Prefabrication experiments - 510 - Modern Industrialized and Practical Kitchens - a modular success story

 

As the practicality of gas and electricity replaced wood and coal as fuels for cooking and heating in homes, kitchens were transformed into multifunctional and cleaner areas, becoming the locus of social life. Further, these conveniences reduced spaces for wood storage, made cooking consistent and increased time for leisure. The kitchen also benefitted from advances in technology and mass-produced appliances. The Bauhaus Kitchen of Haus am Horn (1923) and The Frankfurt Kitchen (1926) designed by Grete Schütte-Lihotsky and built-into many of Ernst May's mass housing projects improved ergonomics and foreshadowed postwar comforts. 

 

In 1933 Bruynzeel Kitchens founded in the Netherlands, drawing on a longstanding experience in furniture manufacturing, reformed kitchen design with their prefabricated coffers. The modular cabinets could be juxtaposed to create various cabinet configurations, introducing early mass customization that would become the predominant business model in kitchen design. 

 

Post-World War II technological dissemination simplified hardware, made electrical appliances the norm, introduced cheaper materials and production methods, and defined what would become the mid-century modern kitchen, conceived to facilitate everything from storage to preparation. USDA (the United States Department of Agriculture) idealized these facilities and packed them into a 1949 film: The Step Saving Kitchen. Linked below the film pitched to middle-class homemakers, spawned fantasies about the latest design features, commodifying the kitchen as home’s powerful engine requiring spinning shelves, hide-away compartments, and integrated garbage disposals.

 

Democratization initiated in the 1920s laboratory work-kitchen and promotion of consumerism like the 1949 film still underline most kitchen designs. In the 1980s, Ikea took Bruynzeel’s model and perfected it with their own DIY culture articulating kitchen design to their prefab caissons manipulated on digital configurators empowering anyone to predetermine their own kitchens equipped with enumerable cabinet types, fixtures and utensils. Today, the variable assembly of modular caissons remains the accepted model for producing personalized kitchens. Many companies offer similar approaches or preconceived models that can be either panelized, modularized or packed, protected and delivered to be plugged into any coordinated space; making the kitchen probably the most successful offsite-built system in the history of prefabrication.

Link to the film