Frankfurt kitchen

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The Frankfurt kitchen was initiated by Ernst May in 1926 as part of the New Frankfurt project and developed by the Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. It is considered the archetype of the modern fitted kitchen.

The Frankfurt kitchen should be designed as practical as an industrial workplace: all important things should be accessible with a single handle and the operations shortened with a large number of equipment. In order to meet the possibility of quick accessibility, the kitchen was kept very compact, which met the requirements of the wide-ranging residential construction. At the same time, the Frankfurt kitchen stood for a high design standard.

Prehistory
By means of lectures, the kitchen specialists Otto and Anni Haarer tried to convey the advantages of modern kitchens and to promote their “economic cuisine”:

Around 1925, Ernst May became aware of the two and won them for his settlement project. In particular, he was able to attract with the order volume of 10–20,000 kitchens and entrusted the care of his employee Margarethe Schütte-Lihotzky. In the autumn of 1926, the company Haarer already delivered the first kitchens to Frankfurt.

The basis of Frankfurt cuisine was Taylorism, whose goal is the optimization of workflows. Christine Frederick already transferred this system in 1912 to the work processes in the home environment, especially the kitchen, and published it a year later as a book.
By means of a stopwatch, all handles to be executed were measured and the duration of one operation was determined and optimized.

It was Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky who, as an architect, communicated this idea of work optimization to the outside world in the magazine Das neue Frankfurt:

The kitchen is consistently designed as a workplace for one person, an assistant (housemaid) who is quite usual in larger households was explicitly excluded in the basic version of the kitchen.

Design

Until the 1920s, individual furniture in kitchens was common, which the residents would have had to take with them to the inappropriate kitchen in case of doubt. Sometimes there were even apartments without kitchens, or living kitchens. Even then, a kitchen was an expensive purchase, so that one promised by the provision of advantages for the resident.

The kitchens were uniform custom-made for entire buildings. The entire functionality of a “large” kitchen should be concentrated in minimal space (type 1: 1.9 m × 3.4 m), without subordinating the efficiency of the room minimization. The individual work centers were arranged in such a way that unnecessary movements and handles were avoided.

The kitchen was formally simple, wooden parts were painted blue-green on the fronts, which reach into the green-blue. In addition, especially of the large versions (type 2 and 3) kitchens in other colors were realized.

The horizontal working surfaces consisted of