Should anyone be dropping into New York before March next year - this would be a really interesting exhibition to visit;
MOMA - COUNTER SPACE Design & the Modern Kitchen
Counter Space explores the twentieth-century transformation of the kitchen and highlights MoMA’s recent acquisition of an unusually complete example of the iconic “Frankfurt Kitchen,” designed in 1926–27 by the architect Grete Schütte-Lihotzky. In the aftermath of World War I, thousands of these kitchens were manufactured for public-housing estates being built around the city of Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany. Schütte-Lihotzky’s compact and ergonomic design, with its integrated approach to storage, appliances, and work surfaces, reflected a commitment to transforming the lives of ordinary people on an ambitious scale. Previously hidden from view in a basement or annex, the kitchen became a bridgehead of modern thinking in the domestic sphere—a testing ground for new materials, technologies, and power sources, and a spring board for the rational reorganization of space and domestic labor within the home. Since the innovations of Schütte-Lihotzky and her contemporaries in the 1920s, kitchens have continued to articulate, and at times actively challenge, our relationship to the food we eat, popular attitudes toward the domestic role of women, family life, consumerism, and even political ideology in the case of the celebrated 1959 “Kitchen Debate” that took place between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow at the height of the Cold War.
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| Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Frankfurt Kitchen from the Höhenblick Housing Estate, Frankfurt, Germany (reconstruction). 1926–27. | | |
As you can see this kitchen was designed in the mid twenties - in the heart of the Art Deco Era - but would not look out of place in a contemporary home today.
In designing your kitchen space - Think about your clients lifestyle- & how this space should fit in with the rest of the house.
