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PERMANENT COLLECTION - OPEN STORAGE Located in a former workshop-building, the museum is organised as "open
storage" in which visitors can investigate the museal setup of the
collection on about 500 square meters. In the permanent exhibition,
objects are grouped into sample-collections. These show on one hand the
basics of the polarising Werkbund-objectives, basic aspects of
material-, shape-, function- and use-history of things within the 20th
century and contemporary material culture on the other hand. The objects
face a very suspense constellation: Objects designed by very famous
artists and anonymous design, individual pieces and mass-production,
functional and puristic objects and so called "error in taste" or
"Kitsch", substantial, "honest" things and material surrogates, branded
articles and no-name products.
The special character and the
unusual structure of the collection goes along with the development of a
special exhibition-type in the WMD, the so called "open storage". The
collections presented in the form of an "open storage" is permanently
questioned, further developed and commented.
The WMD sees itself
as museal laboratory which focuses on perceiving and making perceivable
the history of things in the 20th century, based on today’s product
culture. Further subjects of investigation are the museum-space, the
impact of the specific museal structure on the object’s status and the
construction of perception as well as the possibilities of aesthetic
education in museums and exhibitions.
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Instruction Manual for a "Frankfurt Kitchen" in the Werkbundarchiv — Museum der Dinge The "Frankfurt Kitchen" is an important document of cultural history for the transfer of industrial, rationalized work processes to the sphere of the private household. This is a central characteristic of modern architecture and everyday culture in the 1920s.
The Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the kitchen in 1926 as a standard prototype. Some 10,000 such kitchens were realized in numerous variants in the Frankfurt estates. Schütte-Lihotzky was commissioned by the Frankfurt building inspector Ernst May, who was both the architectural designer and the local administrator responsible for the "New Frankfurt" of the 1920s. In view of the scarcity of rental housing in Frankfurt after the First World War, this building programme was intended to produce cheap, efficient housing with an economical use of use space and simple, economical furnishings for a growing population. The housing estate building programme, supported mainly by the SPD, was politically motivated and aimed at providing the technical and hygienic standards of the day — running water, gas and electricity — to the lower classes. The programme was publicized through a modern campaign. As part of that campaign, the kitchen was presented and well received at the Frankfurt spring fair of 1927.
The development of a standardized modular system made it possible to reduce the floor area required, and also permitted mass production which lowered costs further.
The Frankfurt Kitchen was widely marketed and became the model for the fitted kitchen of today. There is not just one Frankfurt Kitchen, however. The model underwent several changes during the period in which it was realized in a number of Frankfurt estates until 1930.
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The Frankfurt Kitchen was designed to be efficient and functional,
modeled after railway dining car kitchens, and planned based on
taylorized work processes. It was intended to be used as a "cooking
workroom", and divided from the sitting room by a sliding door.
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The
Frankfurt Kitchen specimen in the display collection of the
Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge was taken from a two-family terrace
house at Heidenfeld 24 in the Römerstadt estate, built in 1927-28. The
kitchens in the Römerstadt estate lacked the sliding door and the hay
box that is present in other Frankfurt Kitchens, and was equipped with a
combination coal/electric cooker. The cooker in this specimen is no
longer the original, but a comparable model. The kitchen cabinets were
originally painted blue-green, and were repainted in a cream color
during its years of use. The kitchen is exhibited in its
unrestored state to show the authentic signs of use and modification.
Paint has been removed from the fittings, however, and some missing
parts have been replaced.
The ensemble is an ideal addition to
the Museum's collection because the Frankfurter Kitchen illustrates key
principles of the 1920s: objectivity, functionalism, and above all
standardization. The concept of standardization was connected not only
with production techniques, but also reflected the ideological position
of the Bauhaus and Werkbund activists, who saw the uniform design of
everyday objects as a contribution towards leveling the differences
between classes. The artistic design of the standardized object served
to refine it and to ensure that the right form was definitive.
The
Frankfurt Kitchen was one of the models propagated by the Werkbund and
the Bauhaus for the "New Life" of the "New Man", an idea that was widely
popular in the 1920s. These visions involve a renunciation of
historically determined elements of identity. Bruno Taut, in his book
Die Neue Wohnung ("The New Home"), rejects the presence of mementos and
any kind of "historic junk". Erna Meyer, the academic housekeeping
expert of the 1920s and 1930s, wrote: "Now it's all or nothing: New Man
needs a new skin!" (Wohnungsbau und Hausführung, 1927, 89).
A
"planned order" was to replace the "senseless chaos" of the world. The
notion of a regularly constructed reality corresponds to the principles
of functionalism and rationality conditioned by industrial production
processes. Both objects and people were to conform to these principles.
The
consequences of these reformative initiatives, especially in housing
estate architecture, were criticized in debates on socially supported
housing in the 1970s and 1980s. The image of women that is evident in
the Frankfurt Kitchen concept must also be viewed critically. A purely
functional working kitchen was intended to make housework easier, but
without questioning the gendered division of labour.
Alongside
the actual kitchen exhibited in the museum, visitors can examine an
audiovisual installation based on historic photos and films, a 1985
interview with the designing architect, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, and
the findings of two researchers who spent years studying the Frankfurt
Kitchen. Astrid Debus-Steinberg of the Stuttgart Society for the
Conservation of Art and Historic Monuments (Stuttgarter Gesellschaft für
Kunst und Denkmalpflege) has preserved, collected and systematically
researched and many Frankfurt kitchens since the late 1980s. The
cultural historian Dr. Joachim Krausse, together with the architectural
theorist Jonas Geist, made a documentary film in the 1980s as an
archaeological study of the discrepancies between the idea and the
reality of the New Frankfurt.
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The acquisition of the Frankfurt
Kitchen was funded in part by Stiftung Preussische Seehandlung, Berlin.
The
installation of the kitchen was largely supported by the Museum's
partner school, the Marcel-Breuer-Schule in the Berlin borough of
Weissensee. |
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