The Frankfurt Kitchen (2011) | Hacker News Reader

The Frankfurt Kitchen (2011)

moma.org

36 pointsbenbreen25 comments

It is amazing how important it is to talk to the people who use your product. Years ago my bit of east London was being gentrified.

One day I went in and the bar area was totally updated with a nice (old) bar top taken from another pub, moved forwards into the bar areas, giving loads of room for the staff being to move and work (on a Friday there could be about 10 staff serving at once).

But when talking to the bar staff they hated it - the tills were along the back wall, and the beer tabs were on the bar side - so they could no longer pour a pint and take payment at the same time.

The bar had been 'improved' by the owners, who had obviously never worked in a bar or talked to their staff.

I see some similarity to the kitchen of my aunt (mother's side). My mother has formal education in home economics. She laid out her own kitchen using a technique where a day of work is simulated with a paper plan, pins, and thread between the pins for every movement. I always thought that was very clever in its simplicity, and yes, the result is that commonly needed things are within reach where they are needed, and outputs of one step kind of naturally end up right where they need to be for the next step.

> She laid out her own kitchen using a technique where a day of work is simulated with a paper plan, pins, and thread between the pins for every movement.

The general rule of thumb is well-known to interior/kitchen designers:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_work_triangle

* https://archive.is/https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story...

There are still common mistakes that many designs still make, specifically about ventilation: never put the cooktop on an island, as (a) getting a vent hood there is difficult, and (b) downdraft hoods are almost useless.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJmPQOP7XN0

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymK9k5PMA6g

Neat! My mom's kitchen is L-shaped though - the stove is in the corner. Not shown in the work triangle but part of the layout: work area, storage for cutlery, plates, glasses, cooking tools, pots, (dinner table) - these all have logical places as well.

(It's a combined kitchen / dining room fitted into a largish pre-existing room for the same purpose in an old farmhouse)

The general rule of thumb is well-known to interior/kitchen designers

And yet, every new apartment I look at has an open plan kitchen seemingly designed by someone who has never cooked a meal in their life.

The Swedish state did a similar study in the 40s where observers took very detailed measurements of everything women did in the kitchen during the day and then optimised every part of the kitchen design to save both time and effort. Most apartments built between the 40s-60s in Sweden are designed based on these studies.

The USDA created a similar design, here's a charming old fashioned video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2N9RCQjPqh4

My SIL has a new house, built in the last 5 years, and the kitchen SUCKS. There's a big island in the middle of it that makes it impossible to make a trip to any other part of the kitchen in a straight line and its so big that it is hard to walk past someone else in the kitchen.

I'm in an 80's apartment and it has all kinds of issues mainly related to having hardly any space for storage and it's all in the wrong place anyway.

But since I am a fan of Adam Savage and watched his cave evolve especially with his new paradigm of a shopping area and a work area, I recently had an idea for rearranging my kitchen.

There are three areas of the kitchen the work area (sink, prep, and stove), the storage area (pantry, refrigerator), and the eating area (table, dishes).

When you are getting ready to prepare food you need ingredients from the storage area, and tools (knives, cutting boards, bowls) and it needs to be near the sink for washing and the trash for waste. Then the prepared food can move to the cooking area which has the stove, pots and pans, hot pads, and utensils. The eating area needs easy access to getting the hot food to the table and getting table ware (dishes, glasses, silverware) to the table from storage and to the sink/dishwasher/trash for cleanup. It's like a fractal of triangles to design a functional kitchen.

I used the dimensions of the Frankfurt kitchen for the design of the kitchen space in the studio apartments I designed.

The dimensions ended up being the only part of the Frankfurt kitchen I re-used. I Decided that the Frqnkfurt kitchen 2.0 would be mostly countertop and sink. The idea was that the rest of the system could be modified to the end user's taste.

The whole project has taken much longer than I expected but I'm now turning the corner. The next phase for me will be fabricating components that can be mixed and matched.

I will make a number of shelves and cabinets of different dimensions. The building will end up with catalog of objects that tenants can use or have modified to meet their needs.

After moving to Germany a few months ago, I asked a contractor about the wiring for the lights, and one phrase he used to describe it was "deutsche küchenordnung," referring to some features that made it especially efficient. I'll bet the etymology is related.

I have never heard of that phrase! Would you mind explaining it in more detail?

Yeah haven't heard of anything like that either. Perhaps what was meant was DIN 66354 and/or DIN EN 1116.

I hadn't heard it either--I still don't speak much German--so I asked what it meant; and he explained that Deutsche küchenordnung means "German kitchen style," and refers to when "everything is laid out just so."

There’s a moderately good episode of Roman Mars’ podcast on the subject.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-frankfurt-kitchen...

My mother still has one of those, funny to see it featured by moma :-).

There is also a German word "Frankfurt bath", when you place the shower in the kitchen, with some of these arangements still present in flats today.

I never heard of that, interesting. You'd think it would rather be a schwäbisches bath.

Now in my mind I started debating merits of wetroom kitchens... The remembered that you have lot of cabinets and dry goods inside... So benefits of being able to hose it down might be questionable.

I lived in an apartment in Frankfurt that still had this. The bathtub/shower was in the kitchen with just a curtain separating it (toilet with sink was in a separate room). With two roommates in the apartment, it made for some awkward moments, but you get used to it.

100 years later there is a housing crisis again, even in Frankfurt, and construction plummets with no Frankfurt Kitchen 2.0 in sight. Ironic.

tangential - "Kitchen Debate" between Nixon and Khrushchev

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Debate#The_role_of_wom...

"Whilst pointing to the dishwasher, Nixon emphasized on his strive to make life easier for women by way of the pre-installed units. Khrushchev replied, "Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under Communism,"

And Khrushchev kept his word - mass built USSR houses carrying his name https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Хрущёвка

a typical 3 room flat - measurements are in meters, 5.2m2 is the kitchen, 45m2 total (i.e. 60sqft and 500sqft) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Хрущёвка#/media/Файл:GI_Planir...

"kitchen ready for occupancy permit" (that 60sqft one) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Кухня_при_сдаче_дома...

what generation was the kitchen in the end of the Ленинград — ЗОЖ clip? I'm guessing more Khrushchev than Brezhnev?

(or how about the kitchen Ivan the Terrible encounters in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a50qT9bW2Qo#t=2143 ? Brezhnevka?)

>I'm guessing more Khrushchev than Brezhnev?

Neither, it is bigger and ceilings are higher. And the building isn't standard concrete panels (the shape of the window and the thickness of the walls in the window opening in particular tell that). So, it is older than Khruschev. May be Stalin time or pre-Revolution (elongated shape suggests not original design and instead ad-hoc space reorganization that happened to pre-Revolution flats when they were made into multi-family "communal" flats).

>the kitchen Ivan the Terrible encounters

The apartment building in the movie is of the "improved" design, very infrequent type of building at the time, and typically the kitchens there were a bit larger. The kitchen in the movie isn't real though - such large kitchens never existed in post-Stalin mass built multi-story apartment buildings. I've seen such large kitchen only in the Stalin time built 3 story building where top city officials/bosses lived - my friend's father was a CEO of a factory, and so they lived in a flat in that building.