Schütte-Lihotzky designed kitchens like a factory floor, then mass-produced the result

Post-World War I Frankfurt faced a severe housing shortage, and the New Frankfurt public housing project, directed by architect Ernst May, needed to build large numbers of affordable units quickly — which meant keeping every room, including the kitchen, as small and cheap to build as possible. But a kitchen too small or badly laid out risked adding hours of wasted motion to the working days of the women who used it, especially in housing built for working-class families with no live-in domestic help.

Simply shrinking a conventional kitchen layout to save space would have made the existing inefficiencies worse, not better — a smaller version of a badly organized workflow is still a badly organized workflow. What was needed was a kitchen designed from scratch around how someone actually moved and worked while cooking, not around traditional kitchen conventions scaled down.

Architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky studied the compact, efficient galley kitchens of railway dining cars and conducted detailed time-motion studies, tracking how long each step of kitchen work took and how far a cook's body moved to complete it, then redesigned the entire workflow around minimizing wasted motion before laying out the physical kitchen to match.

Designed the workflow first from time-motion studies, then built a compact prefabricated kitchen around it, cutting wasted motion while shrinking cost.

Time-motion studies revealed which movements were essential and which were wasted habit.

Designing the room around the optimized workflow made it smaller and cheaper without sacrificing efficiency.

Prefabrication as a single unit allowed mass production without per-unit layout decisions.

When shrinking a space, don't just scale down the old layout; redesign the workflow from measured data first, then build the space around it.

Around 10,000 Frankfurt Kitchens were built into New Frankfurt housing units between 1926 and 1930, making it the first mass-produced fitted kitchen in history and one of the first spaces in domestic architecture designed from measured efficiency data rather than convention.