Hasta La Ideas

With Taylorism embedded in her mind and the emerging field of Scientific Management gaining traction, Christine Frederick opened the Applecroft Home Experiment Station in her home in New York, circa 1912. It was basically a kitchen laboratory where she tested different appliances and food preparation methods in a Taylorian quest to find the best way to perform a particular kitchen task. She incorporated Taylor’s time and motion studies into her methodology and, like Beecher before her, began championing the simple idea of consistent-height work surfaces.

Around the same time she began writing a column for Ladies’ Home Journal called “New Housekeeping,” in which she not only revealed her test findings, but sought to explain Taylorism to housewives. The column was a hit, and the articles were later collected into a book called “New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management.”

Frederick’s book was translated into German in 1922, and eventually a copy made its way into the hands of pioneer Margarete Lihotzky, Austria’s first female architect. (She was also the first female student at what is today the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where she won a series of awards for her design work.) Lihotzky was also a fan of Taylorism, and when she was hired by German architect Ernst May for a Frankfurt-based project in 1926, she was well armed with a knowledge of Scientific Management.

In Frankfurt she met a man who changed her name, by marrying her and making her Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. She subsequently changed the history of kitchens by giving birth to the galley kitchen.

The Frankfurt, Germany of 1926 had a housing shortage. Ernst May was the man called on to solve it by designing public housing units. The budget was tight and space was at a premium, as they would have to shoehorn 10,000 liveable units into the city.

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