Frankfurt

I spent Friday wandering around Frankfurt. No real purpose other than getting my haircut! Sitting on the square outside the Zoo, a tram went by: it was going to Ernst May Platz. It was like lightning struck me "I'm in Frankfurt, where the Frankfurt Kitchen is!" How I failed to make the connection, having been so interested in the design of this kitchen (it's the subject of my first post on this blog) is strange and beyond me!!! So I set off on a mission, full of excitement and apprehension that there were enough hours in the day to find and see the flat complex and that it would be open and that I would find people with the info.
So I figured my first port of call should be The Deutsche Architektur Museum. The staff were incredibly unhelpful and weird. They knew nothing and didn't care to help so all I could do was pay my entrance fee to the museum. It was utter crap. One of the temporary exhibs was being changed. The way in to the exhibition rooms was bizarre - through the empty auditorium, down a corridor, up a stairs and having to choose between corridoors or doors. It was very unclear. Badly laid out. So I found the permanent exhibition. A series of models called "From hut to skyscraper" or something. It had models of buildings representing generic building types - ie a primitive hut, a medieval cathedral, a greek amphitheatre. Nonsense! No architectural depth. Appropriate for a children's sideshow but not as the main exhibit in an architectural museum. Is it the national such musuem? And on the top floor: "American Architecture Today". A huge poster, each the same layout, with a picture of the partners in the practice, a biography, a photograph and maybe a drawing or photo of a model - and this for maybe 20 architects. Nonsense. Suitable for a pamphlet but by no way representative of American architecture in 2007.
And so i went to the tourist info office in the main train station where I met a most helpful young guy who happens to live in pne of the apartment blocks that used to have the Frankfurt Kitchen. So he knew about them! He looked on the computer/internet maybe and said the preserved kitchen was open to the public on saturday from 3-6 but I wasn't free and couldn't go. I didn't ask him if I could go home for dinner with him! Or even if his apartment still had the original kitchen (even the layout). And I didn't check to see if there was a phone number I could ring to make an appointment. But I did some internet-ing back in the hotel and saw that the Kitchen is reconstructed in the V&A so a trip to London is quite urgent as I've written an article on the subject and hope for it to be published.
As for Frankfurt, I didn't feel safe in the city. I found it grubby. The riverside however was beautiful; a really interesting space/place. And the way the museums are mostly all in the one area is cool. Though maybe that's a German thing-I'm thinking of Berlin's Museuminsel.

The Frankfurt Kitchen

The "Frankfurt Kitchen" was designed by Grete Schütte-Lihotsky, Vienna’s first female architect and a socialist, in 1926.

About 10,000 of the units were craned into position in Frankfurt social housing schemes. It is the fore-runner of the modern fitted kitchen.

I first heard of this kitchen and this architect in a Hugh Campbell lecture on History of Architecture. I read an article about it a journal [Krausse, Joachim "La Cucina di Francoforte" Domus no. 695 (June 1988) pp. 66-73, xxi-xxii].

It's an efficient, hygienic fitted kitchen which can be closed off from dining/living area.

Dimensions: 6.5m² - 1.9m x 3.4m

"At the time [when the Frankfurt Kitchen was designed] all the things which by today’s standards make a kitchen really clean and hygienic didn’t exist... the filth, the dirt, the vegetable cleaning, the peelings, the refuse, was all in the living room. That made it a lower form of living. And so we thought about this in Frankfurt and it seemed to us that a higher form of living would be created if... we also make a sliding door so that we can close off the room. Then we have combined all the advantages of the kitchen/living room with the advantage of a separate room for the dirt/kitchen refuse etc. And that was the point of departure for the Frankfurt Kitchen."

Context of the Design:

• Taylor’s theories: scientific organisation of work

"We must recognize that for every job there has to be a simplest and best way of doing it which is therefore the least tiring."

• models: laboratory and pharmacy

"A kitchen is actually nothing other than a laboratory and it would be much easier to work in if it was considered as such and fitted out in a similar fashion. It has to look something like a pharmacy where every phial and every little thing has its own place or its own drawer, with a precise label, everything as fas as possible the same size... The fitted cupboards should have glass doors, and all spices and other things such as tea, cocoa etc., which one keeps in boxes should be put into glass jars with a label just like in a pharmacy."

• Socialism post World War War: housing for all
• Tenements/public housing ridden with disease (cholera, tuberculosis), bad hygiene
• Greater respect for women’s rôle in society
• Kitchen = food: cooking, eating, washing, heating etc.
• Adolf Loos "Raumplan" (volumetric plan), Oskar Strnad, Josef Frank "Raum als Weg" (space as distance)
• Christine Frederick The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management (german trans. by Irene Witte published in Berlin, 1922) - bible of household rationalization and kitchen reform
• attempts by manufacturers to design a new kind of kitchen furniture and household appliances (e.g. Otto Haarer)
• 1927: The Frankfurt Spring Trade Fair. This fair brought together architects, industry and women. The Frankfurt Housewives Association exhibited "The modern household". Also exhibited: The Mitropa dining car (2.9x1.9m), in which, during a 15-hour journey, meals and drinks for over 400 people are prepared.

Resulting features:

• Layout is fitted/fixed
• long, narrow shape (optical illusion of bigger space achieved by cupboards only on one side, only sometimes with wall cupboards above, upper part is white plasterboard, white extractor hood, light-coloured tiles, large window, black horizontal floor surfaces)
• Fold-out ironing board (1.5m long, no leg)

• Overhead presses
• Cupboards with sliding glass door

• Shelves with graded heights and depth
• Food cupboard ventilated through outside wall
• Sliding shelves
• Drawers for cutlery
• Pans arranged according to size on sloping slatted shelves with metal rack for frying pans at bottom
• Everything can be removed for cleaning
• Adjustable lamp

• Kitchen separated from dining area (controversial) by sliding door
• Labelled containers for food
• Stool
• Window above sink
• Rubbish chute in a drawer
• Cooking box
• Optimum working-distances in the kitchen
• distance from dining table to cooker & sink: not more than 2.75m
• Aesthetic: linked to hygiene and labour-saving = smooth surfaces, clear cubes; glass, aluminium, nickeled or enamelled metal, tiles or xylolite, linoleum, ultramarine woodwork (flies avoid blue)

I suppose I'll have to make a visit to Frankfurt!