How Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky created real change in kitchens

Like most museums, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, which specialises in design and decorative arts, has more material than it can display. To address this, it recently opened an exhibition space within its East London warehouses showcasing a changing array from its storage, along with a few permanent exhibits.
One of these exhibits is a complete Frankfurt Kitchen.

In the 1920s, the German city launched a massive public housing scheme, building over 10,000 units. Many came with a new kitchen designed by Marg arete SchütteLihotzky, a young architect who did something revolutionary — she studied how women cooked and designed a kitchen to make it easier. Modern kitchens had been designed before, but nearly always for male chefs. Home cooking was women’s work and as such was taken for granted: Why bother making it easier?


Some women had tried to counter this, usually by eliminating home cooking in favour of communal kitchens. Schütte-Lihotzky recognised that families preferred privacy, so she created individual kitchens that simplified work. All work areas were easily accessible without much movement. Everything was built-in and easy to clean, and it was all mass produced in modular units to reduce costs.

The kitchen displayed at the V&A is remarkable mainly because it doesn’t seem so — it could be one of millions inspired by its design.

Yet, the Frankfur t Kitchen was criticised. Earlier kitchens may have been impractical, but were large, communal spaces, where many women could gather to cook and carry out other activities, like childcare or making clothes. Schütte-Lihotzky’s single person space seemed sterile and isolating. Even its efficiency was a trap, because it didn’t reduce women’s work, just loaded them with more.

It also seemed designed to force families to buy new electric kitchen appliances, trapping them in consumerist culinary culture.

Indian kitchens would seem opposed to the Frankfurt model. In Nao Saito’s wonderful Travels Through South Indian Kitchens , the Japanese architect details a range of kitchens, from villages to cities, bungalows to shared apartments, across castes and communities, and notes how “the kitchen need not be a single room. It can expand to other spaces inside, and even outside. The working surface flows from the table to the floor, expanding from the kitchen to the living room and the balcony”. People, and animals come and go through the cooking spaces.

Yet, there is also an older reality of kitchens as neglected parts of the home. CS Lakshmi evokes this in her story A Kitchen in the Corner of the House : “Two windows. Underneath one, the tap and basin. The latter was too small to place even a single plate in. Underneath that the drainage area, without any ledge. As soon as the taps above were opened, the feet standing below would begin to tingle.”

When a daughter-in-law suggests changes, the family patriarch treats it as an insult. Women are expected to produce endless, delicious food from this oppressive, inconvenient place. A Frankfurt Kitchen would be an unimaginable improvement.

DS Rathore provides a rare male Indian view in his book My Kitchen and its Metamorphoses. This recalls the Rajasthani kitchen he grew up in, the traditional vessels and utensils, the rituals of firewood collection, food preservation and storage. He recalls how the day started with the noise of hand-mills grinding grain: “That time of day — more than an hour before sunrise — was called Ghatti Bela ( Ghatti — hand-mill, Bela — time)”.

His current kitchen combines old and new, still plastered in cowdung, but with an LPG stove and other appliances.

The key reason for Rathore’s involvement with the kitchen was his love for meat, especially game, which the women in his family increasingly refused to touch. The men had to cook it themselves, so the kitchen mattered. In the kitchens Saito profiles, many men do equal cooking. Real changes in kitchens perhaps come not so much from designs, but by both men and women participating in kitchen labour.