B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

In the early twentieth century the middle-class kitchen was at the front line of a particularly bitter variety of class warfare, carried out for the most part in conditions every bit as constricted as those endured by the sappers digging under the trenches of the Somme. It was a conflict between maids, expected to remain mute and invisible in the background of the intricate domestic arrangements of the families that they worked for, and their scarcely less constrained employers, for whom every act of daily life was carried out with a spectator present. Every creak of the stair, every cry from another room, had an audience on both sides of the social divide silently registering the significance of what they were unwilling parties to hearing or seeing.

The scale of a country house had allowed for a social campaign of movement and manoeuvre with back stairs, green baize doors and servant’s halls mitigating the claustrophobic aspects of domesticity. But a suburban kitchen crammed the combatants toe to toe in territory in which every square inch was contested.

The kitchen, whatever its size, was a kind of buffer zone. It was like the boiler room of a ship, populated by crew rather than passengers. With a few exceptions, its design was pragmatic and utilitarian rather than an aesthetic statement. But this variety of simplicity had a growing appeal. Terence Conran, largely responsible for the look of the aspiring British home for the last quarter of the twentieth century, recalls his schooldays in a Norman Shaw house, where it was the below-stairs world of kitchens with long deal tables, open fires and plain walls that he found much more appealing than the grander rooms on the upper floors. The kitchen was the route through which electrical and mechanical appliances started filtering into the home. Given the association of machinery with work, it was a sensitive process. Throughout the nineteenth century, those who could afford to kept work and home entirely separate. To be able to do so was a reflection of social status. Early wireless sets and gramophones were camouflaged as furniture for fear that in their raw state they would compromise the domesticity of the home. The kitchen was the most mechanized part of the home, the place in which order and method were seen as desirable.

The contemporary kitchen is the product of the mingling of these two worlds that came when domesticity flooded through the bulkhead to colonize what had once been no-man’s-land. The kitchen has become the symbolic centre of the home in a way that it never used to be, a domestic shrine to the idea of family life and conviviality. But it is also a place in which the conspicuous celebration of efficiency has acquired a symbolic value.

If Conran helped to make the kitchen a fashionable alternative to the living room, Margarethe Schütte-Lihotzky, a Viennese architect, and a lifelong revolutionary socialist, is paradoxically responsible for its underlying organizational principles. In the late 1920s, Schütte-Lihotzky combined egalitarianism with logic and devised the Frankfurt kitchen, a concept that has a claim to be understood as the mother of all fitted kitchens. As many as 8,000 examples were installed in the blocks of flats built for Frankfurt’s workers by the city. She was influenced by the theories of Taylorism, named for Frederick Taylor, the American inventor of the time-and-motion study, and by his determination to lay the production line out so efficiently that the worker became an integral part of it. She went on to work on the plan for the city of Magnitogorsk for Stalin, and on schools for Fidel Castro.

Schütte-Lihotzky lived long enough to celebrate her one hundredth birthday in 1997 in the atrium of the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna’s version of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Soviet and Cuban flags flew in tribute to her unflinching radicalism and the work that she had done in both countries. Waiters in white gloves dispensed Sekt and Sachertorte, while Schütte-Lihotzky took to the floor to dance a waltz.

In 1916, Schütte-Lihotzky had been one of the first women to study architecture at the Vienna Academy of Applied Art, in a building that still stands next door to the museum. While most of her year were enthusiastically pursuing the decorative style of the secessionists, Schütte-Lihotzky was more interested in functionalism. Her student projects showed that she could draw beautifully, but she wanted to find ways of using architecture to deal with the everyday questions of survival. She later claimed that ‘What attracted me to architecture was the very concrete task of serving the people.’

The First World War triggered a traumatic social upheaval in post-imperial Vienna. The city was struggling to accommodate a flood of refugees. Schütte-Lihotzky worked on a number of emergency schemes to help them cope with life in the burgeoning shanty towns and camps springing up around the edges of the city, and the epidemics that came with them. She spent her evenings, after classes, touring squatter shacks, working with their inhabitants to install running water and electricity. It was at the height of the influenza epidemic that killed twenty million people in 1918 - including both Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. Schütte-Lihotzky was spared influenza but contracted tuberculosis. The epidemic clearly played an important part in impressing on the early modern movement pioneers the urgency of making hygiene an essential part of their programme.

After graduating, she worked on designing social housing projects for Adolf Loos, a man whom she remembered as ‘charming, but too ready to drop everything to go down to the Riviera’ to be able to make it in the serious world of public housing.

She had met Ernst May, the German architect who was building pioneering social housing in Frankfurt, by chance while she was standing in for Loos, who was due to give May a tour of some newly built flats. She ended up being offered a job with May’s team in Frankfurt, and later followed him into exile in the Soviet Union. For five years in the late 1920s, she produced a series of standardized kitchens to be installed throughout Frankfurt’s new social housing.

Schütte-Lihotzky’s designs had to work within the constraints of minimal-space standards in which every inch counted. Her kitchens were characterized by neat rows of storage bins and racks and work surfaces designed to be easy to clean. When I was a child in Acton in the 1950s, our kitchen was a scullery just big enough for two people to stand up in, with a gas oven, a sink and no refrigerator, in a disorganized version of Schütte-Lihotzky’s galley.

Her built-in units give the impression of a sense of purpose. She designed a prefabricated concrete basin for one version of the kitchen to keep costs down. Given the need to cram everything into the smallest possible space, washing was combined with cooking in some cases, and she designed bathtubs that came with a lid so that they could provide an extra work surface when not in use. She used wide, sliding doors which connected the kitchen to the living room, to allow mothers to keep an eye on their children. She was equally practical and businesslike about planning. She persuaded Frankfurt to drop its scheme to accommodate single women in hostels; instead, they were assigned accommodation integrated with family housing. Rather than putting working women in a ghetto, it made more sense to give them accommodation close to that of families. It would allow those women who weren’t working to earn a little money from washing or cleaning or child-minding for their neighbours.

Margarethe moved from Germany to the Soviet Union in 1930 with Ernst May and his team of architects to plan settlements for Stalin’s Great Utopia. When purges and show trials made life impossible there, she left, and, after brief stays in London and Paris, ended up in Istanbul, where she joined a group of anti-fascist exiles.

In 1940, she volunteered to return to Austria to work against the Nazis, but was caught by the Gestapo almost at once and sentenced to fifteen years in a labour camp. Liberated in 1945, she worked in East Germany and in Cuba, as well as in Austria, designing social housing, nursery schools, children’s furniture and exhibition systems.

It is not for designing any single house that she will be remembered, but for the radical approach she brought to understanding how ordinary people related to life in the homes that architects designed. She was one of the first to insist on the responsibility that architects must have to their real clients: not the government bureaucracy responsible for the brief and the budget for social housing but the people who would live in it. For the first time, Schütte-Lihotzky made this the centre of an architect’s vision. That the logic and discipline she brought to the design of the kitchen should become the starting point for the worktop, the built-in sink and the spice rack is one of the great ironies. There was not much space in the Frankfurt kitchen for sipping orange juice and eating bircher muesli on leisurely Sunday mornings. But it is precisely the combination of the domestic ideal and Schütte-Lihotzky’s celebration of efficiency that has made the kitchen the centre of the domestic world. And, as a result, it is the place in which the affluent can be persuaded to invest in more travertine floors, limed-oak storage units and stainless steel worktops per square inch than anywhere else in the home, even as the customs of shared meals and preparation of food atrophy. The kitchen is where they can live out their dreams of Provençal farm houses, or wood-lined Scandinavian cabins, or cook to the precision of a Michelin-starred restaurant. There are domestic kitchens that have preparation kitchens attached to them. One for the staff, and one for their employers to eat in against a background of temperature-controlled cabinets for wine, ice available on tap, and the kind of hotplates that depend on magnetic resonance. It is now even possible to purchase from Electrolux a domestic version of the laboratory equipment that Ferran Adrià used at El Bulli - provided you have the means to afford the £250,000 price.

Despite Schütte-Lihotzky’s devotion to the proletariat, it is the kitchen that has become the greatest domestic class-signifier of them all. What you eat, where and when you eat, and how and who prepares it provide the most intimate portrait of any individual. The elite are fascinated by the world of the lumpen, where shared meals, if they take place at all, are consumed on the sofa, without the benefit of crockery, glassware, or much in the way of cutlery. They look on in wonder when food is consumed by the underclass while they are in motion on the street, and when the dining table and mealtimes no longer exist. But they themselves fret anxiously over their own food rituals. Is it worse to be catered for by bright young things who do it for a living than to rely on the part-prepared offerings of the supermarket? If the purpose of fashion really is to measure class distinctions, it is at its most effective in the kitchen, which is still full of social anxiety about shifts in taste.