Passthrough (architecture)

[2] If dining involves dedicated waiting staff, the pass-through allows servers to work without stepping into the kitchen; a restaurant design frequently has two passthroughs, one for the food and one for the dirty dishes.

Pre-war, the meal preparations in the middle-class homes involved domestic help, a closed-off kitchen was desirable to keep odors (and voices of servants) out of the public area.

[10] In the original design of the Stahl House the boundary between the kitchen and the rest of the space were not just demarcated by a lowered ceiling and a passthrough: the entrance to the kitchen could have been closed off by sliding doors, thus leaving the very large passthrough as the sole means of communication with the rest of the house, still providing the wife a "commanding view".

[11] A view from other side of the opening also applies: combined with glass walls, the passthrough facilitates a common feature of the suburban life, surveillance: "…there is no escaping the omnipresent eye of the community" (William Mann Dobriner).

[12] This constant visibility (including the household members observing the wife in the kitchen cooking[12]), perpetuated the heteronormative structure of family and society.