The Kitchen

Definition

The kitchen is the domestic room for preparing (and, in many periods and plans, cooking and even eating) food — the workspace of the house and, in this wiki, the second room-type page. Across the sources it has four registers. (1) The planned workspace: in Beecher & Stowe's domestic-science program the kitchen is the technical core of a designed household economy — "'scientific' kitchen planning to accommodate changes in food preparation and management" (editors, p. 43) — with storage, workflow and labor-economy specified as design problems (see domestic-economy). (2) The mechanized room: the industrial descendant, where the kitchen's appliances and built-ins are the machine-for-living's most literal fittings (the Lustron's "built-in kitchen exhaust" and undercounter all-in-one dishwasher/clothes washer) — and where the twentieth century's central proposal, the compact labor-saving kitchen (of which the Frankfurt kitchen is the canonical case), rationalized the cook's movements (see machine-for-living, mechanization). (3) The modernist form and its audit: Lawrence's chapter — via the editors' headnote — names the kitchen (with the dining room) as modernism's domestic test case: "although modernism brought aesthetic resolution to the kitchen and dining room, it failed to address a need for these rooms adapting to demographic shifts in family constitution and population" (p. 184) — aesthetic closure purchased at the price of temporal adaptability. (4) The dissolving and portable boundary: the Swedish "all-in-one room" eliminated "the kitchen/living room boundary" in 1955; the community kitchen of the taste-full museum moves the room's social function ("Much as the kitchen is the social center of the home, the kitchen is also the social center of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum") into the institution; cooperative-housekeeping proposals (the Beechers' common laundry, the cooperative-kitchen movement of 1869) common its labor. The kitchen is thus the room where the house's labor, machinery, gender and adaptation converge — the planned interior's hardest case.

A fifth register — the consumption-directing room — comes from Lupton & Miller: "The kitchen became a site not only for preparing food but for directing household consumption at large; the kitchen door is the chief entryway for purchased goods, and the main exit point for vegetable parings, empty packages, outmoded appliances and other discarded products" (1992/2006, p. 204). In this register the kitchen is the household's logistics hub of the consumer economy — goods in, waste out — and its industrialized form is the continuous kitchen: "the slender legs supporting individual units were absorbed into monolithic, built-in slabs which linked mechanical devices to work and storage cabinets"; the kitchen "also reflected the production ideal of the modern factory, whose linear sequence of work stations enabled an unbroken flow of activity. This norm, which we call the continuous kitchen, was established by the end of the 1930s and still remains powerful today" (pp. 205–206). The continuous kitchen is register (2)'s mechanization carried to plan-form: the factory's linear flow as the kitchen's own layout, "a miniaturized, open plan factory" (p. 209) — one of the "twin temples to the processes of elimination" (see process-of-elimination).

A sixth register — the geopolitical arena — comes from Larson: the kitchen as the room in which the Cold War's economic systems were staged and contested. The 1959 "kitchen debate" — "Very little is ever mentioned of the other rooms of 'Splitnik'; it is the kitchen that is dissected" — was "the climax of interior architecture's role in the Cold War," and the kitchen was "perhaps, the exact right place to exchange ideas on the interiorities of two rivaling political and economic ways of living and governing" given the era's food politics (see kitchen-debate, cold-war). The register's lineage: the compact labor-saving kitchen the century had produced ("American Taylorism meeting German Wohnkultur… produced such results as the Frankfurt Kitchen (1926)," frankfurt-kitchen, taylorism) became the standard both superpowers claimed, adjudicated "dishwasher to dishwasher"; and the room's pre-debate career — the Berlin exhibitions' model kitchens (propaganda) and the FCDA's civil-defense audit of housekeeping (civil-defense) — made it "the exact right place to exchange ideas on the interiorities of two rivaling political and economic ways of living and governing." In this register the kitchen is the room where an economic system was claimed to "trickle down into the dishwashers and bedrooms of an average family" — the workspace (1), machine (2), and consumption-hub (5) registers conscripted as geopolitics.

A seventh register — the resistant workshop/instrument — comes from Norman Potter (1990/2006): the kitchen as "kitchen situation," designed as an instrument and workshop rather than bought as an assembly. Potter's polemic names the room's two falsifying forces — "as much by consumer fantasy as by the commercial pressures that incidentally nourish it; but the High Street retail store is the more obvious culprit" — and the commercial alternative's origin-principle: the storage-units-with-worktops "have little to do with kitchen design: their essential uniformity reflects the production and marketing feasibilities of their commercial origin." His exemplar is the four-ounce Meta-fuel stove, "a model of clarity and intelligence" that "no product designer has yet reached near enough to design the life out of"; his programme is the kitchen designed "in the round, i.e. as seen and used in movement," with "next-to-no gadgetry: this is the opposite extreme to the highly generalised and frictionless modern kitchen in which time and labour saving comes first" — the continuous kitchen (register 5) refused in built form — and a redefinition of the efficiency register (2) itself: "The Penton kitchen is efficient to the extent that it gives pleasure, and a positive sense of location to its concerns – of being in and with them." The register's temporal thesis: "There is nothing really instant about food; although meals are pretty basic, there is process, ritual, and continuity involved, and I think this kitchen had the feel of that" — the kitchen as the room designed to carry the meal's ritual rather than to save its minutes (see everyday-life, work-leisure-distinction, mechanization). The workshop route has an economic threshold: "The more individual kitchen becomes a workshop job (but first find your workshop, and then afford it)" — see self-build.

Key Thinkers

Catharine E. Beecher & Harriet Beecher Stowe — the founding planners (1869): "scientific" kitchen planning "to accommodate changes in food preparation and management"; the kitchen-and-workside as the designed core of the household economy; the galley-inspired kitchen of the model cottage.
Roderick J. Lawrence — the modernist auditor (1987/2006): the kitchen/dining pair as the rooms modernism gave "aesthetic resolution" without "addressing… adapting to demographic shifts in family constitution and population"; the kitchen as the test of the dwelling's social responsiveness (see flexible-interior).
Deborah Schneiderman — the industrial-kitchen register (2018): the prefab kitchen's mechanical innovations (built-in exhaust, all-in-one washer) as the machine-room's factory-made form (see prefab-interior).
Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the editors who frame Lawrence's kitchen/dining emphasis, making the two rooms the reader's case for the dwelling's adaptation problem.
Ellen Lupton & J Abbott Miller — the consumption-logistics historians (1992/2006): the kitchen door as "the chief entryway for purchased goods, and the main exit point for… discarded products"; the continuous kitchen norm (fixtures over furniture, the factory's linear flow) "established by the end of the 1930s and still remains powerful today"; the kitchen as "a miniaturized, open plan factory" and temple of elimination.
Jodi Larson — the geopolitical-register historian (2018): the kitchen dissected at Splitnik as "the climax of interior architecture's role in the Cold War"; the Frankfurt Kitchen (1926) as the Taylorism/Wohnkultur product; the room as "the exact right place to exchange ideas on the interiorities of two rivaling political and economic ways of living and governing" (see kitchen-debate).
Norman Potter — the resistant designer (1990/2006): the kitchen as "situation" against the High Street commercial unit ("Such assemblies have little to do with kitchen design: their essential uniformity reflects the production and marketing feasibilities of their commercial origin"); the four-ounce Meta-fuel stove as exemplar; "next-to-no gadgetry… the opposite extreme to the highly generalised and frictionless modern kitchen in which time and labour saving comes first"; efficiency re-founded — "efficient to the extent that it gives pleasure"; and the Penton kitchen as the built case (see self-build, simplicity).

The Dining Room — the kitchen's paired room: eating against preparing; Eastlake's formal downstairs room and the Beechers' workside are the two poles of the house's food program; Lawrence's editors name the pair together as modernism's domestic test case.
Domestic Economy — the kitchen's founding design science: "the close packing of conveniences" and scientific planning as the first systematic claim that the interior's plan is an instrument for rationalizing everyday labor.
Machine for Living — the kitchen's mechanization register: the room as the machine-house's functional core, its appliances and built-ins the apparatus's working parts.
Flexible Interior — the audit's remedy: the need the modern kitchen failed to meet — adaptation "to demographic shifts in family constitution and population" — is the flexible interior's brief.
Cooperative Housekeeping — the collectivist alternative: the kitchen's labor commoned across households; the movement Peirce launched in 1869 (cooperative kitchens) against the mechanized private kitchen's victory.
Gender and the Interior — the kitchen's laboring occupant: the room's history is the history of whose work it organizes; domestic-economy's female expertise and the unpaid houseworker's day both run through this plan.
Domestic Interior — the room-type within the house-wide system; the kitchen as the domestic interior's functional pole against the parlour's display pole.
Process of Elimination — the kitchen's master operation: economic elimination (purchase → discard) running through the room's door; the kitchen as one of the two "twin temples to the processes of elimination."
Consumerism — the room's economic system: "directing household consumption at large"; packaging and the food brand as the kitchen's own supply chain history.
Streamlining — the kitchen's shell-form: "the shells of modern kitchen cabinetry and appliances… enclose the tools and materials of the kitchen behind a seamless surface" — the packaging model scaled to the room.
Kitchen Debate — the geopolitical arena register: the 1959 exchange in Splitnik's bright yellow kitchen as the room-type's superpower showdown.
Frankfurt Kitchen — register (2)'s canonical case (1926): the compact labor-saving kitchen as the century's central proposal and the Cold War's inherited standard.
Taylorism — the rationalization method: the cook's timed movements as design doctrine ("American Taylorism meeting German Wohnkultur"); the doctrine Potter's "next-to-no gadgetry" kitchen names and refuses.
Cold War — the theme frame: the kitchen as the arena of the systems' competition and the housewife its battlefield.
Self-Build — register (7)'s production route: "the more individual kitchen becomes a workshop job (but first find your workshop, and then afford it)"; workshop-built with unit-prefabrication within a tight budget.
Work/Leisure Distinction — the register's temporal stake: the labour-saving kitchen promises leisure from preparing; Potter values the preparing itself ("process, ritual, and continuity") — the kitchen as the room where the labour-saving promise meets the meal's valued practice.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — the modernist audit and the temporal register: "modernism brought aesthetic resolution to the kitchen and dining room, it failed to address a need for these rooms adapting to demographic shifts in family constitution and population" (editors, p. 184); rooms for "eating and preparing food in Australian and English households" as the chapter's emphasis (p. 184); the dwelling's responsiveness to social influence as the condition the kitchen's design must serve.
A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the founding specification: "'scientific' kitchen planning to accommodate changes in food preparation and management" (editors, p. 43); the kitchen-and-workside of the model cottage; the plan as labor-saving apparatus ("the close packing of conveniences," p. 44).
Inside the prefab house (Schneiderman 2018) — the industrial register: the Lustron's "built-in kitchen exhaust" and "undercounter all-in-one dishwasher/clothes washer" ("although apparently neither functioned especially well"); the kitchen's fittings manufactured into the steel house; the dinette/kitchen china-cabinet wall assemblage.
Architecture for Everyday Life (Swedish Association of Architects 2010) — the boundary dissolution: the "all-in-one room" (1955) "eliminated the kitchen/living room boundary simultaneously with the elimination of domestic servants" — the kitchen's social opening as a welfare-state program.
Touch, Taste, Smell (Brown 2018) — the institutional extension: "Much as the kitchen is the social center of the home, the kitchen is also the social center of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum" — the kitchen's social function transferred to the museum's community programming.
Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — the consumption-logistics and continuous-kitchen register: the kitchen door as "the chief entryway for purchased goods, and the main exit point for vegetable parings, empty packages, outmoded appliances and other discarded products" (p. 204); the hygienic modernization following the bathroom ("whose aesthetic of obsessive cleanliness resonates in the non-porous materials used for kitchen floors, walls and work surfaces in the 1910s and 20s," p. 205); the fixture-form ("the slender legs supporting individual units were absorbed into monolithic, built-in slabs which linked mechanical devices to work and storage cabinets," p. 206); the factory model ("the production ideal of the modern factory, whose linear sequence of work stations enabled an unbroken flow of activity. This norm, which we call the continuous kitchen, was established by the end of the 1930s and still remains powerful today," p. 206); the food package as the kitchen's shell-model ("the shells of modern kitchen cabinetry and appliances would later enclose the tools and materials of the kitchen behind a seamless surface," p. 206); the room's final form — "the kitchen became a miniaturized, open plan factory… twin temples to the processes of elimination" (p. 209). Where Lawrence audits the kitchen's social adaptability, Lupton & Miller historicize its economic function and industrial form (see process-of-elimination, consumerism, streamlining).
'House Beautiful': Style and Consumption in the Home (Madigan & Munro 1996/2006) — the kitchen's place in the technological history of mass housing: "Twentieth-century changes in the technologies of heating, plumbing and refrigeration have had profound effects on the physical design of mass housing: the introduction of bathrooms, the disappearance of sculleries and the advent of the fitted kitchen" (p. 221, citing Dudley's Design of Dwellings, 1944) — the fitted kitchen as one of the three built transformations (bathroom in, scullery out, kitchen fitted) that reorganized the working house; and the century's second wave, the leisure-device era, which "wrought their impact primarily on the living-room or lounge" (p. 221) — the kitchen's labour-saving era displaced by the lounge's leisure equipment, with men the target for the new devices ("a gendered division of labour in which the home still functions as a place of rest, leisure and recuperation for men, but remains a place of work for women," p. 221). The kitchen thus gains its post-war history: fitted once, then eclipsed as consumption's showcase by the room the essay's male-targeted leisure economy colonized (see work-leisure-distinction, gender-and-the-interior).
Hearts and minds and dishwashers (Larson 2018) — the geopolitical register: the kitchen as the Cold War's chosen arena. "It was, however, kitchens that dominated the show" (the American National Exhibition's RCA/Whirlpool kitchens — "labor-saving technology and push-button ease, including a floor-cleaning robot"); "Very little is ever mentioned of the other rooms of 'Splitnik'; it is the kitchen that is dissected. It is into this sunny, bright yellow kitchen that Vice President Nixon pulled Premier Khrushchev close and said, 'I want to show you this kitchen.'"; the lineage ("American Taylorism meeting German Wohnkultur… produced such results as the Frankfurt Kitchen (1926)"); the historical warrant ("when the food politics of agriculture, airlifts, and post-WWII price control of food and farm commodities were still hot topics, the kitchen was, perhaps, the exact right place to exchange ideas on the interiorities of two rivaling political and economic ways of living and governing"); and the room's adjudication standard — Khrushchev "bringing his comments back to a dishwasher-to-dishwasher comparison," the systems' results claimed to "trickle down into the dishwashers and bedrooms of an average family." Where the page's other sources historicize the kitchen's plan, labour, and economy, Larson shows the room conscripted wholesale as the stage of systems rivalry (see kitchen-debate, cold-war, frankfurt-kitchen).
The Apartment (Perec 1974/2006) — the room-type's satirical definition and the timetable's busiest room: "a kitchen is a room in which there is a cooker and a water inlet" (p. 259) — the kitchen reduced to fixture-inventory; and the nycthemeral day's densest routing (nycthemeral): "07.00 The mother gets up and goes to get breakfast in the KITCHEN"; "07.45 The father and the child have their breakfast in the KITCHEN"; "09.30 The mother fetches her shopping basket from the [kitchen]… and goes to do the shopping"; "10.45 The mother prepares lunch in the KITCHEN"; "13.30 The mother does the dishes in the KITCHEN"; "16.30 The child has his tea in the KITCHEN"; "18.30 The mother gets supper ready in the KITCHEN" (pp. 260–261) — seven slots across the day, all but one the mother's: the kitchen as the room where the gendered day is concentrated. In the open-plan renaming, "not a kitchen but a cooking-area" (p. 262) — the function surviving the wall's removal. Where the page's other sources give the kitchen its plan, machine-form, audit and geopolitics, Perec gives its definition, its schedule, and its occupant (see gender-and-the-interior, everyday-life).
The Kitchen as a Place to Be (Potter 1990/2006) — the resistant workshop/instrument register, and the only full designer counter-programme to the rationalized kitchen in the wiki: the kitchen-situation polemic ("Properly speaking, there are people and places – equally individual – and there is the 'kitchen situation' to be variously interpreted and made actual," p. 264); the High Street unit's origin-principle ("their essential uniformity reflects the production and marketing feasibilities of their commercial origin," p. 264); the four-ounce Meta-fuel exemplar ("Its weight is four ounces, its form is a model of clarity and intelligence, and no product designer has yet reached near enough to design the life out of it," p. 264); the anti-Taylorist specification ("There is next-to-no gadgetry: this is the opposite extreme to the highly generalised and frictionless modern kitchen in which time and labour saving comes first," p. 266); efficiency re-founded ("The Penton kitchen is efficient to the extent that it gives pleasure, and a positive sense of location to its concerns – of being in and with them," p. 266); cooperation built into the counter's geometry ("Help with various operations… takes place across the relevant work-surfaces rather than side-on to them," p. 266); and the temporal thesis ("There is nothing really instant about food; although meals are pretty basic, there is process, ritual, and continuity involved, and I think this kitchen had the feel of that," p. 268). Where Lupton & Miller historicize the continuous kitchen and Larson its geopolitical staging, Potter designs against both — and the kitchen's success is measured by attachment ("she was so attached to the structure that joiners were employed to dismantle the whole thing and re-erect it on an entirely different site," p. 268) (see mechanization, taylorism, self-build, everyday-life).
Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the production-housing apotheosis, the kitchen's market triumph: "Kitchens in smaller, older homes were treated as utilitarian spaces. In larger historic homes, the kitchen was totally ignored because food was prepared by servants… In new production houses, however, the kitchen is universally acknowledged to be the most important room in the home" (p. 155); the lineage — "the biggest historical influence on current kitchen design was the American country kitchen of farm homes throughout the nation… the precursor of today's 'eat-in' kitchen" evolving into the kitchen/breakfast/family great room "where in one large space households can spend most of their time" (p. 155); the island as stage — the sink/range in "a central island counter—which also functions almost like a podium on a stage from which people can communicate with others" (p. 155); the room's institutional status — "The country kitchen is very much the social and nerve center of an operating household" (p. 155), with its desk alcove, drop zone, garage adjacency and sit-com prominence ("watching almost any television sit-com, where one of the key sets is invariably the kitchen," p. 155); the return details — the walk-in pantry as the historical larder (unheated for freshness), the island's movable-table ancestor, and the socializing function ("One of the reasons island counters are popular today is because they let people socialize while they work," p. 175). Where the page's other sources give the kitchen's plan-history, labour, economy and geopolitics, Wentling gives its mass-market apotheosis — the room the industry optimizes first (see domestic-interior, everyday-life, kitchen-debate).

Open Questions

The Beechers planned the kitchen "'scientific[ally]… to accommodate changes in food preparation and management'" (1869) and Lawrence's editors charge modernism with aesthetic resolution without adaptation to "demographic shifts in family constitution and population" (1987/2006): is adaptability the kitchen's constitutive design problem — a room whose function has been permanently in technological and social transition — and has any kitchen design ever solved it rather than merely re-specified it?
What would a history of the kitchen from Beecher (1869) to the Frankfurt kitchen (1926) to the all-in-one room (1955) and the community-kitchen museum show about the room-type genre — a room defined by process (preparation) rather than by furnishing code (see dining-room's room-code question)?
The kitchen is the house's laboring room and its social center (Brown's formula): can a room be both the site of unpaid work and the home's hearth — or does each design register (workspace, machine, open plan, commoned kitchen) resolve the contradiction by displacing it?
The all-in-one room dissolved the kitchen/living boundary "simultaneously with the elimination of domestic servants" — is the open kitchen the servantless household's architecture, and does Lawrence's demographic-shift test (the family that changes around a fixed room) now fall on the open plan too?
The continuous kitchen "reflected the production ideal of the modern factory, whose linear sequence of work stations enabled an unbroken flow of activity" (Lupton & Miller, p. 206) — and Lawrence charges the modern kitchen with aesthetic resolution without demographic adaptability. Is the unbroken flow then the kitchen's own hermetic seal: a room planned as factory-line fixes the cook in its sequence as surely as the McClures' sealed building fixes its program? See machine-for-living, hermetic-seal.
The kitchen was "perhaps, the exact right place" for the systems debate because of 1950s food politics (Larson). Is the kitchen's geopolitical centrality structural — the room where domestic labor is rationalized, hence the room where systems can be compared — or contingent on that food-political moment? See kitchen-debate, taylorism.
Khrushchev adjudicated the systems "dishwasher to dishwasher" on the Frankfurt kitchen's own terms (the rationalized compact kitchen both sides claimed). Was the Cold War kitchen therefore system-neutral by design — and did the debate's "turning point" verdict rest on appliances whose Taylorized politics both sides already shared?
Perec's timetable gives the kitchen seven of the day's quarter-hour slots and assigns six of them to the mother ("The mother gets up and goes to get breakfast"; "fetches her shopping basket"; "prepares lunch"; "does the dishes"; "gets supper ready" — the child's tea the exception). Is the kitchen's centrality therefore a scheduling fact before it is a symbolic one — and does the fitted kitchen's design history (Beecher to Frankfurt to all-in-one) presuppose exactly the occupant the timetable assigns? See nycthemeral, gender-and-the-interior.
Potter names the continuous kitchen's thesis as his negative — "the highly generalised and frictionless modern kitchen in which time and labour saving comes first" — and re-founds efficiency as "efficient to the extent that it gives pleasure." Is the values-led kitchen (pleasure, identity, ritual, cooperation across the work-surfaces) a generalizable design programme, or structurally a one-off (workshop-built, "first find your workshop, and then afford it") — with Potter's own minimal exemplars (Wells Coates NW3, Le Corbusier Zürich) the only legitimate generalized form, and only "in their own terms"? See self-build, mechanization.
"The taking of food being a prime agent of precisely that [continuity]" (Potter): does the time-and-labour-saving kitchen's saved minutes measure exactly the loss of the meal's continuity-work — is labour-saving the design-form of the everyday's temporal impoverishment? And does the dismantled-and-re-erected Penton kitchen (attachment strong enough to move the structure; the V&A the considered alternative) show which design the occupant finally valued? See everyday-life, work-leisure-distinction, house-museum.

Notes

This is the wiki's second room-type page after dining-room (which first posed the room-type question); drawing-room is its counterpart. Treat domestic-interior as the hub page and the room-type pages as its annexes. The Frankfurt kitchen is now paged (frankfurt-kitchen, created from the Larson lineage); the parlour/library/boudoir room-types are not yet paged (see log).