“America represents the fat kitchen, and Europe a very lean kitchen indeed.” This was how German émigré Heinrich Hauser, writing in 1945, described his perception of a “spiritual chasm” opening up between the two. While rationing and postwar reconstruction maintained a hold on Europe, the United States’ economy experienced a significant boom, and rapidly came to dominate the world market in consumer goods. Building on wartime research into new materials, technologies, and ergonomics, large companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse, Hotpoint, and Rubbermaid shaped powerful corporate identities, reinforced by the new form of television advertisements.
A climate of abundance and an emphasis on consumer choice, embraced during the Cold War as hallmarks of capitalism and democracy, put a new spin on the now well-established rhetoric of efficiency and anti-drudgery in design for the kitchen. Members of “the affluent society” (as economist John Kenneth Galbraith referred to them at the time) could acquire for their kitchens—increasingly suburban and spacious—an ever-expanding range of products, available from the mid-1950s in new shopping malls.
Due in part to American aid administered through the Marshall Plan, design powers soon reemerged in Europe. In Germany, Braun developed a cohesive family of appliances revered internationally for their superior functionality and pure form. Italy became a hotbed of innovative design in plastics, and in the 1960s designers like Virgilio Forchiassin reimagined the kitchen in mobile and miniaturized forms.
By the 1970s alternative design pushed beyond new materials and forms to consider social and environmental concerns. In Sweden, companies like Ergonomi Design shaped kitchen tools for the elderly and people with disabilities. And dedicated designers like Adnan Tarcici supported sustainable energy with impressively simple solar cookers. Contemporary designers continue to creatively address the enormous range of materials, functions, possibilities, and problems that reside in the modern kitchen.
A climate of abundance and an emphasis on consumer choice, embraced during the Cold War as hallmarks of capitalism and democracy, put a new spin on the now well-established rhetoric of efficiency and anti-drudgery in design for the kitchen. Members of “the affluent society” (as economist John Kenneth Galbraith referred to them at the time) could acquire for their kitchens—increasingly suburban and spacious—an ever-expanding range of products, available from the mid-1950s in new shopping malls.
Due in part to American aid administered through the Marshall Plan, design powers soon reemerged in Europe. In Germany, Braun developed a cohesive family of appliances revered internationally for their superior functionality and pure form. Italy became a hotbed of innovative design in plastics, and in the 1960s designers like Virgilio Forchiassin reimagined the kitchen in mobile and miniaturized forms.
By the 1970s alternative design pushed beyond new materials and forms to consider social and environmental concerns. In Sweden, companies like Ergonomi Design shaped kitchen tools for the elderly and people with disabilities. And dedicated designers like Adnan Tarcici supported sustainable energy with impressively simple solar cookers. Contemporary designers continue to creatively address the enormous range of materials, functions, possibilities, and problems that reside in the modern kitchen.
In 1911 the Ironrite Ironer Company began manufacturing electric ironing machines and marketing them to American housewives as the modern antidote to the drudgery of hand-ironing. In the late 1930s it launched the Health Chair, which facilitated “a scientifically correct ironing posture,” to complement its machines. World War II delayed mass production of the chair but stimulated the development of a newly scientific and systematic analysis of the interface between the human body and the designed environment. When production resumed, the benefits of the Health Chair were advocated by Ironrite instructors, who provided free demonstrations at “ironing schools” as well as in private home lessons.
See more, including videos at the Museum of Modern Art web site.
