Frankfurt cuisine: Who came up with a design that made life easier for women
Dmitry Kurkin
Kitchen set has become so familiar part of the interior.that it may seem as if he has been in houses for centuries. Meanwhile, the modern kitchen, which we know it, is less than a hundred years old - that is, it is not much older than the TV and younger than the electric refrigerator - and its design was based on both simple considerations of convenience and the idea of freeing women from endless domestic servitude. The authorship of this epochal invention belongs to a no less outstanding woman - Margarete Schutte-Lihocki.
When in 1918, Greta Lihotsky decided to enroll in the Vienna School of Applied Arts, her choice surprised even liberal-minded parents. “Everyone discouraged me from becoming an architect. Everything: my teacher Oscar Strnad, father and grandfather. Not because they were hostile, of course not. They were just sure that I would starve with this profession. Besides, even at that time it was unthinkable to think that a woman may be involved in the construction of houses, ”recalled Lihotsky, who became the first female architect in Austrian history.
The front of the work for her, however, was found: in the mid-twenties, in the post-war Frankfurt-am-Main, a project was launched to build affordable and affordable housing in the working area of Remerstadt. Margaret, who arrived in the city at the invitation of the architect Ernst May, was offered to develop a kitchen for the houses of the future — perhaps it was not without stereotypes. This has its own irony: Likhotski argued that by her twenty-eight years of age she had never stood at the stove. But she was armed with the ideas of production optimization theorist Frederick Taylor. Thanks to them, the foremother of the current cuisine as an indivisible and compact whole - the Frankfurt kitchen - has appeared.
Remembering the three K formula of gender slavery "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" ("children, kitchen, church"), sold out in Bismarck's time in Germany, it is worth considering that the kitchen of that time was much more important in everyday life. It was a space where they not only cooked, but also dined, bathed and often slept, so the woman was almost literally locked in the kitchen - she simply didn’t have enough time for anything else, much of which was spent on the rushes between the sinks scattered around the house , stove and cabinets for dishes and products.
Likhotsky came to a simple and elegant conclusion: throw everything out of the kitchen that has nothing to do with it (including for reasons of hygiene), and seal the rest as much as possible. Measuring the senseless bustle in seconds and meters, she calculated that everything you need for cooking can be collected in a room of six and a half square meters.
The laconic design was consistent with the principles of economy, but innovations invented by Likhotsky were not limited only by size. In her kitchen, everything was thought out up to the choice of materials: the tabletops were made of durable beech wood, containers for storing bulk products were made of oak (protection from pests), extractor hood (another Likhotsky know-how), washing and drip tray with washed dishes - from metal. The original Frankfurt kitchen was painted in unusual for today's eyes, spoiled by the Scandinavian whiteness, blue-green and light gray colors - also for practical reasons: it was believed that these shades scare flies.
In an effort to minimize movement across the kitchen, Lihotski put a rotating chair with adjustable height in it, and also installed sliding sliding doors that made it possible to watch children from the kitchen in the next room.
Contemporaries criticized the original design of the Frankfurt kitchen for design flaws: only one person could cook in it, and the children could reach the small pull-out drawers (later these boxes, called "shyuttenkami", are gone). But even then it was clear that Lihotski had created a revolution by rethinking that part of the house that her predecessors had not noticed at all. She created the kitchen of the future - fundamentally gas-electric (there is no longer any coal stove in it) - and this is a rare case when innovations were thought out so far-sightedly that they have reached our days almost unchanged. The only notable exception was the appearance of the refrigerator, which came into use after World War II.
Likhotsky, who designed her kitchen “as an architect, not as a housewife,” considered the house “the organization of the living habits” of a person. Its development did not just save time - it changed the daily routine, and, as a result, self-awareness: the kitchen ceased to be a confinement chamber.
The social, person-oriented approach will be traced in its other projects (and, for that matter, not only in architectural design: during World War II, she joined the Resistance, because of which she spent four years in a Nazi prison) in the shadow of her main invention. "If I knew that [in an interview] I would not be asked about anything else, I would never have started to build this damned kitchen!" she complained on her 100th birthday.
Photo: Ozon, clippings