Episode 2 - The Frankfurt kitchen

"If I had known they'd talk about nothing else I never would have designed that damn kitchen"

In this episode we discuss the Frankfurt kitchen the first mass-produced fitted kitchen.   Designed in 1926 by the amazing and brilliant Greta Schutte-Lihotzky, we'll also discuss functionalist design, the birth of public housing and the idea of "wicked problems"

To explore further:

• Description of the Frankfurt kitchen here
• Video of "Kitchen Dance" here
• Video of Robert Rotifer's song "The Frankfurt Kitchen" here
• Instructional film from 1926 showing the Frankfurt kitchen in use here
• “The Secret History of Home Economics” by Danielle Dreilinger, here
• Article on Red Vienna's housing program here
• Article on Greta Schutte-Lihodzky here
• Article on Ernst May and the New Frankfurt program here
• Wikipedia article on Futura typeface here
• Wikipedia article on Bauhaus here
• Article on gesamtkunstverk here
• Article on Casa Batlo here
• Rittle & Webber's 1973 paper "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" here

Email feedback and suggestions to talkingmodernism@gmail.com

Photo credit Wikimedia commons Christos Vittoratos

Transcript

Welcome! To the second episode in the series, “Talking Modernism”, the podcast about the 1920s and 30s, and how our grandparents and great-grandparents changed the world. I am your host, Michael Hauptman. 

In this episode, I am going to talk about the Frankfurt kitchen, and how inFrankfurt in 1926, the remarkable Greta Schutte-Lihodzky – the right person in the right place at the right time – created the “Frankfurt kitchen:, the first mass-produced fitted kitchen, a masterpiece of modernist design.

Some, perhaps most, listeners will never have heard of the Frankfurt kitchen, so this podcast will be a wonderful revelation. But some of you may be familiar with this icon of design. How iconic? There are Frankfurt kitchens in the collections of at least 10 major museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2020 there was rather wonderful 8 minute interpretive dance piece called Kitchen Dance, and set in a Frankfurt kitchen. Of course, I’ve provided a link to the video on the podcast website. And in 2008, the Austrian/British singer Robert Rotifer wrote a song called “The Frankfurt Kitchen” dedicated to, yes you guessed it, the Frankfurt kitchen. There’s a link to that on the website too. And if you;re a fan of Rotifer’s work, heard the song, and asked yourself “That kicthen Frankfurt thing sounds interesting – I wonder if there’s a podcast that talks about it?” , well, let me extend a special welcome to you.

And what exactly was this kitchen that has inspired dance and song? It was a small, low cost kitchen that was installed in approximately 12,000 homes built by the Frankfurt Municipal Building authority in the 4 years between 1926 and 1930. The kitchen was available in 3 sizes, but the smallest was by far the most common version. And small it was, and narrow, measuring 1.9 by 3.4 metres, that’s 6.2 by 11.2 feet, barely 6 square metres. The entrance was at the bottom of the rectangular plan, opposite a window. On the left was a stove, typically gas, sometimes electric, with another sliding door connected the kitchen to the living/dining room. On the right wall was a bank of cabinets and a sink, in front of the window a workbench.. This small kitchen revolutionised kitchen design and was the inspiration for features that are a standard in the kitchens we have in our homes today.

The issue of good kitchen design was the focus of much attention at the start of the modernist period. In the 1800s, there existed two sorts of kitchens. A small proportion of affluent houses had a space, far away at the back of the house , large enough to hold the sometimes multitude of servants who prepared the meals. But for most people, especially in the crowded cities that sprung up in the industrial revolution, their dwellings didn’t have a separate kitchen at all. Instead, meals were prepared in the main living room, which if they were lucky had a sink. Certainly there were no fitted cupboards. Indeed the phrase “everything but the kitchen sink”, which dates from the 1900s, reflects the fact that the only immovable fixtures in a home at the time were the sink, the stove and the doorhandles.

Imagine the tedious effort in preparing a meal in such a space! No bench space, no drying racks, storage a jumble of mismatched cupboards and cabinets, perhaps with some hanging shelves that your husband had knocked up. From the mid 1800s in particular, people began to seriously consider the reform of kitchen design, to find a new, better conception of the kitchen, and this was arose out of two aspects of modernism: and they were: 

Scientific management and the changing status of women.

What was scientific management? Scientific management was one of the first systematic attempts at analysing an industrial process to make that process more efficient. The key element of scientific management were what was called time-and-motion studies, where a process was carefully studied and broken down into its component steps, and each step timed. Opportunities to make the process faster could thereby be indentified.

The person who did most to develop and spread Scientific Management was the American Frederick Winslow Taylor. Indeed, scientific management is often called “Taylorism”. Initially a clerk at a, steel plant, then foreman, later qualifiying as an engineer, Taylor refined his ideas in the 1890s and became one of the world’s first management consultants. In 1911 he published his ideas in a very influential paper, “The Principles of Scientific Management”. Even if many of its ideas have since been discredited, Scientific Management, or Taylorism, was the genesis of the management theory that is taught in business schools today.

Scientfic management also held that it was possible to identify how much a good or service should cost if it was stripped of all inefficiencies in its production. This concept was picked up by the US government’s Supreme Court at the time. Justice Louis Brandeis, later federal Attorney General, was involved in approving price increases on regulated industries such as steelworks and the railroads. Brandies used the new field of Scientific Management to argue that rather than increase prices to maintain profits, industries should instead root out the production inefficiencies identified in the analysis and thereby reduce costs to maintain . The publicity of these court battles between the Interstate Commerce Commission and industry helped boost and spread the new gospel of Scientific Management. 

Whilst Fredrick Taylor was seeking to reduce waste and inefficiency in business, another group of innovators was looking to do something similar with housework, especially kitchen work, under what was known in the states as “domestic science” or “home economics”. One of the earlier texts on home economics, “A Treatise on Domestic Economy” was published in 1843 by the pioneering feminist Catherine Beecher. Catherine came from a famous abolitionist family and was sister to Harrier Beecher Stowe, who wrote the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 

“A Treatise on Domestic Economy” contained several plans for ideal kitchen layout, and considered for the first time the ergonomics of the kitchen, with designs addressing aspects such as lighting, ample work space, regular shelving, dedicated storage for various food items, and separate areas for food preparation and actual cooking. Catherine Beecher was a strong advocate for women’s’ education, and in 1823 opened with her sister Harriet a college for women, the Hartford Female Seminary. In those days a women’s career prospects were largely limited to the home, and Catherine’s aim in making cooking and housekeeping more efficient was to make practical improvements the lives of the largest possible number of women. 

Indeed as opportunities for women slowly began to widen, the field of domestic science attracted the attention of many talented women. And that was because they were denied opportunities to work in pretty well any other field of science. In the US, the Morill Act of 1862 encouraged states to open up college education to women. And where could these newly educated women work? The case of the chemist Ellen Swallow Richards was typical. Richards was the first female student accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, in 1870, and later she became its first female instructor. Lacking opportunities to work in any other field, she established a domestic science laboratory for research into sanitation and nutrition, fields which at the time were seen as suitably feminine. 

The work of these pioneering women in domestic science is largely forgotten today, but the innovations they introduced have become part of everyday life: food groups, the definition of the poverty level, clothes labeling and consumer protection movements., all these came from the domestic science movement There is an excellent book on the subject published just this year, “The Secret History of Home Economics” by Danielle Dreilinger, and I’ve included a link on the podcast’s website.

The two “sciences” of Domestics Science and Scientific management came together in America at the beginning of the 1900s. Domestic Science was very active at the turn of the twentieth century, with the first national conference held in 1899 at Lake Placid. At the same time there was huge interest in scientific management, with what some dubbed an “efficiency craze” from 1910 to 1920. Two innovators in particular applied scientific management methods to domestic science, especially the use of time-and-motion studie, and user interviews, to identify areas for improvement.

The first was Lillian Gibreth. She was married to a very influential scientific management specialist called Frank Glibreth, and the two had a consulting business together. She also had a family of 11 children, and she applied the principles of time-and-motion efficiency to pretty well every aspect of her household , as depicted in a rather fun movie from 1950 based on her biography called “Cheaper by the Dozen”, with Myrna Loy taking the role of  Lillian Gilbreth. 

This carefully planned efficiency allowed her to juggle domestic life and her professional work, especially after her husband died quite young. With her husband’s death her professional work focused more and more on kitchen design for gas and electricity companies. In particular Gilbreth inventing the concept of the “work triangle”, still a staple of domestic kitchen design today, where the fridge, stove and sink are all arranged within 1.2 and 2.7 metres of each other. She is also credited with inventing wall light switches, the pedal bin, and shelves on the inside of refrigerator doors.

A contemporary of Lillian Gilbreth and fellow domestic scientist was Christine Fredrick. She was introduced to Scientific Management by her husband, a New York advertising executive who was fascinated by this new discipline. Christine Campbell was similarly smitten and in 1912 established a test kitchen at their home, grandly titled the “Applecroft Home Experiment Station”, where she claimed to have tested over 18 hundred different tools and appliances. We can thank Campbell for simple innovations such as constant height work benches. 

In 1918 she published a book called “The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management”. It was a very influential book, and was translated into German in 1921, and was eventually read by Greta Schutte-Lihotzky. Our hero has appeared on the scene, and the stage was now set for the creation of the Frankfurt Kitchen

Greta Schutte-Lihotzky, Red Vienna and the post-war housing crisis

Greta Shutte-Lihotzky was one of the larger-than-life characters that the modernist period seemed to generate in great numbers . Born Maragete Lihotzky in vienny in 1897, she was a child of the new century and a poster child for modernism, embodying several of its themes during her long life. 

In 1916 she was fortunate to be one of the first woman to study architecture at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, nowadays known as the University of Applied Arts. This was partly due to the endorsement of a friend of her mother, the famous artist Gustav Klimt. 

She was also a firmly committed communist. Whilst at university Schutte-Lihotzky developed a strong social conscious, especially after one of her professors encouraged her to spend time investigating the housing problems of the city’s working class. This developed into a lifelong commitment to communism that survived even the fall of the Berlin Wall. Shetravelled to the Soviet Union in the 1930 as part of a “work brigade” of German architects led by Ernst May, who’ll we’ll hear more about shortly. And she stayed on even after her work brigade colleagues became disillusioned with the reality of life under Stalin and Soviet Communism and returned to Germany. Indeed she was such an ardent communist that late in 1940 she left the safety of Turkey where she was living, to join in a communist spy ring in wartime nazi Vienna. Unfortunately she was soon caught. Two of her co-conspiriters were executed and she spent the remainder of the war in a Nazi prison. She stayed in Austria after the war, but as an avowed communist, work opportunities there were limited so she tended to work in the communist sphere, in places like China, Cuba and Vietnam.

She lived to almost 103, fittingly dying in the year 2000 at the end of the twentieth century. She lived long enough for her achievements to be re-appraised and acknowledged in her home country , and in 1992 was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Arts and Science, plus another award acknowledging her brave work for the resistance. Spritely to the end, at the age of 97 she was part of an action to sue controversial right-wing Austrian politician Jorg Haider for describing concentration camps as “punishment camps”, implying that the inmates had done something wrong.

But all this lay in the future. In 1921 she graduated from university, having already demonstrated her ability by winning a number of prizes for her designs for public housing. And Vienna in the early 1920s was a wonderful place for a brilliant young architect with a social conscience to learn their craft. Similar to Germany, Austria suffered severe disruption after WW1, the economy in tatters and the city of Vienna swollen to bursting with ex-soliders and displaced people from the former Austro-Hungarian empire. 

Living today in our relatively affluent times , its easy to forget how bad were living standards for the majority of people back in the day. Here is an extract from a survey of English housing completed in 1933:

 'At one-and-a-half to a room Kitchens counting as rooms - there are six people in this house, divided for sleeping purposes thus : main bedroom, husband, wife and child; second bedroom, two girls ; parlour, son.

Accommodation which necessitates five people sleeping in two small bedrooms, and one person in the parlour, is by every civilized standard odious.

Nevertheless, today in England it is a standard of perfection. Of the eleven and-a-half million people dealt with in our survey, one in four live in conditions of overcrowding, besides which this is luxury.

If one adds the presence of vermin, the bug, the beetle, the rat - the all pervasive slum smell, and the absence - in thousands of cases of bathrooms and W.C.s and even of water taps, one arrives at some idea of the living conditions of a quarter of the population as dealt with here.' 

When this was written, Britain had, on average, one of the highest standards of living in the world. You can imagine what the situation must have been like in a city like Vienna. 

With tenements crammed and tens of thousands of people living in the city’s parks, diseases like tuberculosis and the Spanish Flu were rife. It became imperative to provide more housing, but with the economy on its knees – Austria had hyperinflation until 1924 – private investment was at a standstill. So the Viennese city government stepped into the breach and created a huge program of building public housing, the first of its kind in the world. In the nine years between 1925 and 1934, the city built more than 60 thousand apartments as well as many cottages, providing housing for 200 thousand people.

Vienna at this time has a socialist government, the Social Democrat Workers Party of Austria (SDAP). So socialist in fact, Vienna was known as Red Vienna. The SDAP ruled until a fascist national government banned them in 1933. Being socialist they wanted to ensure the new buildings provided the best possible accommodation for their predominantly working class tenants. But how could good accommodation be provided cheaply? Modernist architecture claimed to have the answer. And Vienna in the 1920s was home to some of the leading lights of the modernist architecture movement, such as Adolf Loos, who the city chose to head its housing office, or Settlement Office as it was called. Loos hired a number of forward-thinking architects into the Settlement Office, including the newly graduated Greta Lihodzky. 

Functionalist architecture , and architecture as a“total work of art”

Now, what exactly do I mean by “modernist architecture”? And why was it so suited to Vienna’s Socialist-sponsored public housing program? “Modernist architecture” is a very nebulous phrase, but in this context it refers to the new type of architecture often called functionism, or in German referred to as Neue Sachlichkeit, or “New Objectivity”, or even ”New sobriety”. Functionalism basically held that a building should be considered like a machine, and like a machine should be designed to best fulfil the requirements of the building’s inhabitants. The emphasis was on satisfying requirements, rather than covering the facade with florid decoration, or making allegorical allusions to previous civilizations like ancient Rome or medieval Europe. And this marked a sharp break with Western decorative architectural traditions of the previous 300 odd years. This concept of functionalism united several different strands of architecture. Adolf Loos, who we met earlier as Shutte-Lihotzky’s boss at Vienna’s Settlement Office, wrote a seminal essay in 1913 titled “Ornament is a Crime”, which pretty well summed up functionalism in the title. The legendary Swiss archictect Le Courbusier expressed similar ideas in his 1923 book “Towards a New Archietcture”. 

And perhaps the best known expression of functionalism came from the Bauhaus school. The Bauhaus school was a German design school that was founded in the aftermath of WW1 in 1919, and operated until closed by the Nazis in 1933. Despite only operating for 14 years, it managed to establish such a strong brand around the world that for many people Bauhaus is synonymous with modernist design. 

The Bauhaus operated under 3 different directors, all strong characters, and the methods and principles of the school changed with each new director. But certain principles remained throughout. One was a desire to provide well designed, aesthetically pleasing buildings and products to the largest number of people by mass production. So the school placed at least as much emphasis on craft as on art, and established strong relationships with industry, especially in its later years as the German economy recovered from WW1. Here is how Mies van de Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus, described the aims of the school. 

“Look at your writing table, this shabby writing table. Do you like it? I would throw it out the window. (van de Rohe rarely minced his words)

That is what we at the Bauhaus want to do. We want to have good objects so that we do not have to throw them out of the window.”

Architecture, especially housing design, was an obsession for the Bauhaus even though it didn’t actually construct that many buildings in its 14 years of operation. It was much more prolific in industrial design, as well as textiles, photography and font design. Good architcture was seen to have the power to solve much of the social problems facing the western world, especially the poverty and inequalities caused by early stage capitalism and the industrial revolution. This view of architecture as a key tool of social reform was common throughout the modernist world. Courbusier in his 1923 book had a whole chapter titled “Architcture or Revolution” where he wrote ‘It is the question of building which lies at the root of the social unrest of today; architecture or revolution.’ Greta Schutte-Lihotzky herself wrote of her time studying the Viennese slums as a student: ““I didn’t yet know the great Heinrich Zille quote, ‘You can kill a person with an apartment just as well as with an axe,’ but I felt it,” 

The eglatarian aspects of Functionalist architecture made it particularly popular with socialist leftist governments like Vienna’s SDAP. A fountain pen designed on Functionalist principles would suit a rich capitalist and a worker alike. And as functional design emphasised industrial production rather than hand crafting, the products would be affordable by all.

As well as social objectives, for the Bauhaus architecture also held a central place for artistic reasons. They held that architecture satisfied the concept of “Gesamtkunstwerk” a German word that very loosely translates as “total work of art”. And that means a work of art that brings together all other artforms in a transcenental whole that is much more than the sum of its parts. Brought into being by a brilliant hero creator, who combines intuition, an inspired personal vision, with practical capabilities and abilities across many art forms so they can make their vision a reality. 

In the late 1800s the operas of Richard Wagner, such as his famous Ring Cycle, were seen to embody the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. But at the turn of the century it was more archicture that was seen to be the new Gesamtkunstwerk. The Art Nouveau movement, or the Jugenstil or Succession style as German-speakers called it, had buildings where the architect designed not just the building, but the furniture, the drapery, the door handles and even the crockery and cutlery. My favourite example of this, indeed probably my favourite house in the world, is Gaudi’s hallucinatory Casa Batlo, built in Barcelona in 1904. And a tip for if you’re visiting Barcelona, the queues for the Cas Batlo are much shorter than for his more famous Basílica de la Sagrada Família. Modernism in general, and Bauhaus in particular, continued to place architecture at the pinnacle of the arts.

The Frankfurt kitchen

Our story now shifts from Vienna to Frankfurt. Like Vienna, Frankfurt had a post-WW1 housing crisis, and like Vienna, it had a socialist city government under mayor Ludwig Landmann and the German Democratic Party. And also like Vienna, it instituted a social housing program for the city’s poor, this time under modernist architect and Frankfurt native Ernst May. May’s program was callled Neues Frankfurt or New Frankfurt, which gives a hint of how much it embraced modernist functional design. Indeed, the program developed its own functionalist sans-serif font – Futura, still popular today – for its posters, magazines and newsletters. In the 5 years between 1925 and 1930 the New Frankfurt project built 12 thousand apartments and terrace houses in what has been called "one of the most remarkable city planning experiments in the twentieth century". 

The apartments of the New Frankfurt project were low rise, with plenty of space for parks and gardens, and communal amenities like laundries and childcare. Construction costs were kept low by use of prefabricated building elements made from reinforced concrete. And each of the 12 thousand units were to have the world’s first mass produced fitted kitchen, bringing ground-breaking features to tenants at an affordable price. And to design what would become known as the Frankfurt kitchen, Ernst May reached out to the brilliant young Grete Lihotzky, by now aged 29, who was making a name for herself in rational house design in Vienna.

Schutte-Lihotzky’goal was to liberate women, by creating as efficient a kitchen as possible, so that wives, who were increasingly beginning to juggle work and home, could spend as little time in the kitchen as possible. She wrote in her memoirs: “women’s struggle for economic independence and personal development meant that the rationalization of housework was an absolute necessity.” She employed the scientific design techniques she had read about in Christine Campbell’s book “he New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management”. She conducted user interviews with housewives clubs, known as “Hausfrauenvereine” and she conducted time-and-motion studies of domestic cooking. She worked with industry to ensure the design was cheap to manufacture. Appartently she took inspiration from the small but efficient kitchens in railways dining cars, and also the fitted kitchen in a Bauhaus exhibition house from 1923.

The resulting design was a radical reimagining of the traditional working class kitchen. Rather than being part of the living room, it was moved into its own small space, carefuly laid out for optimum efficiency. “She found the shortest route from larder, to worktop, to cupboard, to cutlery drawer, to worktop, to bin”, as Robert Rotifer sings in his tribute song.

She carefully designed pretty well every aspect of the kitchen, drawing on some of her experiences in the Vienna Settlement Office. There was a bank of 18 narrow removable aluminium drawers with pouring spouts, for dry ingredients like flour and sugar. These were built by machinery that in WW1 had made ammunition boxes. It had an electric light on a track so it could be moved to where it was needed. It had a work stool on castors. The cutting bench was beech as it resisted staining and knife marks. The carcasses of the cupboards were steel for ease of manufactore, and the wooden cupboard doors were painted blue in the belief that blue repelled files. It had tiled spashback. Rather than an expensive refridgerator, a low-level cupboard was vented from the outside to keep food cool. The ironing board was hinged to the wall and could be lowered to use. There was a draining rack over the sink. Even the disposal of rubbish was considered: the waste-bin was in its own cupboard that could be emptied from outside the kitchen in the hall.

The Frankfurt kitchen had influence far beyond Ernst May’s building project. The idea of a carefully designed fitted kitchen quickly took hold throughout the western world. And the fact that it had been designed by a female architect caught th epublic imagination and generated a lot of publicity for the new kitchen. Ironically, the Frankfut kitchen concept returned to Germany after WW2 but  it was now known as the Swedish kitchen. And no doubt you made your breakfast this morning in a fitted kitchen with integrated benchtops, features and layout inspired by Schutte=Lihotzky’s pioneering design. 

The Frankfurt kitchen was by no means perfect. Users complained that the food containers were too low, within reach of grabby toddlers. And they also complained that the tiny kitchen only had room for one, with not even space enough for a child to lend a helping hand. But overall it was a huge step forward compared to pervious working class kitchens, and a triumph of functional design. 

Design as a solution to a problem

The Frankfurt kitchen was largely the fruit of the unique drive and genius of Greta Schutte-Lihotzky, but it was also a product of the revolution in design that was functionalism. Codified by schools like the Bauhaus, many of its principles have been carried on to this day. Concepts like multi-disciplinanry approaches to design, the social aim to use design to improve the world, the favouring of radical new solutions and new technologies, and the focus on practical experimentation, are all staples of design theory today as practcied by leading design studios like ideo and leading design schools like Berkley’s D-school , which both happen to be based in California.

What has changed though is the nature of problems that designers are looking to solve. In the 1920s, Vienna and Frankfurt were faced with a problem of scarcity, trying to solve a severe housing shortage with very limited funds. Most of the apartments that Ernst May built for the neues Frankfurt program were what was termed “Existenzminimum”, or subsistence, dwellings, 36 square meters or even sometimes 30 square metres, and these had to house up to a family of four. The design question was to how to provide the maximum possible amenities for the lowest possible cost in the smallest amount of space, And whatever shortcomings the Existenzminimum apartments or the Frankfurt kitchen had, they were an undoubted improvement on the slum housing they replaced. 

The world today is immeasurably more wealthy than in the 1920s and 30s. Many, perhaps most of the design questions today are no longer problems of scarcity, but rater problems of saity, or abundace.: ow to provide innovation to stimulate demand in saturated consumer markets. What new features can be crammed into an iPhone? How can a website be best laid out to result in a sale? Similarly, with affluence and the maturing of industry of industrialisation, issues of efficiency aren’t as pressing, hence the decline in fields like scientific management .

As well as being wealthier, the world has also become more cynical, or at least less naive, than it was in the 1920s and 30s. In those heady days, impressed by innovations like the Frankfurt Kitchen,there was the widesperead belief that clever designers, architects and other professionals, given enough resources, would be able to harness the steady stream of scientific and technological breakthroughs in order to solve any and all of society’s problems, to create the world of tomorrow as an ultimate utopia. And the related concept Gesamtkunstwerk , the total work of art, suggested that the total design of society could have an artistic dimension as well – achieving both spiritual and material perfection. 

By the end of the 1960s unfortuantely that promise had been proved to be an illusion, especially in the United States, where despite huge wealth and talent, and sustained social investment in the form of President Lydon Joshnson’s War in Poverty society seemed further away from perfection than ever, with poverty, drugs, and the unpopular war in Vietnam just some of the issues consuming American society. Why had the modernist program failed? 

In 1973, two professors from University of California Berkley, Horst Ritten and Melvin Webber published a paper that offered an answer; Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. In their paper they put forward the concept of “wicked problems”, which basically said some of the most pressing problems facing society cannot be easily defined or formulated, certainly not in a way that allows a simple solution to be found. They offered “poverty” as an example of a wicked problem. What causes poverty? Is it a problem at the overall economy? Is it a problem with skills training? Is it a problem with incentives to work? The list goes on. Unable to identify the root cause, it is difficult to begin to design an effective solution.

And the issue of problem formulation was only one the challenges of a “wicked” problem. The paper lists 10. Here’s another: “Solutions to wicked problems are not binary, true or false, solved or unsolved, but rather, did the solution make the problem better or worse? “. And another: “Every wicked problem can be considered part another problem”. 

And what’s more, they noted that wicked problems become more common as societies mature and become more fragmented, and different points of view abound. 

The concept of the wicked problem is central to design today. Minimalist rather than maximalist, contemporary design tries to find a series of simple modest solutions to wicked problems, each new solution building incrementally on the success of the last. 

Global warming has been described as a wicked problem “par excellence”, and the world’s efforts to drive a solution through a program of incremental agreements at the annual COP conferences is perhaps an example of how we design a solution to such problems today . In the case of global warming, let’s hope for all our sakes it proves successful.

But let’s have Great Schutte-Lihotzky have the last word on the Frankfurt kitchen. When interviewed on her 100th birthday she said:

"You'll be surprised that, before I conceived the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926, I never cooked myself. At home in Vienna my mother cooked, in Frankfurt I went to the Wirthaus [restaurant-pub]. I designed the kitchen as an architect, not as a housewife

and finally:

“If I had known that people would talk about nothing else, I would have never designed that damn kitchen!”

And so we come to the end of our second episode, I hope you found it interesting. If you want to find our more about Greta Schutte-Lihotdzky, the Frankfurt kitchen or anything else I’ve discussed in this episode, please visit the podcast website where you’ll find a whole bunch of links. And join us next time when I’ll be talking about the ballet “The Rites of Spring”, World War One, and its impact on the modern age. I look forward to speaking to you then.

(c) 2021 Michael Hauptman