Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was the first Austrian architect and activist in the Nazi resistance movement. She is mainly remembered for designing the so-called Frankfurt Kitchen.
The Frankfurt Kitchen Frankfurt kitchen was an innovation for domestic architecture, and is considered the forerunner of the modern kitchen, as was first thought of as part of a housing project, designed to enable efficient work and to be built at low cost. It was designed in 1926 for the social housing complex Römerstadt in Frankfurt (Germany) , the architect Ernst May. About 10,000 units were built in the late 1920's in Frankfurt.
German cities after the end of World War I suffered a serious housing shortage. Various social housing projects were conducted in the 20 to increase the number of apartments rent. These major projects had to provide affordable apartments for a lot of working class families and therefore were designed for smaller budgets. Therefore, the apartments were designed to be comfortable but could not be spacious, and so the architects sought to reduce costs using the same design for a large number of apartments.
design Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky the kitchen for Römerstadt and had to solve the problem of how to build many cuisines, not to occupy too much space to allow the entire apartment. The typical worker's home was a two room apartment, where the kitchen had many functions at once: in addition to cooking, a dining, living, bathing, and even slept there, while the second quarter, intended as room, it was often reserved for special occasions . In contrast, Schütte-Lihotzky kitchen was a small separate room connected to the living room by sliding doors, thus separating the functions of work (cooking, etc..) of life and relaxation, according to his view on life:
- Besteht is in Arbeit, zweitens in ausruhen, Gesellschaft und genuß of Erstens.
- "First (in life), is the work, and second is everything else: relaxation, companionship and pleasure."
Schütte -Lihotzky draws heavily on railway kitchens, forced to occupy a very small space in the dining car.
design Schütte-Lihotzky was strongly influenced by the ideas of Taylorism, which were in vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century . Started by Catharine Beecher mid nineteenth century and reinforced by the publication of Christine Frederick in 1910, the growing tendency to see work at home as a true profession was the logical consequence of the optimization initiated industrial Taylorism applied to the domestic area.
These ideas were well received in Germany and Austria and were instrumental in designing the kitchen Schütte-Lihotzky Frankfurt. She made detailed studies of productivity in determining how long it took each stage of processing kitchen, redesign and optimize workflows, and plan your kitchen design so that the optimal support. Improved ergonomics the kitchen and the rationalization of kitchen work were important to her:
- Das Problem, die Arbeit der Hausfrau RATIONELL zu gestalten, almost all walks of life are equally important. Both the women of the middle class, the economies in many cases without any help at home, and women of the working class, who often have to pursue yet another professional work, are so overloaded that its revision in the long run can not remain without consequences for the entire public health.
- "El problema en el trabajo del racionalizar ama de casa es igualmente importante para todas las clases de la sociedad. Las mujeres de la clase media, que trabajan a menudo sin ninguna ayuda (es decir, sin servidumbre) en sus homes, and working-class women, who must often work in other works, overexposed to the point that stress is the limit, can have serious consequences for public health in the long run. "
