Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the first Austrian woman to complete a degree in architecture, came to the Frankfurt Building Authority from Vienna in 1926. Under the direction of city planning officer Ernst May, numerous industrial buildings, public buildings, and around 12,000 municipal apartments were built here from 1925 onwards, which became known in architectural history as “New Frankfurt.” Schütte-Lihotzky became a specialist in planning the kitchens for these apartments. In so doing, she addressed various contemporary debates: on rational housekeeping, space- and time-saving processes in kitchen work, and standardized manufacturing processes for built-in elements such as cupboards, countertops, or door handles. Around 10,000 examples of the Frankfurt kitchen, designed by Schütte-Lihotzky, still exist in thirty different versions, which were permanently installed in the narrow kitchen layouts of the housing estates. The kitchen was financed by the tenants via a rent levy.

Schütte-Lihotzky's design, planned as a purely working kitchen on a rectangular footprint of just 6 to 7 square meters, makes full use of the limited space from floor to ceiling and accommodates everything that is needed. Characteristic features include the aluminum containers for semolina, rice, or sugar. The smooth cupboard doors and work surfaces are easy to clean, while the glazed sliding doors reveal the contents of the cupboards and prevent lengthy searches. The handles are standardized fittings from the building authorities or prismatic wooden blocks with recessed grips. The first kitchens were green, later some were blue for hygienic reasons. However, there are also light beige kitchens, such as the one in the collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst. The floor is made of polished lime tiles. Our example no longer includes the fold-out ironing board, the height-adjustable stool, the Prometheus electric stove, and the ceiling light that slides along a metal bar.

For several decades, the Frankfurt kitchen defined the standard of a purely working kitchen as a room separate from the rest of the home. As remarkable as the design was, there was lasting criticism that this room concept isolated the woman—ostensibly the natural person to do the unpaid housework—from the rest of family life, and that work in the kitchen made simultaneous childcare impossible. The woman was also required to complete the domestic chores quickly and cost-effectively, thereby establishing the double burden of housework and employment.
Thus, the question remains: Can efficient interior design solve a sociopolitical problem?