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Kitchen

Within homes, the kitchen can be the center of other activities as well, depending on its size, furnishing, and equipment (see also major appliance), for example washing up (with or without dishwasher), washing and drying laundry (often with a washing machine), normal and refrigerated food storage, and eating. The kitchen is sometimes the most comforting room in a house, where family and visitors tend to congregate, instead of in the living room.

Table of contents

1 The evolution of the kitchen 1.1 Early history 1.2 The kitchen moves 1.3 Early North American kitchens 1.4 Industrialization 1.5 Rationalization 1.6 Technization 1.7 Free for all 2 Domestic kitchen planning 3 Other kitchen types 4 Literature 5 External links 6 See also

The evolution of the kitchen

The development of the kitchen has been intricatly and intrinsically linked with the development of the cooking range or stove for most of human history. Until the 18th century, open fire was the sole means of heating food for cooking, and the architecture of the kitchen reflects it. It wasn't until the industrialization, when technical advances brought new ways to heat food into homes, that fundamental changes occurred in the kitchen when architects started to take advantage of the newly gained flexibility.

Early history

The Romans—at least the wealthy ones—already had relatively well-equipped kitchens. The kitchen in a Roman villa was typically integrated into the main building as a separate room, set apart for practical reasons (smoke) but also out of sociological reasons (operated by slaves). The placement of the kitchen near the living and dining rooms shows that the importance of the kitchen was recognized. The fireplace was typically on the floor, placed at a wall, sometimes raised a little bit (one had to kneel to cook), and there was no chimney.

The common folk in the roman cities often had no kitchen of their own, they did their cooking in large public kitchens. Some also had small mobile bronze stoves, on which a fire could be lighted for cooking.

The early medieval longhouses simply had an open fire under the highest point of the building. The "kitchen area" was between the entrance and the fireplace. In place of a chimney, these early buildings only had a hole in the roof through which some (but by far not all!) smoke could escape. Besides for cooking, the fire also served as a light source and to heat the single-room building. A similar design can be found in the Iroquois longhouses of North America.

In the larger homesteads of the nobles, the kitchen sometimes was moved to a separate sunken floor building to keep the main building, which also served representative purposes, free from smoke.

European farmhouse]] Although many architectural advances were made throughout the middle ages, the kitchen remained largely unaffected by them. The reason was simply that there were no technological advances concerning the hearth—open fire remained the only method used. Kitchens were dark, smokey, and sooty places—whence their name "smoke kitchen".

In medieval cities around the 10th to 12th century, the kitchen still used a open fire hearth in the middle of the room. The first primitive chimneys appeared. In wealthy homes, the kitchen often was located on the first floor, like the bedroom and the representative hall, while the ground floor was used as stable.

In castles and monasteries, the living and working areas were separated; the kitchen was moved to a separate building, and thus couldn't serve anymore to heat the living rooms.

With the advent of the chimney, the hearth moved from the center of the room to one wall, and the first brick-and-mortar hearths were built. The fire was lit on top of the construction, a vault underneath served to store wood. Pots made of iron, bronze, or copper started to replace the pottery used earlier. The temperature was controlled by hanging the pot higher or lower over the fire, or placing it on the hot ashes.

Leonardo da Vinci invented an automated system for a rotating spit for spit-roasting: a propeller in the chimney made the spit turn all by itself. This kind of system was widely used in wealthier homes.

Using open fire for cooking (and heating) of course was risky. Fires devastating whole cities occurred frequently.

The kitchen moves

Beginning in the late middle ages, kitchens lost their home-heating function even more and were increasingly moved from the living area into a separate room. The living room was now heated by tiled stoves, operated from the kitchen, which offered the huge advantage of not filling the room with smoke. Freed from smoke and dirt, the living room thus could become to serve as a representative area. In the upper classes, cooking and the kitchen were the domain of the servants, and the kitchen was set apart from the living rooms, sometimes even far from the dining room. Poorer homes often did not have a separate kitchen yet, they kept the one-room arrangement where all activities took place, or at the utmost had the kitchen in the entrance hall.

The medieval smoke kitchen remained common, especially in rural farmhouses and generally in poorer homes, until much later. In a few European farmhouses, the smoke kitchen was in regular use even in the middle of the 20th century! These houses often had no chimney, but only a smoke hood above the fireplace, made of wood and covered with clay, and used to smoke meat. The smoke then rose more or less freely, warming the upstairs rooms and protecting the woodwork from vermin.

Early North American kitchens

In the early North American kitchen, the same distinction as for the medieval European kitchen is visible. The early settlers in the north often had no separate kitchen; a fireplace in a corner of the cabin served as the kitchen space. Later, the kitchen did become a separate room, but remained within the building.

The development in the southern states was quite different, but then, so were the climate and sociological conditions. In southern estates, the kitchen was often relegated to an outhouse, separated from the mansion, for much of the same reasons as in the feudal kitchen in medieval Europe: the kitchen was operated by slaves, and their working place had to be separated from the living area of the masters by the social standards of the time.

To avoid that the main house was heated by the preparation of the meals for the harvest workers or tasks like canning, larger farms further north often also had completely separated "summer kitchens".

Industrialization

Technological advances during the industrialization finally brought major changes to the kitchen. Iron stoves, which enclosed the fire completely and were more efficient, appeared. Early models included the Franklin stove around 1740, which was a furnace stove intended for heating, not for cooking. Benjamin Thompson in England designed his "Rumford stove" around 1800. This stove was much more energy efficient than earlier stoves; it used one fire to heat several pots, which were hung into holes on top of the stove and were thus heated from all sides instead of just from the bottom. However, his stove was designed for large kitchens; it was too big for domestic use. The "Oberlin stove" was a refinement of the technique that resulted in this size reduction; it was patented in the U.S. in 1834 and became a commercial success with some 90000 units sold over the next 30 years. All these stoves were still fired with wood or coal: although the first gas street lamps were installed in Paris, London, and Berlin at the beginning of the 1820s and the first U.S. patent on a gas stove was granted in 1825, it wasn't until the late 19th century that using gas for lighting an cooking became commonplace in urban areas.

The emigration to the cities in the second half of the 19th century induced other significant changes that ultimately would also change the kitchen. Out of sheer necessity, cities began planning and building water distribution pipes into homes, and built canalisations to deal with the waste water. Gas pipes were laid; gas was used first for lighting purposes, but once the network had grown sufficiently, it became available also for heating and cooking on gas stoves. At the turn of the 20th century, electricity had been mastered well enough to become a commercially viable alternative to gas and slowly started replacing the latter. But like the gas stove, the electrical stove had a slow start. The first electrical stove had been presented in 1893 at the Chicago world fair, but it wasn't until the 1930s that the technology was stable enough and began to take off.

The industrialization also caused social changes. The new factory worker class in the cities was housed under generally pitoyable conditions. Whole families lived in small one or two-room apartments in tenement buildings up to six stories high, badly aired and with insufficient lighting. Sometimes, they even shared the apartment with "night sleepers": unmarried men that paid for a bed at night. The kitchen in such an apartment doubled as a living and sleeping room, and saturdays even as a bathroom. Water had to be gotten from the nearest well; hot water was then heated on the stove. Water pipes were laid only towards the end of the 19th century, and then often only with one tap per building or per story. Brick-and-mortar stoves fired with coal remained the norm until well into the second half of the century. Pots and kitchenware typically were stored on open shelves, and parts of the room could be separated from the rest using simple curtains.

In contrast, there were no dramatic changes for the upper classes. The kitchen, located in the basement or the ground floor, continued to be operated by servants. In some houses, water pumps were installed, and some even had kitchen sinks and drains (but no water on tap yet, except for some feudal kitchens in castles). The kitchen became a much cleaner space with the advent of "cooking machines", closed stoves made of iron plates and fired by wood and increasingly charcoal or coal, and that had flue pipes connected to the chimney. Only for the servants the kitchen continued to serve also as a sleeping room; they slept either on the floor, or later in narrow spaces above a lowered ceiling, for the new stoves with their smoke outlet no longer required a high ceiling in the kitchen. The kitchen floors were tiled; kitchenware was neatly stored in cupboards to protect them from dust and steam. A large table served as a workbench; there were at least as many chairs as there were servants, for the table in the kitchen also doubled as the eating place for the servants.

The middle class tried to imitate the luxurious dining styles of the upper class as best as it could. Living in smaller apartments, the kitchen was the main room—here, the family lived. The study or living room was saved for special occasions such as an occasional dinner invitation. Because of this, these middle-class kitchens often were more homely than those of the upper class, where the kitchen was a work-only room occupied only by the servants. Besides a cupboard to store the kitchenware, there were a table and chairs, where the family would dine, and sometimes—if space allowed—even a feauteuil or a couch.

Gas pipes were increasingly laid only in the late 19th century, and gas stoves started to replace the older coal-fired stoves. Gas was more expensive than coal, though, and thus the new technology first was installed in the wealthier homes. Where workers' apartments were equipped with a gas stove, gas distribution would go through a coin meter.

In rural areas, the older technology using coal or wood stoves or even brick-and-mortar open fireplaces remained common throughout. Gas and water pipes were first installed in the big cities; small villages were connected only much later.

Rationalization

The trend to increasing gasification and electrification continued at the turn of the 20th century. In industry, it was the phase of rationalisation, where work processes were attempted to be streamlined. Taylorism was born, time-motion studies were used to optimize processes. These ideas also spilled over into domestic kitchen architecture due to a growing trend that called for a professionalization of household work, started in the mid-19th century by Catharine Beecher and taken up and amplified by Christine Frederick's publications in the 1910s.

In the worker class, the women frequently also worked in the factory to ensure the family's survival, as the men's wages often did not suffice. Social housing projects led to the next milestone: the "Frankfurt kitchen". Born in 1926 out of a desire to optimize the work in the kitchen in order to make cooking less work (so that women should spend less time in the kitchen and more in the factory!) and also to be able to build decently equipped kitchens at low costs, the Frankfurt kitchen, designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, was the result of detailed time-motion studies and heavily influenced by the railway dining car kitchens of the period. This fore-runner of the modern built-in fitted kitchen measured 1.9m by 3.4m and had a standard layout. It was built in some 10000 apartments in a social housing project of architect Ernst May in Frankfurt.

Although the initial reception was more than critical (people were not accustomed to the changed processes also designed by Schütte-Lihotzky; it was so small that only one person could work in it; some storage spaces intended for raw loose food ingredients such as flour were reachable by children), the Frankfurt kitchen embodied a standard for the rest of the 20th century in rental appartments: the "work kitchen". Too small to live or dine in, it was soon criticized as "exiling the women in the kitchen", but the post-World War II conservatism coupled with economic reasons prevailed. The kitchen once more was seen as a work place that needed to be separated from the living areas. Practical reasons also played a role in this development: just as in the bourgeois homes of the past, one reason for separating the kitchen was to keep the steam and smells of cooking out of the living room.

Technization

The idea of standardized dimensions and layout developed for the Frankfurt kitchen took hold. The equipent used remained a standard for years to come: hot and cold water on tap and a kitchen sink, an electrical or gas stove and oven; not much later the refrigerator was added as a standard item. The concept was refined in the "Swedish kitchen" using unit furniture with wooden fronts for the kitchen cabinets. Soon the concept was amended by the use of smooth synthetic door and drawer fronts, first in white, recalling a sense of cleanliness and alluding to sterile lab or hospital settings, but soon after in lively, friendly colors, too. After World War II, Western Europe adopted the trend beginning in the 1940s in the U.S to equip the kitchen with electrified small and large kitchen appliances such as blenders, toasters, and later also microwave ovens.

Parallel to this development in tenement buildings went the evolution of the kitchen in homeowner's houses. There, the kitchens usually were somewhat larger, suitable for everyday use as a dining room, but otherwise the ongoing technization was the same, and the use of unit furniture became a standard also in this market sector.

General technocentric enthusiasm even led some designers to take the "work kitchen" approch even further, culminating in futuristic designs like Luigi Colani's "kitchen satellite" (1969, commissioned by the German high-end kitchen manufacturer Poggenpohl for an exhibit), in which the room was reduced to a ball with a chair in the middle and all appliances at arm's length, an optimal arrangement maybe for "applying heat to food", but not necessarily for cooking. Such extravaganzas remained (luckily) outside the norm, though.

In the former Eastern bloc countries, the official doctrine viewed cooking as a mere necessity, and women should work "for the society" in factories, not at home. Also, housing had to be built at low costs and quickly, which led directly to the standardized apartment block using prefabricated slabs. The kitchen was reduced to the max and the "work kitchen" paradigm taken to its extremes: in East Germany for instance, the standard tenement block of the model "P2" had tiny 4 m² kitchens in the inside of the building (no windows), connected to the dining and living room of the 55 m² apartment and separated from the latter by a pass-through or a window.

Free for all

Starting in the 1980s, the perfection of the extractor hood allowed again designing open kitchen, integrated more or less with the living room without causing the whole apartment or house to smell. Before that, only a few earlier experiments, typically in newly built upper middle class family homes, had open kitchens. Examples are Frank Lloyd Wrights House Willey (1934) and House Jacobs (1936). Both had open kitchens, with high ceilings (up to the roof) and were aired by skylights. The extractor hood made it possible to build open kitchens in apartments, too, where both high ceilings and skylights were not possible.

The re-integration of the kitchen and the living area went hand in hand with a change in the perception of cooking: increasingly, cooking was seen as a creative and sometimes social act instead of work, especially in upper social classes. Besides, many families also appreciated the trend towards open kitchens, as it made it easier for the parents to supervise the kids while cooking. The enhanced status of cooking also made the kitchen a prestige object for showing off one's wealth or cooking professionalism. Some architects have capitalized on this "object" aspect of the kitchen by designing freestanding "kitchen objects". However, like their precursor, Colani's "kitchen satellite", such futuristic designs are exceptions.

Another reason for the trend back to open kitchens (and a foundation of the "kitchen object" philosophy) is also to be found in the changes in the food alimentation. Whereas in the 1950s most cooking started out with raw ingredients and a meal had to be prepared for real, the advent of frozen meals and pre-prepared convenience food has changed the cooking habits of many people, who consequently used the kitchen less and less. Why "waste" space for a fully equipped kitchen in a separate room if it had only cursory uses to "nuke" frozen meals? For others, who followed the "cooking as a social act" trend, the open kitchen had the advantage that they could be with their guests while cooking, and for the "creative cooks" it might even become a stage for their cooking performance.

Domestic kitchen planning

Domestic kitchen design per se is a relatively recent discipline. First ideas to optimize the work in the kitchen go back to Catherine Beecher's A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1843, revised an republished together with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe as The American Woman's Home in 1869). Beecher's "model kitchen" propagated for the first time a systematic design based on early ergonomics. The design included regular shelves on the walls, ample work space, and dedicated storage areas for various food items. Beecher even separated the functions of preparing food and cooking it altogether by moving the stove into a compartment adjacent to the kitchen.

Christine Frederick published from 1913 on a series of articles on "New Household Management" in which she analyzed the kitchen following Taylorist priciples, presented detailed time-motion studies, and derived a kitchen design from them. Her ideas were taken up in the 1920s by architects in Germany and Austria, most notably Bruno Taut, Erna Meyer, and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. A social housing project in Frankfurt (the Römerstadt of architect Ernst May) realized in 1927/28 was the breakthrough for her Frankfurt kitchen, which embodied this new notion of efficiency in the kitchen.

While this "work kitchen" and variants derived from it were a great success for tenement buildings, home owners had different demands and didn't want to be constrained by a 6.4 m² kitchen. Nevertheless, kitchen design was mostly ad-hoc following the whims of the architect. In the Source | Copyright