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This week in New York, the city's foodie elites gathered to poke around an 80-year-old kitchen. It was designed in 1926 for a housing project in Frankfurt, Germany. But rather than being updated with Ikea fixtures, the entire kitchen was ripped out and shipped, piece by piece, to New York.
The Frankfurt Kitchen is now in the Museum of Modern Art, in between the Andy Warhols and the MoMA snack bar. It's the centerpiece of a new show called Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen.
The kitchen is tiny, the size of a VW bus. It's mostly outfitted in gunmetal gray — no granite countertops. But through one of the first architecturally designed kitchens, you can see the ideas that launched a million home remodeling projects: built-in bins, undercabinet storage, pullout drawers and a four-burner stove.
These days, there are magazines and television programs devoted to kitchen design, but in 1926 it was a new idea. In fact, curator Juliet Kinchin tells NPR's Robert Smith, designing a kitchen was actually a political act.
The Politically Progressive Kitchen
"There's always been that political dimension to kitchens," Kinchin explains.
"For centuries, really, the kitchen had been ignored by design professionals, not least because it tended to be lower-class women or servants who occupied the kitchen space," she says.
"The kitchens were often poorly ventilated, shoved to the basement or annex, and caused a lot of drudgery in the kitchen."
Read more about interior kitchen design on www.interiordesignerclasses.com
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