Frankfurt Kitchen - User Acceptance and Influences

User Acceptance and Influences

Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt kitchen was installed in some 10,000 units in Frankfurt and as such was a commercial success. The cost of a single kitchen, fully equipped, was moderate (a few hundred Reichsmark); the costs were passed on to the rent (which reportedly increased the rents by 1 RM per month).

However, the users of these kitchens often had their difficulties with them. Unaccustomed to Schütte-Lihotzky's custom-designed workflows for which the kitchen was optimised, they often were at loss as to how to use the kitchen. It was frequently described as not flexible enough—the dedicated storage bins often were used for other things than their labels said. Another problem with these bins was that they were easily reachable by small children. Schütte-Lihotzky had designed the kitchen for one adult person only, children or even a second adult had not entered the picture, and in fact, the kitchen was too small for two people to work in. Most contemporary criticism concentrated on such rather technical aspects. Nevertheless, the Frankfurt kitchen became a model for a modern work kitchen. For the rest of the 20th century, the small, rationalised work kitchen was a standard in tenement buildings throughout Europe.

Sociological aspects of the "work kitchen" were criticised only much later, in the 1970s and 80s, when feminist criticism found that the emancipatory intentions that had in part motivated the development of the work kitchen had actually backfired: precisely because of the specialised rationalisation and the small size of these kitchens such that only one person could work comfortably, housewives tended to become isolated from the life in the rest of the house. What had started as an emancipatory attempt (although all proponents such as Beecher, Frederick, or Meyer had always implicitly assumed that the kitchen was the woman's domain) to professionalise and revalue work in the home was now seen as a confinement of the woman to the kitchen.

Kitchens in the 1930ies until the 1960ies in Germany were often smaller and less comfortable. Housing societies thought that the Frankfurt kitchen was too luxourious. But the principles of this kitchen were adapted in other countries like Sweden and Switzerland and reimported to Germany, and recognized to be the same like the Frankfurt kitchen before. The mayor difference of most of the later kitchens was that the Frankfurt kitchen used relative expensive materials and not particle boards.