Arts & Culture
Machines for living
Published 10 April 2006
The modernists are known for grand architectural visions, but they were just as concerned with making daily life more efficient. Sebastian Harcombe on the designers who created a brighter domestic future
Very cold, Stuttgart. In winter at least. Standing on the doorstep of a house that looks like a conglomeration of sections from a truncated helter-skelter and glistens in the frost like an architect's birthday cake, I am feeling distinctly chilled. Inside, however, things couldn't be cosier. An entire wall of glass magnifies the dim winter light into extravagant sunshine. It swirls around the sinuous sitting room where my hostess is extolling the virtues of her suntrap home - its low heating bills, the uplifting ambience . . .
Such words would have been music to the ears of its architect, Hans Scharoun, whose 1927 building was typical of the burgeoning modernist movement. Modernism's exponents hoped, quite literally, to create a brighter future for succeeding generations of home dwellers. Examples of this "new architecture" had been springing up all over Europe since the early 1920s, when, in the pursuit of beauty through efficiency, architects started to replace the usual building ma- terials of wood, brick and stone with steel, concrete and large expanses of glass. As well as responding directly to the chronic housing shortages that followed the First World War, the modernists were also consciously echoing the revolutionary aspirations of international socialism. Through their unadorned, utilitarian dwellings, they were attempting to purge architecture of its bourgeois past; their utopian belief was that design and art had the power to transform society.
The Scharoun house was one of 33 buildings on the Weissen-hofsiedlung, a showpiece housing estate built as part of "Die Wohnung" ("The Dwelling"), an enormous exposition of modern living that took place in Stuttgart in the summer of 1927. The 17 illustrious architects whose work Die Wohnung showcased included the three godfathers of modernism: Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school. More than 500,000 people visited the exhibition that summer, but the Weissenhof fell into disrepair after Hitler came to power. Modernism was unpopular with the Nazis - not just because of its connections with the political left but because its abstraction was considered degenerate. A contemporary cartoon satirised the whitewashed, flat-roofed, cube-like Weissenhof houses as "un-German" and inhabited by people in Arab dress, leading camels through their concrete byways. The houses were half destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War, and it was not until 1958 that serious reconstruction began.
"Die Wohnung" wasn't exclusively about architecture, however. A substantial section of the exposition was devoted to radical developments in the design of household furnishings and objects. The designers and architects advocated a mass "chuck-out-the-chintz" initiative for the modernist home: ornamentation and knick-knacks were banished; electric heaters replaced the hearth; familiar furniture was eclipsed by built-in fitments and reconceived objects such as dinner trolleys and tubular chairs - practical and efficient components appropriate for the new "machines for living". In the wake of the tuberculosis and influenza epidemics of the first quarter of the 20th century, there was a preoccupation across Europe with health, fitness and development of the body. Weissenhof and similar estates had special terraces where residents were encouraged to sun-worship and sleep in the open air. Furnishings for the open-plan interiors were developed to be dust-repellent, hygienic and easy to clean.
Perhaps the piece of social engineering that best sums up the philosophy of this brave new domestic world was the ground-breaking Frankfurter Küche, the world's first mass-produced fitted kitchen. The Frankfurt Kitchen was designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the Austrian Communist architect and member of the "May Brigade", a crack team of designers composed by the visionary city planner Ernst May to create a series of progressive housing estates in Frankfurt between 1925 and 1930.
Schütte-Lihotzky hoped to transform women's lot by making kitchens more efficient. Taking railway buffet cars as her inspiration, she used a stopwatch and time-and-motion studies to ana-lyse kitchen manoeuvres. The "housewife's laboratory" was born. Its components included continuous units, smooth surfaces, an ironing board hinged to the wall, a low-level cooling cupboard ventilated from the outside, pouring spouts for food staples, a movable ceiling lamp and a built-in bin that could be emptied from an adjacent hallway. Cheap to build and easy to clean, more than 10,000 such ensembles were built, and they became the prototype for the fitted kitchens of the future. In 1998, aged 101, Schütte-Lihotzky was still striving to improve conditions for working women, overseeing the construction of a unique housing estate in Vienna - designed for women, by women.
The Frankfurt Kitchens might well have vanished into the skips of history were it not for the determination and dedication of another woman, Astrid Debus-Steinberg, whom I met in a cold and cavernous grotto of a warehouse in Stuttgart. A neat, elderly lady dressed in a pink beret, she told me of her excitement at "rescuing" her first Frankfurter Küche in 1989. Ever since, she and her artist daughter Martina have continued to gather examples, amassing a substantial collection. According to Debus-Steinberg, the Frankfurt Kitchen outlines, in microcosm, the philosophies and dreams of the modernists: "A kitchen is a room that everybody knows and it's very easy to explain the concept of modernism through its familiar components," she explains. "It clearly expresses the desire to achieve rationality and functionality in design - to assist ordinary people in their daily lives. The samples also give an impression of the past in a very immediate, non-intellectual way." Tarnished by grease, ingrained with grime, the kitchen graveyard that surrounds us certainly does this - emitting a sordid, shabby, pitiful energy that is an eloquent reminder of years of forgotten toil.
One of Debus-Steinberg's kitchens has been transported to London for the Victoria and Albert Museum's exhibition "Modernism: designing a new future". It will sit among a plethora of artefacts - from sculpture, paintings, photographs and furni- ture to swimsuits, teacups, X-ray machines and cars - assembled by the curator Christopher Wilk. "There's never been a show remotely like this in Britain, a gathering together of such a wide variety of modernist items," he says.
Our world was fundamentally changed by modernism. It was the main point of reference for art, design and architecture in the 20th century. Wilk hopes that, at a time when we are confronted daily by the modernists' stylish progeny - from iPods and sunbeds to Ikea and Pizza Express - the presence in the V&A exhibition of the Frankfurt Kitchen will remind audiences of modernism's political roots. So will the displays of the Weissenhof and various May estates. "In other exhibitions on this subject in the past, the politics were de-emphasised," Wilk says, "and the social ethos of modernism was left far behind - which is just plain wrong."
In Römerstadt, one of the Ernst May estates, an original Frankfurt Kitchen is still in use today. Its owner learned to cook in it as a child and tells me that it is now subject to a preservation order. Misreading her weariness, I suggested she might donate it to Frau Debus-Steinberg's collection and buy herself a new one. "Oh no, I could never part with it!" she replied, horror-struck. "Besides, they don't make them like they used to."
"Modernism: designing a new future (1914-1939)" is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London SW7, until 23 July. For tickets and further details log on to www.vam.ac.uk
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