On the sixth floor of a quiet residential street in central Vienna, a tiny kitchen offers a masterclass in stylish functionalism. Every inch has been designed for efficiency, yet the first impression is one of warmth and comfort. The kitchen’s deep orange splashback and the dark green cabinets with red interiors are all bathed in natural light, with sweeping views of the city rooftops beyond.
This is the work of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the architect, activist and resistance fighter who in 1926 designed the Frankfurt Kitchen – the prototype for the modern fitted version now standard in the west. It introduced many features we now take for granted: continuous countertops, built-in cabinets and drawers optimised for storage, a tiled splashback – all designed as a complementary whole.
In September, the Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Centre, headquartered in the architect’s apartment in the Viennese 5th district, concluded a painstaking restoration of the kitchen, which is now open to the public. “It was an exciting detective game,” says Renate Allmayer-Beck, the architect who oversaw the restoration. She relied on two original plans as well as photos taken after Schütte-Lihotzky’s death in 2000, and sourced products from across Europe.
Many elements in the kitchen, which Schütte-Lihotzky designed in the 1970s, are lifted directly from her 1926 breakthrough – a foldaway ironing board on the wall, pouring cups for dry goods in cubbyholes, room for a revolving stool below the work surface, and shallow drawers that hide additional counter space.
But the Frankfurt Kitchen was about more than matching cabinets, sleek countertops and handy gadgets. Designed as part of a public housing programme in Frankfurt, it was the first mass-produced built-in kitchen, requiring great technical expertise, as well as a forward-looking space that sought to free up women’s time for a life beyond the slog of domesticity.
For Schütte-Lihotzky, architecture was inherently political. Born in 1897 to a middle-class family in Vienna, she became interested in the social issues of housing when studying architecture – the first woman to do so in Austria – and went on to work with Adolf Loos for the Viennese settlement movement. Her work so impressed the German architect Ernst May that he invited her to join the municipal building department in Frankfurt.
Put in charge of designing a kitchen for social apartments, she envisioned the space as a “modern laboratory” in which work could be done as efficiently as possible, freeing women’s time and energies for work, education and leisure. (As progressive as Schütte-Lihotzky’s thinking was, the idea that a man might also take on domestic duties didn’t enter her calculations.)
Although the Frankfurt Kitchen was designed with very specific architectural and financial constraints in mind, it took on a life of its own and was promoted by May as a space created for women by a woman – after all, who could know a kitchen better? Yet it was all just marketing, wrote Schütte-Lihotzky in her memoir, Why I Became an Architect: “I never ran a household, never cooked, and never had any cooking experience prior to creating the Frankfurt Kitchen.”
Instead she interviewed housewives, conducted time-motion studies and drew inspiration from kitchen galleys on trains. The result was a narrow space where a woman could turn from sink to stove without taking a step, and every utensil and ingredient had a designated space.
“There was nothing comparable at the time,” says Christine Zwingl, director of the Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Centre, “especially when you consider that this was a social project installed in 10,000 homes. It is beautiful in function and design.” For all the progress the design embodied, Schütte-Lihotzky’s decision to move the kitchen from the corner of a shared family room to its own domain would later be criticised by second-wave feminists for isolating women in the kitchen and making housework invisible.
As the Frankfurt Kitchen gained in popularity, Schütte-Lihotzky was wary of being typecast. When she moved to the USSR with May and his merry band of architects in 1930 to develop new towns for workers, she did so under one condition – that she would not have to build any more kitchens. While her personal ideals were staunchly socialist, she was not a member of any political party during those years. This changed in 1938, when she moved to Istanbul and joined the Austrian Communist party to take part in the Nazi resistance, which led to her eventual arrest by the Gestapo in Vienna in 1941. She barely escaped a death sentence and remained imprisoned until May 1945.
Returning to Vienna, she found the welcome colder than expected. “She had a large social circle,” says Zwingl, “and was in demand internationally, but it was the cold war. Communists were boycotted by the public authorities.” Unable to secure public commissions in Austria, she continued working as an independent architect and consulted on projects in China, Cuba and the German Democratic Republic. She also became a prominent activist as the first president of the Federation of Democratic Women of Austria and a member of the Austrian Peace Council.
Her convictions didn’t weaken with age. When she was offered the Austrian Medal for Science and Art in 1988 – only one of the many honours she belatedly received – she refused it due to the then president’s complicity in Nazi war crimes. And at the age of 98 she sued the rightwing politician Jörg Haider for trivialising the Holocaust. “There was no retreat,” says Zwingl. “It was always, ‘What can I do? How do I do it?’ And then she did it.”
Yet she could never escape the long shadow of the Frankfurt Kitchen. At the age of 101, she testily exclaimed: “If I had known that everyone would keep talking about nothing else, I would never have built that damned kitchen!”
