Kitchen

Middle Ages

Early medieval European longhouses had an open fire under the highest point of the building. The kitchen area was between the entrance and the fireplace. In wealthy homes, there was typically more than one kitchen. In some homes, there were upwards of three kitchens. The kitchens were divided based on the types of food prepared in them.

The kitchen might be separate from the great hall due to the smoke from cooking fires and the chance the fires may get out of control. Few medieval kitchens survive as they were "notoriously ephemeral structures".

Colonial America

In Connecticut, as in other colonies of New England during Colonial America, kitchens were often built as separate rooms and were located behind the parlor and keeping room or dining room. One early record of a kitchen is found in the 1648 inventory of the estate of a John Porter of Windsor, Connecticut. The inventory lists goods in the house "over the kittchin" and "in the kittchin". The items listed in the kitchen were: silver spoons, pewter, brass, iron, arms, ammunition, hemp, flax and "other implements about the room".

Technological developments such as the Rumford roaster and the kitchen range enabled more efficient use of space and fuel.

Efficiency and the work triangle

In the 19th century, Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe proposed a rationally planned kitchen in their household manual The American Woman's Home (1869). Their model house was organized around a central core containing the stairs, closets, toilet, kitchen and stove, together with ducts for heating and ventilation. The kitchen had a continuous countertop at a single height and separated the area for cooking at the stove from the area for food preparation; the Beechers cited the compact kitchens of steamboats as a model.

In the early 20th century, home economics became linked to the broader efficiency movement.^{: 646–647} Christine Frederick authored The New Housekeeping (1913) and Household Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home (1920), and worked as an editor for the Ladies' Home Journal.^{: 647–648} As Laurel D. Graham notes, Frederick pioneered the vocation of household engineering through this work.^{: 647–648} Applying a simplified observational methodology that relied on a clock and the naked eye,^: 648 Frederick published floor plan diagrams using dotted lines.^: 68 As quoted by Heidi Overhill, these diagrams showed how a "proper arrangement of equipment" transformed "confused intersecting chains of steps" into what Overhill describes as non-overlapping motion.^: 68 Industrial engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth conducted some motion studies in the household prior to 1924.^: 643 Following Frank's death, Lillian Gilbreth applied industrial psychology to domestic engineering, emphasizing fatigue reduction and personal satisfaction.^{: 633–636, 653–654} In September 1929, Gilbreth's "Kitchen Practical" model, designed for the Brooklyn Borough Gas Company, was first shown at the Woman's Exposition.^: 659 Across her model kitchens, she promoted an optimized arrangement she termed the "circular work place" and custom-height work surfaces—a feature of adjustability that was sacrificed when manufacturers agreed on standardized 36-inch cabinet heights by 1945.^{: 661–663, 667} Overhill states that a prototype for the "kitchen work triangle"—a phrase she notes was coined around 1947 by the University of Illinois Building Research Council—may be seen in a diagram by Frederick.^: 67–68 Separately, Graham writes that Gilbreth's circular work place was transformed into a work triangle.^: 667

Fitted kitchens

A fitted kitchen is one furnished with matching cabinets and other units built for the room and fixed in place, usually with continuous countertops and appliances built to standard dimensions.^: 56 According to the design historian June Freeman, it grew out of the combination of American household-engineering ideas with the production of standardized building units in 1920s Germany.^: 35 Before it, many households used large freestanding kitchen cabinets, such as those made by Hoosier in the United States, Poggenpohl in Germany and Hygena in Britain.^{: 42–44 : 247}

Frederick's first household manual was translated into French in 1920 and into German in 1921, as Die rationelle Haushaltführung. Her ideas were taken up by German architects and housing reformers: Bruno Taut discussed The New Housekeeping and its kitchen circulation diagrams at the start of his book Die neue Wohnung (1924), and Erna Meyer's manual Der neue Haushalt (The New Household, 1926) was based on it. An early modernist fitted kitchen, with integrated units and flush countertops, was shown by Benita Otte in the Haus am Horn, the experimental house built for the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923.

The best-known German attempt to rationalize the kitchen was the Frankfurt kitchen, designed in 1926–27 by the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky for Ernst May's "New Frankfurt" social housing program. Drawing on time-and-motion studies and on the manuals of Frederick and Meyer, she planned the position of every element to save the housewife labor and movement, while keeping costs low through prefabricated components. It was not the first fitted kitchen, but it was the first to be mass-produced: around 10,000 were installed in Frankfurt housing estates in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and it has been described as the most influential kitchen of its period.

Kitchen research in Germany came to a halt in the 1930s under National Socialism, but the Frankfurt kitchen was developed further in Sweden, the United States and Switzerland.^: 51, 53 In the United States, fitted kitchens had become a well-established feature of homes by the mid-1940s.^: 45 After World War II, a modified version of the Frankfurt kitchen returned to Germany as the "Swedish kitchen" or the American fitted kitchen.^: 51, 53 The first German built-in kitchen for serial production was presented at the Cologne Furniture Fair in 1950, with wall cupboards and base units that could be installed independently in place of the freestanding kitchen dresser.^: 53 In 1956 the sink, oven and refrigerator, until then separate units, were brought together under a single seamless stainless steel top.^: 53

In Britain, fitted kitchens appeared in significant numbers about a decade later than in the United States, and spread with the economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s.^: 45, 50 Manufacturers moved in cautiously: from the mid-1950s Hygena, working with the designer George Féjer, first made units that buyers could add to their existing furniture, and by the early 1960s offered fully coordinated modular ranges with built-in cookers and refrigerators.^: 47–48 By 1992 about two-thirds of English households had a fitted kitchen.^: 79

India

While many kitchens belonging to poor families continue to use clay stoves and the older forms of fuel, the urban middle and upper classes usually have gas stoves with cylinders or piped gas attached. Electric cooktops are rarer since they consume a great deal of electricity, but microwave ovens are gaining popularity in urban households and commercial enterprises. Indian kitchens are also supported by biogas and solar energy as fuel. World's largest solar energy kitchen is built in India. In association with government bodies, India is encouraging domestic biogas plants to support the kitchen system.