Levka<p><a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/architects" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>architects</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/history" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>history</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/kitchens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>kitchens</span></a> <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/herstory" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>herstory</span></a></p><p>"Schütte-Lihotzky led a remarkably long and full life, dying a few days short of her 103rd birthday in 2000. But her name remains forever connected to a space she designed when only 29 years old: the Frankfurt Kitchen, the prototype of the modern fitted kitchen.</p><p>(. . .)</p><p>The kitchen design was part of a wider effort to standardize housing and lighten the load of the working class. 'She didn’t just develop a kitchen,' says Austrian architect Renate Allmayer-Beck. 'It was a concept to make women’s lives easier by giving them a kitchen where they could manage more easily and have more time for themselves.'</p><p>(. . .)</p><p>The Frankfurt Kitchen was efficiently laid out and compact, to save both on costs and the physical effort required to use it. Here, a woman could move from sink to stove without taking a single step. This quest for efficiency also led Schütte-Lihotzky to move the kitchen from a corner of the family room into its own space—a choice that baffled contemporary homemakers.</p><p>Designing the first built-in, prefabricated, and mass-produced kitchen at a time when none of this was standard practice was a mammoth logistical and technological undertaking.</p><p>While the Frankfurt Kitchen was marketed as a kitchen designed for women by a woman, Schütte-Lihotzky resented the implication that her gender automatically endowed her with secret domestic knowledge, writing in her memoir that 'it fed into the notions among the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie at the time that women essentially work in the home at the kitchen stove.' In fact, Schütte-Lihotzky had never run a household or even cooked before developing the kitchen, approaching it instead like any other architectural challenge. She consulted literature on rationalizing domestic labor, conducted time-motion studies systematically observing and measuring the time and physical movements involved in common tasks, and studied galley kitchens on trains."</p><p><a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/margarete-schutte-lihotzky-frankfurt-kitchen" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">atlasobscura.com/articles/marg</span><span class="invisible">arete-schutte-lihotzky-frankfurt-kitchen</span></a></p>