NO EATING, NO DRINKING, NO TOUCHING: FIVE FAMOUS KITCHENS
If you are so inclined, you might say that kitchens are museums of sorts: filled to the brim with items that speak of their time and the state of humankind, of personal stories, too. Fridges-turned-travelogues with an array of magnets from here to far away, wooden spoons stained by grandma’s stews and the latest food fads, kids’ lunchboxes, fine China, expired cans of sardines bought for their packaging, expensive machinery, sachets of condiments saved from take-out meals, warped wooden boards that still get used every day and specialised baking wear that has not been touched since it was bought — thousands and thousands of little museums, each special in its own way. Far fewer kitchens are actually in museums, however. Those who are have reached the most peculiar kind of honour that can befall a kitchen: never again will a crumb hit their work surfaces, will calcium build up on their taps, will anything edible enter or leave their four walls. They have already proven themselves to be so meaningful that, like any noteworthy celebrity at old age, they get to rest on their laurels and enjoy the praise. And boy, they are special!
THE FRANKFURT KITCHEN
“Frankfurt Kitchen”, originally from the Römerstadt estate, Frankfurt, 1927/28.
Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge
“Frankfurt Kitchen”, originally from the Römerstadt estate, Frankfurt, 1927/28.
Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge
“Frankfurt Kitchen” in the display collection of the Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge, taken from the Römerstadt estate, Frankfurt, 1927/28
Photo: Armin Herrmann
“Holistic and value-driven storytelling is a key element of our growth hacking approach”, you might read somewhere and have a hard time suppressing the urge to gag. Corporate buzzwords are, and probably always have been, cringey. During the early days of industrialisation, one such word was ‘Taylorism’, named after Frederick Taylor, who pioneered ideas about streamlining workflows and getting the most out of workers by figuring out how to keep work ethics high. In short: how to turn man into machine. Of course, it would be a couple more decades for someone to give the same thought to “women’s work” — and it took a woman to do so. In 1926, Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky created the Frankfurt Kitchen, which was a first attempt at turning the home kitchen into a proper work space, in which cooking could take place efficiently and safely. She based the design on time-motion studies, which aimed to determine how long certain tasks took and how the workflow for them could be optimised. In designing the Frankfurt Kitchen for a social housing project built in the nineteen-twenties, she unknowingly created what has remained until today the prototype for built-in kitchens around the world: the Frankfurt Kitchen is everywhere, although very few originals still exist. In the twenties and thirties, they were built by the thousands, but by the sixties, most of them had landed in the trash — before, as those things go, appreciation for the design revived a decade later.
The Frankfurt kitchen can be seen at exhibitions around the world. It is permanently installed at the Museum der Dinge in Berlin, Germany.
PIET ZWART KITCHEN AT HUIS SONNEVELD
Huis Sonneveld, Keuken, Foto Johannes Schwartz
Huis Sonneveld, Keuken, Foto Johannes Schwartz
Architecture firm Brinkman & Van Der Vlugt rose to the upper echelon of European architecture when it delivered the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam in 1931 — now a Unesco World Heritage site, the building was praised by Le Corbusier to be “the most beautiful spectacle of the modern age”. That same year, A.H. Sonneveld, director of the factory, commissioned the firm to build him a home. When he and his family moved from their nineteenth-century, dark, stately house into the new, modernist villa, they brought — nothing. Every single piece of furniture was to be in accordance with the times, created by the best designers of the day. The interior has since remained largely unchanged, except for one room. In 1937, the company Bruynzeel introduced a revolution in the design of kitchens by the hands of Piet Zwart. The Piet Zwart kitchen clearly took cues from Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen, but also improved on it in many ways. While the Frankfurt Kitchen had been quite dogmatically planned and was thus only suitable to be installed in rooms that were built with the Frankfurt Kitchen in mind, Piet Zwarts design was modular, with a host of functional cabinet elements from which the “housewife” could pick and choose. The kitchen could be mass produced out of relatively inexpensive materials — and was immediately installed into the state of the art interior of House Sonneveld, where it still resides today — as it does in thousands and thousands of post-war reconstruction era homes across the Netherlands.
The 1937 Bruynzeel Piet Zwart kitchen is permanently on view in its original context at the Huis Sonneveld in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, part of Het Nieuwe Instituut, museum for Dutch architecture.
LUIGI COLANI’S EXPERIMENT 70
ⓒ Poggenohl
ⓒ Poggenohl
ⓒ Poggenohl
ⓒ Poggenohl
While the Bauhaus school was, clearly, avant garde during the nineteen-twenties and thirties, its style quickly became mainstream in the post-war period of reconstruction. German designer Luigi Colani, who designed this kitchen, saw a great many similarities between himself and the designers of the iconic school, but he was also quoted as saying that nothing could be more “out” than the Bauhaus aesthetic. Colani considered the post-war interpretation of the Bauhaus style, which was tremendously popular in West-Germany, to be hollow and “ultraconservative”. His own designs were more in line with the Bauhaus era in spirit than in style. The Frankfurt kitchen in the nineteen-twenties had been the epitome of Taylorism in the home, and this kitchen was its modern-day equivalent, designed by Colani for the luxury kitchen company Poggenpohl in 1970. Part of ‘Experiment 70’, the design imagined the kitchen of the year 2000 to be a 2.4 square metres large satellite pod outside of the house, in which cooking would be done seated in a swivel chair. For someone who went on to design race cars and aeroplanes, he created a kitchen with obvious flaws, such as an oven door that opens straight into one’s face. But, who knows, maybe in the year 2000, we’ll all be made out of asbestos.
Colani’s Experiment 70 kitchen sometimes travels, and is otherwise on display at the Poggenpohl museum in Herford, Germany.
THE EBONY TEST KITCHEN
The Ebony Test Kitchen, courtesy of MOFAD
Sitting Room of the Ebony Test Kitchen, courtesy of MOFAD
Stovetop in the Ebony Test Kitchen, courtesy of MOFAD
After Ebony Magazine, a publication aimed at highlighting and celebrating the successes and achievements of Black people in the United States, was founded in 1945, its column “A Date With a Dish” quickly became legendary. The column’s first editor was Freda DeKnight, who soon began travelling the country in search of Black American culinary traditions. In addition to DeKnight’s writing about her findings, Ebony’s readers were able to send in their own recipes, which would be rewarded with 25 dollars if selected for publication. All of these recipes, of course, had to be tested, and for that, Ebony needed a test kitchen. That kitchen came when the magazine moved into its publishing company’s new high rise in downtown Chicago in 1971. Both its architects and interior designers were Black, and imprinted on the building an eclectic style that has been described as afrocentric modernism. That style certainly shines through in the test kitchen, designed by the firm Arthur Elrod and William Raiser. The swirling oranges, greens and purples make it an unmistakable product of the 1970s, and while it might seem outdated now, it was a technical tour de force upon its creation. The kitchen was completely electrical, with features like a state of the art oven, a microwave, dishwasher and, perhaps most exciting, a toaster built into the wall. More than its technical innovation, however, the kitchen’s importance lies in its role as an information hub through which, according to food scholar Jessica B. Harris, “a lot of people, both African American and non-African American, became aware of the vastness and scope of African American food”. When Ebony left the Chicago building in 2012, the kitchen was almost lost to history, but since this year, it has become part of the collection of MOFAD, the Museum of Food and Drink in New York.
JULIA CHILD’S HOME KITCHEN
Photo by Jaclyn Nash, courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History
Photo by Jaclyn Nash, courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History
Oh, Paris! To live in the city of love as a U.S.-American in the late nineteen-forties, one must have fancied oneself to stand in a long line of greats who were there before the war (Hemingway! Stein!). Of course, not all Americans in Paris became greats, but a certain Julia Child did. She had moved to Paris for her husband Paul’s work and soon found herself a little bored, so she signed up for the famed French cooking school Le Cordon Bleu and learned how to cook that delicious food herself. Julia and Paul went on to spend time in Marseille, Germany and Norway, until in 1961, they bought a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts and built their own kitchen. Contrary to the slick, shiny surfaces of the sixties, Julia’s kitchen had simple wooden cabinetry, cookware exhibited on all the walls and a gigantic restaurant stove. The kitchen was built to be a real workhorse — and it was. Also in 1961, Julia’s magnus opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was published, and by 1963, she had become the host of one of the first television cooking shows, The French Chef. From there, her star rose, and Julia became a fixture on U.S. television for the next forty years. By the nineties, it became harder for Julia to travel, and so, more than thirty years after its conception, her home kitchen started its second career as a TV studio. In 2001, Julia gifted her kitchen to the Smithsonian National Museum of American history, where it has since been on display. It contains everything from a gigantic pestle and mortar bought in Paris in the forties, to a nineteen-nineties model of food processor, making the kitchen not only a testament to Julia’s own life, but also to the technologies of her time.
Text: Yannic Moeken
Special thanks to Museum der Dinge, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Poggenpohl, MOFAD and Smithsonian’s National Museum of National American History for the photos.
