Such is the ubiquity of the galley kitchen in postwar flats and apartments built throughout the world that one could easily assume that there was never much debate in the first place about how best to lay out a kitchen in a compact and restricted space. But it would be immediately clear that anyone who made that assumption had never heard the name Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky.
One of those astonishing era-defining people whose lives span literal centuries of human history, Schütte-Lihotzky was born in Vienna in what would become apparent were the twilight years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and died aged 102 a mere 18 days into the next millennium, in January 2000. In the interim, Schütte-Lihotzky lived through the collapse of European empires, two world wars, and several violently different developments in the arts and design which mirrored the febrile politics of the first half of the 1900s. Schütte-Lihotzky, usually known as Grete, was a communist activist, a resistance fighter against the Nazis, and a pioneering female architect at a time when such a thing was rarely known. And, as the inventor of the Frankfurt kitchen, there’s a good chance she is responsible for the layout of the place where you prepare and cook food, if you live in a flat.
The Frankfurt kitchen, for those who don’t closely follow European modernist design, is the archetypical fitted galley kitchen. You know the type: long, narrow, with a hob and a sink built in to a horseshoe of countertops and lots of overhead cupboards and storage. It’s named after the city for which Schütte-Lihotzky created it, and she was one of relatively few people who could have done so – even though she later admitted that she had never run a household first-hand before and could hardly cook, instead taking most of her inspiration from interviews with working housewives.
Born on the outskirts of Vienna in 1897 to a middle-class, broadly liberal and progressive family, Schütte-Lihotzky had trained at the Kunstgewerbeschule school of applied arts in Vienna, reportedly the very first woman to do so, between 1915 and 1919 (she was allegedly accepted after her mother secured a letter of recommendation from Gustav Klimt himself). Schütte-Lihotzky was a communist, and her politics were inextricable from her work throughout her career. Like many of the arts practised against the various competing political philosophies of Weimar Germany, late Secession-era Vienna and Europe more widely, architecture was considered a political statement – it was not possible, in Schütte-Lihotzky’s mind, to design a kitchen for a worker that wasn’t in some way a comment on the dignity of that worker.
In 1923, as Schütte-Lihotzky was beginning her career, Le Corbusier described the house as “a machine for living in” in his book Towards an Architecture. Form followed function for the most progressive architects in Europe and America; the automation and ease of the factory could be replicated in the home, benefiting the proletariat, while kitchen fittings could newly be produced cheaply and en masse to ensure that technological luxuries were accessible to workers on modest salaries. The radical concept of social housing was taking gradual shape.
Schütte-Lihotzky was 29 when she was asked to design a kitchen for the German public housing programme known as “Neues Frankfurt” – New Frankfurt – overseen by the architect and town planner Ernst May. A project to provide the city with affordable, clean and stylish housing, May was given the authority and funding to deliver a raft of new development between 1925 and 1930, and the area largely still stands today. Schütte-Lihotzky began designing kindergartens for New Frankfurt, before coming up with her kitchen design, which was partially inspired by the cramped but efficient set-up of train dining cars.
The Frankfurt kitchen introduced many of the features one now expects as standard in an apartment galley kitchen: continuous U-shaped countertops around the edge of the space, built-in cabinetry and drawers for ease of storage, and a continuous splashback. It was – and is – highly spatially efficient and compact, a self-contained unit which is easy to move around and operate in. The city of Frankfurt ordered 10,000 to be installed in affordable housing for its populace.
In 1930, Schütte-Lihotzky travelled to the USSR with her husband to work on the utopian projects of the early-mid Soviet era. Even by that point, though, she was wary of being typecast as a “female designer”, and travelled on the understanding that she wouldn’t be asked to design any more kitchens. Instead, she and her husband Wilhelm Schütte – the pair had met and married in Frankfurt; she took his name – helped build the pre-planned, socialist realist city of Magnitogorsk in the southern Urals.
A decade later, Schütte-Lihotzky returned to Vienna via Istanbul to join the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ) and the resistance movement opposing the Nazis, Austria having united with Germany in the Anschluss of 1938. She was arrested by the Gestapo in a sting operation less than a month after her return, and narrowly avoided being executed. Instead, she was sentenced to 15 years in prison, a sentence carried out in a Bavarian prison until she was liberated by US troops in spring 1945.
One would think that resistance to and imprisonment by the Nazis would bring acclaim and recognition to an architect, but from 1946 onwards Schütte-Lihotzky was shunned and boycotted by the city of Vienna – ironically, for the same reason as her imprisonment: her membership of the KPÖ. As the Cold War set in in earnest, authorities in Western-aligned Austria were suspicious of communists. “It was only after her 90th birthday,” the newspaper Der Standard wrote in 2005, “that the great social reformist architect was showered with honours.”
In the meantime, Schütte-Lihotzky did the natural thing and spent time working in communist countries, namely the People’s Republic of China, Cuba and East Germany. She remained a committed leftist and in 1988, upon being offered the Austrian Medal for Science and Art, she declined to accept, citing the Austrian president Kurt Waldheim’s recently revealed (at the time) complicity in Nazi military actions as a Wehrmacht officer during the Second World War.
Nonetheless, it was the Frankfurt kitchen which came to define Schütte-Lihotzky’s contribution to architecture – perhaps unsurprisingly, given the sheer influence it has had on interior design, and the number of people who have cooked and lived in them. Reports abound of her disavowing it as an albatross around her neck, whether seriously or not, in later life. “At the age of 101,” wrote the Slovene journalist Kaja Šeruga last year, “she testily exclaimed: ‘If I had known that everyone would keep talking about nothing else, I would never have built that damned kitchen!’” It’s just one of many anecdotes which capture Schütte-Lihotzky’s prickly independence, and proof that even a century after her birth in a different world, she wasn’t a woman who would accept being put in a box.
