On May 1, 1942, a small group of communists enjoyed a clandestine celebration in central Vienna. It didn’t matter that they were imprisoned by the Gestapo and each in solitary confinement; they had long ago realized that their toilets were connected to the same pipes, and by removing water from the siphon and sticking their heads into the bowl, they were able to talk to one another. They took advantage of this daily, discussing letters from home, their hopes and fears, the outcomes of their latest court hearings. On this International Workers’ Day, the plumbing carried poems and speeches, closing with “The Internationale.”
“Prison was the only place in Austria ‘The Internationale’ could still be sung on May 1, 1942. An unforgettable celebration,” one of the prisoners, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, later recalled in her memoir Memories of the Resistance (Erinnerungen aus dem Widerstand).
Schütte-Lihotzky had been imprisoned since 1941 for her work as a courier for the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ), which led the resistance against the Nazi regime in her home country. While she managed to narrowly avoid a death sentence, Schütte-Lihotzky remained in jail until the end of World War II in 1945. The incarceration would forever split her life in two. On the one side were her beginnings as a precocious and successful architect spurred on by the desire to create a better life for working-class women. On the other, what she would refer to as her “second life,” as an active communist, political activist, and memoirist who was professionally shunned in Austria for her political beliefs and received her much-deserved accolades only in the final decades of her life.
Schütte-Lihotzky led a remarkably long and full life, dying a few days short of her 103rd birthday in 2000. But her name remains forever connected to a space she designed when only 29 years old: the Frankfurt Kitchen, the prototype of the modern fitted kitchen.
Designed in 1926 as part of a large-scale social housing project in Frankfurt, Germany, the “Frankfurt Kitchen” introduced many of the elements we now take for granted: a continuous countertop with a tiled backsplash, built-in cabinets, and drawers optimized for storage—all laid out with comfort and efficiency in mind. The final design was installed in 10,000 apartments in Frankfurt, and some originals are still on display in museums around the world, including the V&A in London and MoMA in New York, where it is the earliest work by a female architect in the collection.
The kitchen design was part of a wider effort to standardize housing and lighten the load of the working class. “She didn’t just develop a kitchen,” says Austrian architect Renate Allmayer-Beck. “It was a concept to make women’s lives easier by giving them a kitchen where they could manage more easily and have more time for themselves.”
For Schütte-Lihotzky, architecture was political. While growing up in a middle-class family sheltered her from the harsher realities of life in Vienna, she visited the working-class districts as an architecture student and was shocked by the difficult living conditions. There, she saw people living eight or nine to a room, and “bed lodgers” who had to sublet others’ beds for a couple hours a day. The experience cemented her desire to become an architect. “I didn’t yet know the great Heinrich Zille quote, ‘You can kill a person with an apartment just as well as with an axe,’ but I felt it,” she later wrote in her memoir Why I Became an Architect (Warum ich Architektin wurde). “At the time I did not yet understand the roots of their suffering, but I wanted a profession in which I could help alleviate their hardship.”
Socially conscious design would remain a throughline in her work. After becoming one of the first Austrian women to graduate with a degree in architecture in 1919, she went on to work for the Viennese settlement movement, in which thousands of families settled on public land on the outskirts of the city, building makeshift shelters and cultivating gardens as a response to housing and food shortages after World War I. Designing settler huts and “core-houses” (small standardized dwellings that could be expanded with modules when a family could afford them), she became interested in the ways home design could make housekeeping more efficient. Schütte-Lihotzky’s designs included live-in kitchens as well as a futuristic cooking-niche extension in which all elements were poured into one concrete block. Her work caught the eye of the German architect Ernst May, who invited her to Frankfurt in 1926, where she would design her iconic kitchen as part of an affordable public housing program.
While the Frankfurt Kitchen was marketed as a kitchen designed for women by a woman, Schütte-Lihotzky resented the implication that her gender automatically endowed her with secret domestic knowledge, writing in her memoir that “it fed into the notions among the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie at the time that women essentially work in the home at the kitchen stove.” In fact, Schütte-Lihotzky had never run a household or even cooked before developing the kitchen, approaching it instead like any other architectural challenge. She consulted literature on rationalizing domestic labor, conducted time-motion studies systematically observing and measuring the time and physical movements involved in common tasks, and studied galley kitchens on trains.
The Frankfurt Kitchen was efficiently laid out and compact, to save both on costs and the physical effort required to use it. Here, a woman could move from sink to stove without taking a single step. This quest for efficiency also led Schütte-Lihotzky to move the kitchen from a corner of the family room into its own space—a choice that baffled contemporary homemakers.
Designing the first built-in, prefabricated, and mass-produced kitchen at a time when none of this was standard practice was a mammoth logistical and technological undertaking. “That’s what it’s really about,” says Christine Zwingl, the director of the Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Center. According to Zwingl, Schütte-Lihotzky had to consider “the complex issues of architecture and construction, including not only social aspects, but also all the technical considerations and the concrete technological developments.”
The Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Center, headquartered in the restored apartment the architect had designed in the 1970s and lived in until her death, is a museum dedicated to her life and work, as well as a research project documenting the history of women architects in Austria. In September 2024, the Center finished reconstructing Schütte-Lihotzky’s personal kitchen and opened it to the public. “It was an exciting detective game,” says Allmayer-Beck, who spearheaded the reconstruction with the help of photos and two original plans. The tiny kitchen is a testament to Schütte-Lihotzky’s effortlessly stylish functionalism: Every inch is optimized for storage and efficiency, but the dark-green cabinets hide a vivid red interior, which serves no other purpose but to delight. Many of the details are lifted directly from her 1926 design: an ironing board is folded up against the wall, pouring cups for dry goods are nestled in custom-made cubbies, and additional counter space is hidden in shallow drawers.
Allmayer-Beck and Zwingl worked closely with Schütte-Lihotzky from the 1980s, documenting her legacy and working on her archive in the very apartment they have now reconstructed. “It’s only now that we’re noticing all these details, how exquisitely it’s designed, how lovingly and functionally,” says Allmayer-Beck.
It all began when Zwingl, then a young architecture student, attended a lecture by Schütte-Lihotzky in 1980. “Everyone in the room was astonished by what she was saying, because she was describing such an international life and career,” recalls Zwingl. “She was a rather small, inconspicuous woman, but she could talk very well and she did it with such verve.”
By then, Schütte-Lihotzky was in her eighties, with a life story that has since filled multiple books: In 1930 she moved to the USSR as the only woman among 17 experts tasked with planning new cities like Magnitogorsk as part of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan. Her one condition for the move: She would not have to design any kitchens. Instead, she was put in charge of kindergartens, nurseries, and children’s clubs—work that aligned with her desire to support working women.
By 1938, she had moved to Istanbul to escape Stalin’s Great Purge and joined the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) to assist with their resistance activities. In December 1940 she briefly returned to Vienna—ostensibly to visit her sister, though she was acting as a KPÖ courier tasked with conveying messages to local operatives. She was arrested by the Gestapo on January 22, 1941, the day before her 44th birthday and planned return to Istanbul.
During the Cold War, her strong communist views made it difficult for her to get any public commissions in Austria, but she continued to work as an independent architect and consulted on projects in China, Cuba, and the German Democratic Republic.
“She was such an impressive person,” says Zwingl. “She was a role model in her profession, but also as a person who lived in such a deliberate way, who remembered her history but also looked ahead with this architectural attitude: ‘We are building for the future and we have to think about it.’”
Her advancing years did nothing to dampen her desire to create a better future. She became a prominent pacifist and feminist, playing a pivotal role in the founding of the Austrian Peace Council—the local branch of the communist-aligned World Peace Council—and becoming the first president of the Federation of Democratic Women of Austria in 1948. When the Frankfurt Kitchen came under fire from second-wave feminists in the 1970s for isolating women in the kitchens and making domestic labor invisible, the critique hit her hard.
She defended her design in her memoir. “The kitchen made people’s lives easier and contributed to women being able to work and become more economically independent from men,” she wrote. Still, she conceded, “it would be a sad state of affairs if what was progressive back then were still a paragon of progress today.”
Many of her other projects, overshadowed by what she once referred to as “that damned kitchen,” were decidedly feminist. While still in Frankfurt she designed apartments for single working women, and worked internationally on the design and construction of kindergarten classrooms for the better part of four decades. “The misery of working women who are unable to arrange for their preschool-age children to be under the supervision of trained educators during working hours is well known,” she wrote in her memoir. “The solution to this problem cannot be to reduce the number of working women; it can only be to build a great many children’s facilities.”
By the 1980s, the world suddenly rediscovered her, and she was showered with awards and honors, but her political engagement still took precedence. When she was offered the Austrian Medal for Science and Art in 1988 she refused it due to the then-president’s complicity in Nazi war crimes, and at her 100th birthday party at the Viennese Museum for Applied Arts, where she famously waltzed with the mayor, representatives of feminist organizations and the daughter of a fellow Resistance fighter gave speeches alongside leading politicians.
In Frankfurt, she had learned to measure distances with her steps, and the skill would again come in handy as her sight declined in her final years. Her favorite restaurant lay 264 steps from her apartment door, and when the Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Center opened the architect’s restored apartment to the public in 2021, visiting neighbors still recalled her barreling down the street, cane held up high, bellowing, “Coming through!”
“Everyone would stop to let her pass, including the drivers,” laughs Allmayer-Beck. “She was never old, not until her last day.”
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