What's Cooking? The History of Polish Kitchen Design
The appearance of today's kitchens was greatly influenced by architects from the beginning of the 20th century. Their projects resulted not only from practical needs but also from great socio-cultural changes.
Architect – author of the famous Żoliborz Orchards (or Sady Żoliborskie) housing project – Halina Skibniewska, wrote in her book from 1974 Rodzina a Mieszkanie (The Family and the Home):
From the second half of the 19th century, due to the socio-economic situation, problems inside households arise around improving the organisation of the meal preparation process, aimed at reducing the burden of domestic work but not only. This process was related to the struggle women faced in acquiring a position in society and at home, with the liquidation of domestic servants, with the living space becoming smaller, and finally with the characteristic tendency of the scientific organisation of work.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the social changes initiated during the industrial revolution took root, influencing the way people lived, the organisation of cities as well as architecture. Women's emancipation continued, while World War I influenced the development of technology. All these phenomena were noticed by the most progressive architects (this includes the few female architects in this profession) and included them in their housing concepts. It was on this wave that modernism (with its most advanced variation – functionalism) was born, proposing new forms of architecture, adapted to the changing way of life. Today we know that the ideas created at that time revolutionized construction practically all over the world, and influenced both the large-scale vision – urban planning for example – as well as small solutions, such as kitchen designs.
In a simplified matter, it can be assumed that the kitchen revolution began in 1918. It was then that Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky began her studies at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule (University of Applied Arts) as the first woman in the history of Austria. After graduating, she became the first official female architect in her homeland. As Margarete showed interest in social architecture already during her studies, in 1926 a significant representative of the modernist avant-garde, the German architect Ernst May, asked her to join a team developing a vision based on an affordable and comfortable housing estate in Frankfurt am Main. Under his supervision, the architect designed plans for local kindergartens, student dormitories as well as schools, but she made history due to the way she designed kitchens there. She gave them the form of a microscopic laboratory (on an area of 1.9 x 3.4 m), in which all the devices were arranged in a logical order so that no movement was unnecessary, and so that all activities could be performed efficiently and smoothly. The walls in the room were filled with a system of drawers, built-in storage, cupboards, in which it was possible to store many items in a small space (even a folded ironing board could fit there).
In order to better understand the role of Schütte-Lihotzky’s design, it should be remembered that for centuries the kitchen in bourgeois homes was separated from the living area, also – the core members of the household did not spend time in it as kitchen matters were handled by servants. With modern social changes, the existence of maids began to diminish; many families could no longer afford domestic help, there was no room for service in smaller flats, and the women who had been working such jobs began to gain more employment opportunities.
As soon as we begin to strive for our own comfort at home rather than flaunting it, salons with large amounts of plush furniture, paintings of evening landscapes and other items that prove the wealth of the household begin to slowly disappear. The cynosure shifts towards utility rooms, the bathroom, slowly approaching the kitchen.
This is what architect Barbara Brukalska wrote in 1929 in the Dom Osiedle Mieszkanie (Home, housing estate, cooperative apartment) magazine promoting progressive solutions in housing.
It was she who, two years earlier, commissioned by the Warszawska Spółdzielnia Mieszkaniowa (Warsaw Housing Cooperative), designed a model of a modern kitchen for a small flat in WSM’s IV colony in Żoliborz (Brukalska was also a co-designer – together with her husband, Stanisław – of the estate itself). She herself admitted that she was inspired by her Austrian friend’s design, which had been created a little earlier, and by the advice of Irena Szumlakowska, editor of the magazine Organizacja Gospodarstwa Domowego (Organisation of the Household), published by the Household Section of the Instytut Naukowej Organizacji (Institute of Scientific Organisation).
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Brukalska's kitchen had the form of a 2.20 x 1.37 metre recess equipped with a window, and was tailored to the needs of a family of 5-7 persons and a flat with either one, two or three rooms. Brukalska thought of her kitchen as a laboratory. In the aforementioned 1929 article, she wrote:
We adapt the devices of this laboratory to the work performed in it. Hence why we arrange the furnishings and appliances in the order in which the work takes place, to minimize the amount of unnecessary movements. We also try to group all the devices for certain functions where they take place, so e.g. soap, brushes, baking soda, waste pail are next to the kitchen sink, pots, ladles, etc. – by the kitchen stove.
Barbara Brukalska’s kitchenette vision had permanently built-in furniture:
because no one would be able to fit their tables and sideboards, often so irrationally designed, into this small space
– wrote the architect. Logically arranged appliances (coal-gas stove, sink) were fitted with numerous shelves and hiding places, as well as a ventilated cupboard serving as a pantry.
The kitchen designed by Barbara Brukalska was the most innovative idea in terms of interior organisation. But at that time, other solutions were also being developed to facilitate life in a small flat. In the first issue of Praesens, Helena Syrkus published her designs of folding furniture (including, for example, the ‘wall bed’, well-known to many Poles as it was mass-produced in the post-war years), as an optimal solution for a small ‘House of professional intelligentsia’.
In the second issue of the same magazine, Helena and Szymon Syrkus appreciated kitchen–laboratories:
The rational design of the functional strip of the kitchen wall determines the work efficiency of a housewife, the amount of her free and occupied time, and thus almost the entire domestic lifestyle.
From February to May 2018, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art presented an exhibition entitled ‘The future will be different. Visions and practices of social modernisation after 1918’. It was about progressive, modernizing social ideas implemented in Poland after it regained independence. Among these ideas, it was possible to see a model of a kitchen designed in 1927 by Barbara Brukalska.
This design was used by the curator of the exhibition, Joanna Kordjak, to present one of the ideas that gave rise to Polish modernism of the interwar period. The curator wrote:
Interwar architects such as Helena and Szymon Syrkus or Barbara Brukalska sought to influence interpersonal and social relationships through organising a living space for a new man — both on the macro (city/housing development) and micro scale (house/apartment). ‘Beauty is in the organisation of space, not in the chaos of superfluous decoration’, a slogan coined by the Praesens art collective for their 1930 exhibit at at WSM Żoliborz, ‘The Smallest Home’, aptly describes the philosophy of the nascent discipline of interior design.
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After World War II, small kitchens and kitchen recesses became the standard – small prefabricated flats, similar to those drawn by Polish functionalists before the war, also required rationalization and optimization of space. Contrary to the holistic vision of Brukalska, post-war kitchens were no longer equipped with specially designed furniture. Halina Skibniewska – who designed prefabricated housing in the 1960s and 1970s – tried to continue the concepts of pre-war modernists. As one of the few, she analysed the needs of families, combining them with the possibilities that the nationalized housing system provided. She drew plans for small but workable flats, whose functional layout was rather easily changed.
For the Żoliborz Orchards housing project, Skibniewska also designed tailor-made furniture – these, however, mostly remained in the prototype phase. The architect understood that the idea of a small kitchen makes sense only when it is really rationally designed. This was not achieved in housing blocks from the communist era. In the book Rodzina a mieszkanie she wrote:
The low level of usability in small kitchens was caused not so much by the limited space as by the irrational arrangement of fixed appliances, which made it impossible for users to supplement the equipment; the lack of adequate parts on the market, difficulties in assembly, etc. While such errors were tolerated in large kitchens, they were impossible to make up for in small kitchens and caused a wave of justified protests.
Coming back to Bruklaska's kitchen: although rationally designed and modern, it was not well received by users. Nonetheless, the officials and intelligentsia living in the WSM colonies in Żoliborz expected a place for a servant in their flats, and demanded that the kitchenette be separated from the living area. The architect reworked her progressive design in line with the users' expectations...
Changing the kitchen equipment and deciding where it should be in the flat is often understood as not only a practical but also as a political issue. Modern kitchens were to assist cooking and shorten meal preparation time in an era obsolete of servants. But at the same time it was obvious that women take care of the home, so efforts were made to make this work easier for them – so that they could reconcile it with, for example, their professional careers. Optimizing the arrangement of the kitchen was necessary as its size was radically decreased, simultaneously, it was an expression of modernity in an era when electricity began to be supplied to houses (the housing estate in Frankfurt, where the kitchens were designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, was the first electrified housing estate in Germany) and gas installations were installed. Kitchen designs from the 1920s – even if not immediately greeted with enthusiasm by users – were an important element of the socio-cultural changes of the early 20th century that shaped our way of thinking about living today.
Translated from Polish by Agnes Dudek
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