The Frankfurt Kitchen

Overview

This film on kitchen design was part of a series of promotional shorts made by the photographer Paul Wolff in 1927-28 ahead of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), which took place in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1929 and featured various demonstrations of mass housing.Die Frankfurter Küche, for its part, showcases the so-called “Frankfurt Kitchen,” which is still considered a key forerunner of modern kitchen design. Invented in 1926 by the architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky for the housing project “New Frankfurt,” the Frankfurt Kitchen was lauded for its low cost, high efficiency, hygienic design, and mass reproducibility. Wolff’s film demonstrates these qualities by comparing women at work in “old” and “new” kitchens, and through the use of animated diagrams demonstrating, in Taylorist fashion, the efficiency of labor in the new kitchen.