Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht's Berlin

Sloth / Frankfurt Kitchen

The Frankfurt Kitchen was a revolutionary kitchen design with the aim of having a low-cost design with maximum efficiency. Because of the housing shortage following the war and the need to put more people in less space, designers had to rethink how space was used and how design could facilitate comfort and ease in smaller living spaces. This is where the Frankfurt Kitchen came in. Its standardized layout had strict measurements and placements for each appliance and storage space. The ultimate goal was efficiency. The kitchen was very narrow and therefore made everything needed only a step or two away. Each detail had a rationalized idea that led to its placement. The designer, Schütte-Lihotzky, based the kitchen design using ideas from Scientific Management (Taylorism), a theory that analyzed the idea of workflow. Using this science behind the design of the Frankfurt kitchen provided a clear ease to working in one, versus the larger layouts and multi-purpose rooms that kitchens had previously been (“The Frankfurt Kitchen” 2018).

The way that the Frankfurt kitchen demands efficiency seamlessly plays into the idea of taking unnecessary amounts of effort out of everyday tasks. Mothers of Berlin were no longer just housewives; they were now apart of the workforce, and a third of working women were also wives with children or of childbearing age (Grossman 1986, 65). The Frankfurt kitchen provided a simple solution for better time management for these neue Frauen. The design was key in making the lives of working mothers easier. This is not to say that they were sloth-like as in lazy, but rather using better and smarter resources to heighten efficiency.

Bibliography:
“The Frankfurt Kitchen.” 2018. MoMA | Counter Space: the Frankfurt Kitchen. Accessed April 29, 2018. https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/counter_space/the_frankfurt_kitchen.
Grossman, Anita. “Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalized Female: A New Woman in Weimar Germany?” in Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change. Ed. Blanche Wiesen Cook, Judith Friedlander, Alice Kessler-Harris, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

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