The Frankfurt Kitchen

• 1926 First "Fitted Kitchen" designed by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte- Lihotzky known as the Frankfurt Kitchen, which was the prototype of the built-in kitchen now prevelant in the western world.  Based on the scientific reserch by U.S managment expert Frederic Winslow Taylor and her own reserch - Lihotzy used a railroad dining car kitchen as her modelto design a "housewife's laboratory" using a minimum of space but offering a maximum of comfort and equipment to the working mother.  The Frankfurt City Council eventually installed 10,000 of her mass produced, prefabricated kitchens in newly-built working class apartments.
• Lihotzky’s compact and ergonomic design, with its integrated approach to storage, appliances, and work surfaces, reflected a commitment to transforming the lives of ordinary people on an ambitious scale. Previously hidden from view in a basement or annex, the kitchen became a bridgehead of modern thinking in the domestic sphere—a testing ground for new materials, technologies, and power sources, and a spring board for the rational reorganization of space and domestic labor within the home. Since the innovations of Schütte-Lihotzky and her contemporaries in the 1920s, kitchens have continued to articulate, and at times actively challenge, our relationship to the food we eat, popular attitudes toward the domestic role of women, family life, consumerism, and even political ideology