized in such a way that the housewife and
mother could keep an eye on children in the living room while she was occupied
in the kitchen. This meant that the door opening between kitchen and living
room had to be at least ninety centimeters wide, and could be closed off with a
sliding door.
3. The kitchen must have direct access to the hall.
4. Lighting during the day was to come through an external window. Artificial
lighting was to be positioned so that no shadows fell upon the work areas (stove,
preparation surface, sink).
5. Cooking vapors were to be extracted through a hood and ventilation pipe to
the roof.
6. The work-only kitchen was to be small enough to make the greatest possible
economies of steps and handling, yet big enough so that two people could work
alongside one another without getting in each others way.
7. The kitchens could only make a significant labor-saving impact on housework

90 West 86th V 18 N 1

Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky (Austrian, 18972000). Frankfurt Kitchen from the GinnheimHhenblick Housing Estate, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, 192627. Installation view of Counter
Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 15,
2010March 14, 2011. 8'9" x 12'10" x 6'10" (266.7 x 391.2 x 208.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Gift of Joan R. Brewster in memory of her husband George W. W. Brewster, by exchange
and the Architecture & Design Purchase Fund, 2009. Photograph by Jonathan Muzikar.

Passages from Why I Became an Architect 91

if they were fitted with all the necessary equipment. These were made ready for
people at the same time as the houses. This system had two great advantages.
First, constructing kitchens with fittings already built in took up less space.
Second, with the money saved it was possible to hand over the homes to tenants
with a complete kitchen fitted and arranged according to all the principles of
labor-saving housework.
8. When kitchens were included in the building costs, they were financed from
public funds. The rental costs in Frankfurt were calculated according to the
building costs. The addition of a kitchen raised the rents by one deutsche mark
a month, but this was offset by savings made on space, so that ultimately the
inhabitants did not have to bear any increase in rent.
These then were the basic considerations that led to the Frankfurt Kitchen.
After much research it was revealed that the most advantageous format for
the kitchen was an area 1.9 meters wide by 3.4 meters longthat is, nearly 6.5
square meterswith a 90-centimeter-wide door to the corridor and exterior
windows 1.4 meters wide. This conception of the basic kitchen unit was the blueprint for all the other kitchens that were built, regardless of whether they were
installed in apartments or row houses. Besides the design for the floor plans,
there were a lot of other planning issues concerning the standard kitchen equipment and its installation. . . .

Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky (Austrian, 18972000). Frankfurt Kitchen from the GinnheimHhenblick Housing Estate, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, 192627. Installation view of Counter
Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 15,
2010March 14, 2011. 8'9" x 12'10" x 6'10" (266.7 x 391.2 x 208.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Gift of Joan R. Brewster in memory of her husband George W. W. Brewster, by exchange
and the Architecture & Design Purchase Fund, 2009. Photograph by Jonathan Muzikar.

92 West 86th V 18 N 1

Unfortunately, the construction of many of the apartments was not supervised

by the Building Department but by the housing association, who did not oversee
the builders and the materials properly, giving the Frankfurt Kitchen a bad
name, which still survives to this day. For example, the broad doorway between
the kitchen and the living room was often omitted, destroying the essential
unity of the kitchenliving room; this was part of the original design of the
Frankfurt Kitchen. Small causes but big effects. The mother could no longer
supervise the children playing in the living room while working in the kitchen
because the distance from the stove, kitchen table, and sink to the dining
table had grown from three meters to six meters! Also, in this arrangement
two doors had to be opened. And third, the kitchen working space had been
reduced to a miserable, confining corridor in which no one could feel at home.
As an architect, I would be embarrassed to have designed something like that.
Unfortunately, in West Berlin today this is the type of kitchen that is being built,
and after fifty years, this nonsense is justified in the name of the Frankfurt
Kitchen and its creator!

Passages from Why I Became an Architect 93

From pages 14551

It is completely misleading to suggest that one person in the 1920s thought up
the idea of the live-in kitchen, which was then followed by everyone else. The
form of a dwelling is never achieved through the idea of a single individual. . .
So long as burning wood or coal in a stove or oven was the only means of heating
a room, a practice that to this day has not completely died out among mountain
dwellers in Austria, people were going to eat and live in the space where the
single fireplace was to be found. . . .
Austrian city dwellers in the 1920s did not have room for separate eating and
living spaces. A single large table set with stools or a corner bench doubled as
the living area. In Germany, however, where the workers standard of living
was slightly better than in Austria, the two functions of eating and living began
to be separated in small dwellings. The so-called Best Room, where one ate,
was located next to the kitchen in working-class housing. It was only heated
on special occasions and developed in the direction of frigid formality, as a
showroom for visitors, a cluttered copy of the homes of the rich. . . .
We progressive architects naturally fought this cold formality. . . . The influence
of British domestic culture led to the idea that sitting down to eat was something
quite different from sitting down to rest during ones free time. Loos gave whole
lectures on this topic. He promoted British patterns of living and, in his interior
currently on display in the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, he naturally had
both an eating and a living area: the eating area with a corner bench, the living
area with armchairs in which one could sit around the fireplace and stretch out
ones legs in comfort. . . .
For housing projects, it struck me as important to distinguish clearly the
development and relationship of the three functions of cooking, eating, and
living. . . . At that time we resisted the combination of living, cooking, and
eating in one space as unsanitary and unacceptably squalid. So in Frankfurt
we opted for work-only kitchens. . . . Nowadaysin very different labor-saving,
technological, and hygienic conditionsthe most desirable form for the
majority of people has become a dining-kitchen with a separate living room.
But I want to set the record straight at the outset: the Frankfurt Kitchen
represented a great step forward at the time. The 10,000 examples that were
produced made many peoples lives easier and undoubtedly contributed to
more women being able to take up a career, to become financially independent

94 West 86th V 18 N 1

from their husbands, and to spend more time on their personal development
as well as on their families and the upbringing of their children. Nevertheless,
the Frankfurt Kitchen was not developed for current times. It would be a sad
comment on life if a design that marked a step forward in the past were still
being promoted as progressive today. . . . There are new and urgent problems
that need to be addressed in the present. . . .
From all that I have said previously, I should point out that Frankfurt Kitchen
is a misleading term since it does not just refer to the design of a kitchen with
more or less practical arrangements and facilities. As far as I can remember,
it was May who came up with the term and used it for promotional purposes.
In everything he did and said he repeatedly mentioned the fact that it was no
coincidence the Frankfurt Kitchen was designed by a woman for women. This
stemmed from the prevalent petit bourgeois perception that women were, by
their very nature, meant to work at the domestic stove. It seemed to follow therefore that a woman architect would know best what was important for kitchens.
That was good propaganda. But the truth of the matter was that I had never run
a household before designing the Frankfurt Kitchen. I had never cooked, and
had no idea about cooking. On the other hand, looking back on my life I would
say that I have been systematic in every aspect of my professional life, and that it
came naturally to me to approach every project systematically. . . .
What were the theoretical foundations and ideals that lay behind the Frankfurt
Kitchen that led to its being reproduced in the thousands? For me there were
two motives that led to the creation of the Frankfurt Kitchen. The first was
the recognition that in the foreseeable future women would have proper paid
employment, and would not solely be expected to be on hand to wait upon their
husbands. I was convinced that womens struggle for economic independence
and personal development meant that the rationalization of housework was an
absolute necessity. Foremost in my mind when working on housing projects was
the idea that the design and, above all, the layout could save work. . . . Second,
I felt the Frankfurt Kitchena design so connected to the architectural fabric
and to the planning and built-in features of roomswas only the very first
step toward developing a new way of living and at the same time a new kind
of housing construction.

Passages from Why I Became an Architect 95

1 Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky, Erinnerungen aus dem Widerstand, 19381945 (Berlin: Verlag Volk und
Welt, 1985).
2 Inspired by the Garden City Movement, the artist Hans Kampffmeyer (18761932) took up town
planning and became an advisor on housing to the ducal government of Baden at Karlsruhe. In 1921
he became director of the housing department in Vienna and in 1925 he moved to Frankfurt, where,
with Ernst May, he led a pioneering program of house building for the regional government.
3 Ernst May (18861970) was a modernist architect and city planner whose left-wing politics and
experience of the English garden city movement inspired his work in mass housing. As city architect
in Frankfurt-am-Main between 1925 and 1930 he implemented one of the most radical and successful
civic housing programs of the period. As well as Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky, Mays department in
Frankfurt included Wolfgang Bangert, Herbert Boehm, Anton Brenner, Max Cetto, Martin Elssser,
Max Frhauf, Eugen Kauffman, Walter Krte, Ferdinand Kramer, Hans Leistikow, Albert Lcher,
Rudolph Lodders, Adolf Meyer, C. H. Rudloff, Werner Hebebrand, Wilhelm Schtte (who became
Margaretes husband), Walter Schultz, Walter Schwangenscheidt, Karl Weber, and briefly, Mart Stam.
In 1930 he led a group of his staff to the USSR, the so-called May Brigade, where they were engaged
in planning new industrial towns in the Moscow region.
4 Adolf Loos (18701933) was an Austrian architect, designer, and polemicist who made his reputation
with a series of bold modernist buildings, interiors, and essays in the period before World War I.
Appointed chief architect of the Vienna municipal housing department in 1921, he embarked on a
campaign of low-cost, flexible housing designs. Finding himself out of sympathy with the prevailing
policy of mass housing in the Vienna council, he resigned in 1924 although he continued to design
projects in the city.
5 Das schlesische Heim was a Breslau-based journal founded in 1920 and edited by Ernst May for the
Schlesische Bund fr Heimatschutz (Silesian Federation of Homeland Conservation).
6 Eugen Kaufmann (18921984) was a German architect engaged by Ernst May in 1925 to work in the
municipal housing department at Frankfurt, where he was responsible for several schemes including
the workers housing estate at Praunheim, 1927. In 1929 he organized the exhibition Die wohnung fr das
Existenzminimum (The Minimal Existence Home) in Frankfurt. He followed May to the Soviet Union in
1931, after which he settled in Britain, changing his name to Eugene Kent.

Juliet Kinchin

Juliet Kinchin is curator of the history of modern design at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York. She was curator of the exhibition Counter Space: Design and the Modern
Kitchen, a highlight of which was an example of the Frankfurt Kitchen salvaged from
124 Kurhessenstrasse on the Ginnheim-Hhenblick Housing Estate, Frankfurt-am-Main.

96 West 86th V 18 N 1