From Vienna to Frankfurt Inside Core-House Type 7: A History of Scarcity through the Modern Kitchen

This paper traces a history of war-induced scarcity through the material and technological properties of household appliances and kitchens from 1914 to 1930. Investigating the Austrian settlement and allotment garden movement, it argues that the practices of users, self-help builders, and inhabitants who reacted to living with limited resources in the state of emergency found their way into the designs of modern homes, and into the works of canonical modern architecture, in particular the famous Frankfurt Kitchen. This paper thus investigates the design and production of the modern kitchen and its transformations, from Vienna to Frankfurt, moving from a cooperative vernacular building movement to one of the largest construction endeavors to standardize and prefabricate modern housing in Germany