Page - 24 - in Demolished Modified Endangered - Modelling Austrian Architecture Of The 20th Century

24 FRANKFURTER KÜCHE BY MARGARETE SCHÜTTE-LIHOTZKY Year 1926 Status Modified Material Cardboard Glue Scale 1:20 Model maker Barbara Gruber In 1926 the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky started to work for the building department in the German city Frankfurt am Main under the supervision of Ernst May. Within ten years Schütte-Lihotzky developed a series of ergonomic kitchen typologies for the construction projects of the building department. The idea was to cut Frankfurt’s tenants costs by offering flats with inbuilt furniture and kitchens. Schütte-Lihotzky was inspired by the kitchens of restaurant cars as well as the Taylorist theories from the US, which were used to analyse and synthesise workflows in order to improve economic efficiency. Over the years, the building department built almost 10000 kitchens that Schütte- Lihotzky had designed.1 Most of the kitchens had a direct entrance to the living room through a sliding door. Another sliding door connected the kitchen to the garden or to the entrance room. All furniture was designed in the most ergonomic way so as to save time and make the life of the users more comfortable. In 1927 Schütte-Lihotzky designed a kitchen with the dimensions of only 344cm by 190cm with an area to move around in with a width of only 95cm.2 Western kitchens, as we know them today, are all based on the Frankfurter Küche prototype. While factors such as the dimensions of the furniture, the materials, the size of the floor plan or the kitchen equipment changed, the basic requirements, as well as the kitchen ergonomics that were based on the workflow during cooking, remained the same. 1 Architekturzentrum Wien (Ed.) (2016): Architektur in Österreich im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert. Zürich: Park Books. 330. 2 Noever, Peter (Ed.) (1993): Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete: soziale Architektur; Zeitzeugin eines Jahrhunderts. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau. 88-93.