The Frankfurt Kitchen Changed Design History Forever—Inside the Race to Save the Last Ones Standing

The call arrives with a deadline. An apartment in one of Frankfurt’s 1920s housing estates is being renovated, and its original fitted kitchen is scheduled for removal. Volunteers grab their slotted screwdrivers and spattles, chisels and hammers; they may have only a few days to save the cook space before it’s gone for good.

The rescuers come from the Ernst-May-Gesellschaft—or the Ernst May Society, in English—a 23-year-old nonprofit dedicated to preserving surviving examples of the Frankfurt Kitchen, arguably the single most important development in modern kitchen design. “Every contemporary kitchen is based on the DNA of the Frankfurt Kitchen,” says Laura Gerlach, whose photographic archive of extant interiors, The Library of Frankfurt Kitchens, has been exhibited at the society’s show house. “The Frankfurt Kitchen marked a turning point in architecture and in the concept of living and radically scrutinized and rethought the idea of housework. It’s what we mean when we say ‘kitchen.’”

Each remaining cook space is located in one of the city’s Neues Frankfurt (New Frankfurt) estates, a collection of apartment complexes that were built after World War I to address the city’s housing shortage. Though historians estimate that at least 10,000 Frankfurt Kitchens were installed beginning in 1926, most have been discarded or remodeled out of existence. A century after they were first designed, reexamining their relevance in history has never been more important, while protecting their future has never been more dire.

The Frankfurt Kitchen revolutionized domestic labor

In 1925, the mayor of Frankfurt appointed architect Ernst May as the city’s building councilor and tasked him with designing a comprehensive program to address the housing shortage. This was the beginning of Neues Frankfurt. He assembled a team of city planners, engineers, and designers to execute the project, including a trailblazing young architect, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. As one of Austria’s first practicing female architects, she was passionate about a human-centric approach to design. In Vienna earlier that decade, she had begun thinking systematically about how architecture might lessen women’s domestic workload.

Knowing this, May charged her with devising a space-efficient kitchen that could be prefabricated and would rationalize domestic labor, saving women time and energy. “The idea was to minimize the number of steps they took, say between peeling the potato and the oven, ostensibly freeing up their time for other pursuits outside the house,” explains Staci Steinberger, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which recently acquired a Frankfurt Kitchen that is now on view as part of the exhibit, “The Kitchen and Its Discontents.”

What looks familiar today was wholly radical at the time. Before Schütte-Lihotzky’s “modern laboratory,” working-class kitchens consisted of a jumble of mismatched wooden tables and cupboards in the corner of a shared living space. The cooking stove often doubled as the dwelling’s heat source. Apartments could come with little more than a sink, leaving tenants to supply everything from shelves to food safes. Schütte-Lihotzky made what was then the women’s domain the architect’s concern, bringing women’s work to the “forefront in an extraordinary way,” says Christine Zwingl, a Viennese architect and the leading expert on Schütte-Lihotzky. “It is a design by a woman, a contribution to women’s emancipation, and a piece of women’s history.”

Every corner was considered

At just 6.2 by 11.3 feet, every inch in a Frankfurt Kitchen had a purpose. Dishes drained on shelves above the sink; cooking scraps were swept directly into a removable ventilated drawer for disposal; an ironing board folded down beneath an adjustable ceiling lamp. Perhaps most memorable were the labeled aluminum storage bins for flour, sugar, and other pantry staples, each with a handle and pouring spout and slotted into a discreet wall-mounted cubby. Most transformative, however, was the electric stove, which replaced cumbersome, soot-stained, wood-burning ranges.

Influenced by railway dining cars and Taylorism—a system of measuring and streamlining labor to maximize efficiency on factory floors—Schütte-Lihotzky arranged continuous counters, built-in cabinets, stoves, and sinks in assembly-line fashion. By designing the fittings alongside the apartment itself, she reduced tenants’ upfront furnishing costs, while linoleum flooring, tiled backsplashes, and aluminum drawers simplified cleaning. Even the kitchen’s original color, blue, had a practical rationale: The hue was thought to repel flies. “It made cooking and cleaning easier,” Steinberger says, though she notes that the new design “didn’t change who was doing the work.”

The Frankfurt Kitchen soon reached an audience beyond its birthplace. In 1927, photographs of the kitchen appeared in the Swiss architecture journal Das Werk. Three years later, Schütte-Lihotzky joined May’s team in the Soviet Union, where they were invited to apply the wider lessons of Neues Frankfurt’s program to new industrial towns. These exchanges were part of an international effort to rethink domestic labor: From housing schemes in Prague and Brussels to American manufacturers’ test kitchens, designers were exploring related ideas about efficiency.

After World War II, expanding appliance production and consumer markets brought those ambitions to scale. Even as new equipment and materials transformed the room, the principle of planning storage, appliances, and work surfaces as a continuous, complementary whole endured. A century later, the Frankfurt Kitchen remains the genesis of today’s contemporary cooking space.

The fight to save a revolutionary design

Today, parts from approximately 50 kitchens, all saved by the Ernst-May-Gesellschaft—and their predecessor Gesellschaft für Kunst und Denkmalpflege (Society for Art and Monument Preservation)—fill a 2,150-square-foot warehouse in Frankfurt-Fechenheim. Towering metal shelves hold everything from opal-glass mushroom lampshades to massive plastic tubs of hardware. Door frames stacked like cards lean against a far wall beside pallets of crumbling Solnhofen limestone floor tiles. “It’s an amazing place,” says conservator Kerstin Frost, who works closely with the nonprofit on restoration projects, including the deep-blue Frankfurt Kitchen that LACMA acquired.

For years, the Ernst-May-Gesellschaft has served as the official intermediary between the kitchen’s original apartment units and the museum and cultural institutions they often end up in. Because the kitchens are in public buildings, the housing administration would neither sell them nor allow residents to claim and keep them when an apartment was scheduled for renovation. Unless they were immediately transferred to a museum or recognized collection, they were destroyed, says Frost.

When Peter Schepp, a volunteer with the society, approached the housing administration about the soon-to-be-discarded kitchens, the response was straightforward: “We throw it away. Do you want it?” He arranged for the society to be notified whenever one was slated for removal. Over the years, volunteers have salvaged everything from nearly intact kitchens (though this is increasingly rare) to individual cabinets and fittings, adding them to the collection. If renovations by successive generations of tenants have left little of the original kitchen intact, “we rescue just the few original remaining parts, like the screws that fix the furnishings to the wall,” Schepp said.

Before the Ernst-May-Gesellschaft volunteers begin dismantling a kitchen, a photographer documents the interior with a fisheye lens while the team measures and sketches the room. Then they begin carefully disassembling its surviving original elements and transporting them to the warehouse. The goal is to preserve and restore as much as possible, eventually combining components like handles and aluminum bins from different kitchens to reconstruct a complete model for museums or similar academic and cultural institutions.

At the warehouse, the restoration process begins with “cleaning, cleaning, cleaning,” Frost says. Decades of dust, grime, and grease form a layer over the workspaces. Restorers address common signs of wear and tear, such as drawer runners worn down by nearly two centimeters and drawer backs reduced to half their original thickness by decades of knives repeatedly striking the wood. Conservators also remove inconspicuous (often inauthentic) additions. Particleboard, for example, signals a contemporary renovation since the original kitchens were composed primarily of solid softwood and wood-core board.

For Schepp and Frost, the Frankfurt Kitchen’s value is wrapped up in its endurance. Even during our current era of innovation and technological transformation, today’s kitchen looks remarkably similar to the one Schütte-Lihotzky designed 100 years earlier. And if high-quality, socially responsive design could be imagined and integrated then, it might still be possible now.

Gerlach, the photographer, began documenting the kitchens in 360-degree panoramas after discovering that existing photographs rarely captured the relationship between their individual components. Her aim was to preserve the Frankfurt Kitchen as a “concept rather than merely a piece of furniture,” allowing future generations to understand how the space functioned as a whole.

100 Years on, a modern kitchen gets a contemporary update

Because of the housing administration’s policies, removal was historically the only route to preservation for most Frankfurt kitchens. But over the past two years, that has begun to shift. Several Neues Frankfurt estates and their original interiors have been placed under Denkmalschutz, or landmark protection, and the city has hired Frost to restore the kitchens for new tenants. Working with architect Kristian Kaffenberger, she preserves the 1920s cabinetry while incorporating space for refrigerators and dishwashers, adding storage, and raising the counters from 31 to 35 inches to accommodate both the shift from seated to standing work and a century of increasing average heights for men and women. Frost likens the distinction between conserving a kitchen in place and reconstructing one in a museum to the difference between a musical instrument still being played and one only on display. “Both are necessary,” she says. “Museums have been very, very important in ensuring their survival.”

This program has slowed the flow of parts into the Fechenheim warehouse. Schepp recalls receiving as many as 10 calls in a single year, compared with roughly two or three annually today. Yet he considers the in situ initiative an extension of the society’s years-long efforts. “It cuts our source,” he says. “But we don’t mind. We consider it a success.”