Thinking about Kitchens. Nach Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

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Developed in 1926 by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000), the Frankfurt Kitchen is today firmly inscribed in the canon of architectural and design history. Its centennial provides an occasion to subject the kitchen – both as an architectural and design-historical model and as a political, social, and economic space – to renewed inquiry. As a site of the ambivalent entanglement of architectural innovation and the gendered division of labor, it serves as the point of departure for a critical interrogation of topology: In what ways do kitchens structure social relations and reproductive labor within capitalist economies? What is the emancipatory potential of architectural design in this context? The conference addresses these questions from the vantage point of the Frankfurt Kitchen’s position in twentieth-century architectural history, conceiving it as a nexus of transnational discourses on the relations on labor, gender, economy, technology, and social reproduction. It situates Schütte-Lihotzky’s kitchen designs in relation to contemporaneous and later positions, and spans a trajectory from alternative models of community-building to a critical engagement with the musealization of the Frankfurt Kitchen and other iconic designs of international modernism, to the logics of the kitchen as a design object between status symbol and serialization.

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