Frankfurt kitchen

In 1930, the USSR government requested for May to lead a “building brigade” and implement the Frankfurt model when planning new industrial towns in the Soviet Union.

[2] Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, alongside Bruno Taut and Ernst May, was among the leading housing development architects during the Weimar Republic.

[5] The Neues Bauen architects were motivated by the desire to build healthy human settlements with access to clean air and light.

Along the left side, the stove was placed, followed by a sliding door connecting the kitchen to the dining and living room.

[citation needed] The narrow layout of the kitchen was not due solely to the space constraints mentioned above.

[citation needed] Dedicated storage bins for common ingredients such as flour, sugar, rice and others were intended to keep the kitchen tidy and well-organized; the workspace even had an integrated, removable "waste drawer" such that scraps could just be shoved into it while working and the whole thing emptied at once afterwards.

It was slightly larger and had a more square ground plan, and used unit furniture in an attempt to make it adaptable to both the future users' needs and different room shapes.

For the rest of the 20th century, the compact yet rationalized "Frankfurt kitchen" became the standard of tenement buildings throughout Europe.

[citation needed] In the 1970s and 1980s, 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 design's "specialized rationalization" and its small size that allows only one person could work in them comfortably, housewives tended to become isolated from the life in the rest of the house.

They were also sold separately for a few years by Haarer, the manufacturing company and chosen by architects and cabinet makers for their furniture.

[citation needed] By the time public interest on the work of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in the late 1990s was revived, most kitchens did not exist anymore.

[citation needed] In 2005 the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired a "Frankfurt" kitchen for its traveling exhibition "Modernism: Designing a New World" with stops in London, the US and Germany.