The 1950s miracle kitchen of the future
indyweek.com
indyweek.com
I love the alliteration here in place of short, average, tall.
Dad is proud of this letter, the one that told him he was too innovative, even for the most Jetsons-like of dream kitchens.
I think that's a cool thing to be proud of. I also wish we would kind of go in the opposite direction and find solutions that work well for most people while being simpler and having fewer moving parts, a la modern faucet design that handles both hot and cold with one handle.
That's "modern" as in "late 40s"?
Multiple heights are appearing in more designs now.
Plumbing the sink was the trickiest part.
(It practicality each would likely pick the appropriate counter to set to a height).
Gender-wise, ladies are out working, and cooking is now for anyone. Architecturally, many houses no longer have a traditionally segregated kitchen, they instead have a shared kitchen-living space. Increasingly, many houses also no longer have a formal dining table. It is clear that in future many houses will not have any kitchen at all, instead just a sink and prep area within the living space. These changes parallel macro-trends such as reduction in family unit size, increase in rent vs own, and aging populations, which are valid across many cultures in Asia as well as the west.
Recently we've seen a huge amount of money thrown in to the commodification of last-mile delivery for ready-to-eat foods globally, as well as a COVID-concentrated invest-fest in rapid groceries. Both are hitting limits. Perhaps the future is autonomous food prep, retail and delivery, because future, post-millenial, mobile and short-term-renting consumers may have reduced cooking skills, see appliance ownership as a drag, can't be bothered planning ahead for groceries for a household of 1-3, and don't own a car. Eventually cooking your own meal from scratch will be like building your own furniture: a quaint hobby for well-resourced enthusiasts. RIP, kitchen.
When I moved into my current house, I found many screws holding the hinges of the kitchen cabinet doors were loose and needed to be tightened. One hinge had become completely disconnected because its screws had stripped from the side board. The previous owners had not performed the most basic maintenance of just tightening some screws. I suspect that a motorized cupboard with motors, gears, rails, and rollers would be a maintenance nightmare. A sink that moves up and down means plumbing pipes that move, which gives me images of water leaking slowly behind the cabinet and destroying the subfloor.
Cabinet hinges come in "non-adjustable" varieties which are much more durable and can support significantly more weight, but they're also harder to install.
As for a moving sink you could have it be like a commercial sink "behind the scenes" - just dump straight into a sump (usually called a "floor sink"): https://www.webstaurantstore.com/regency-22-16-gauge-stainle...
People likely don't want that, however, even if you could make the entire kitchen flood proof.
The issue is the actual social model: we produce goods to sell them, not much to fulfill a purpose, we do buy goods with a use-and-dispose mindset not asking for "investments in $appliance", the whole house is seen as an investments, but it's content normally is considered a kind of commodity nearly no one care about and the result is cheap prices in absolute terms, far expensive in relative terms (for what they are) and overall very low quality. But that's not a tech issue, it's mostly a social issue.
If we start seeing a furnished "houseplace" [1] as an asset not as a commodity things might change. In that case equipment/appliances are not just something I drop there of the shelves of a nearby vendor but something valuable I use, profiting from it, then I ask for reliable and maintainable stuff not for the cheapest because they are all the same crap so better pay less, it's overpriced anyway...
A slow moving sink for instance it's not much an issue: in the past and for decades, at least in Europe we used flexible anyway to connect sink, bidet, etc, those are a rubber tube surrounded by a traced inox "tissue" with flanges on both side, sometimes with a rubber joint sometimes with a built-in PTFE permanent semi-conic joint and rarely something in between. The are the same conceptually of those used in cars and planes for hydraulic (for instance for breaks), very reliable, sometimes more than rigid ones. Also you can achieve the same result with a moving footboard under the sink able even to lift a child or an adult if needed, again it's the same principle of trucks rear hydraulic tailgate, witch is actually very reliable. The issue is the overall cost and so how people value things and how they consider them useful or not.
Think about an hypothetical humans society that instead of investing gazillion of resources to build roads/roads infra (like bridge, tunnels etc) have decide to go for drones-alike flying transports as "we" have discovered the first usable chopper. Now such society might have left old roads to nature, still usable for some purposes but unmaintained not wasting gazillion of oil and crushed rocks with the industry behind to entertain them, gazillion of resources for bridges etc investing in light aluminum-plastic drones able to fly at the same price of an actual real car (we already have them, in tech terms and since a bit of time). City/civil panorama will be much different but in substantial terms much of actual "nightmares" (collapsing bridges, landslides, bad winter treatments on roads, ...) would be substituted by other "nightmares" but with a similar level of sustainability. Again that's in theory is much more a social issue than a tech one: we have developed a certain society around certain tech but that not means it's the only one possible at the same level of comfort and needs. Nor that's the best we can achieve.
The biggest social issue is that most people and élites are with them are reactionary so fear the REAL change preferring a dummy change of anything to not change anything for real. In the end, after decades, something still going through, often in bad ways, just see actual IT compared to historic Xerox vision. Very few want to change such behavior but so far in the history they fails, almost all the time...
[1] I can't find the right term in English, a room equipped for a specif purpose like a workspace...
It introduces the now-common idea of a “work triangle”; organizing everything needed to cook a meal around a single station.
Air fryers are a good example of a post-internet kitchen change.
There's nothing obviously logical about air fryers in a lot of houses. I'll use mine over my far more advanced, self cleaning oven whenever I can.
Looking after your back is also big in this kitchen, which is interesting. But in the end it wasn't at the project stage for ovens, it seems it was a modular device end users could buy.
The vogue thing now is to even have dishwashers in high cabinets so they can be placed at a more ergonomic height.
This would also correspond with the decrease in average family size over time.