The Frankfurt Kitchen Changed How We Cook--and Live
You might not have heard of the Frankfurt Kitchen, but if you have neatly organized cabinets, an easy-to-clean tiled backsplash, and a colorful countertop, in a sense, you already cook in one.
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Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000) was the first Austrian woman ever to qualify as an architect. Following World War I, she was tasked with the design of standard kitchens for a new housing project by city planner and architect Ernst May. The Great War left rubble and a desperate housing shortage in its wake, but it also opened the way for new ideas and new designs.
There was a pervasive sense among Europe’s leading designers, from Le Corbusier in France to Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus in Germany, that the need to rebuild in the 1920s, though rooted in tragedy, offered a society fresh start, and a chance to leave behind the class distinctions that were baked into 18th- and 19th-century architecture while they were at it. Very much in this mold, Ernst May was a utopian thinker, and his International Style design for the Frankfurt project, known as New Frankfurt, featured egalitarian amenities for the community like schools, playgrounds, and theaters, along with access to fresh air, light, and green space.
For her part, though she was a career woman herself, Schütte-Lihotzky believed that housework was a profession and deserved to be treated seriously as such. This counted as feminism in the 1920s, and although we might find it essentializing or insulting today, making housework easier was considered a form of emancipation for women.
https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/05/modern-kitchen-history-design-ideas-domestic-architecture/586345/
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Depression affected kitchen design and the wealthy had to stop hiring help and cook.for themselves.
Great point about how big kitchens with lots of storage abets hoarding and drawers filled with junk.
A whole part 2 could be written about the evolution of design in the last 20 years too. Just spent weekend with family for graduation. We rented a big house with a central open plan kitchen. It was great for gathering & mixing drinks and spreading out take out. But if you love to cook not so much. The fumes from an appetizer cooking in oven spread everywhere.
For real cooking...the noise of the TV, people in and out, the smells everywhere, all made preparing a meal completely chaotic and unenjoyable to me.
Personally think open kitchens are meant for people who don't REALLY cook 
Funny, saw a house plan the other day that had an open island and some of the "pretty" kitchen but behind it was a door to the "dirty" kitchen. I suppose where you go to hide and wash the dirty pots and fry things. The pretty kitchen part was for chopping beautiful vegetables and sipping on wine and chatting with partner/friends who are sitting at bar. Like you see on TV
