Margarete "Grete" Schütte-Lihotzky (née Lihotzky; 23 January 1897 – 18 January 2000) was an Austrian architect and a communist activist in the Austrian resistance to Nazism. She is mostly remembered today for designing what is known as the Frankfurt kitchen.
Early life and education Margarete Lihotzky was born on 23 January 1897 into a bourgeois family in Margareten, since 1850 part of Vienna. Her grandfather Gustav Lihotzky was a mayor of Czernowitz, Ducal Bukovina, and her mother Julie Bode was relative of Wilhelm von Bode. Her father was a liberal-minded civil servant, Erwin Lihotzky, whose pacifism made him welcome the end of the Habsburg Empire and the founding of the republic in 1918. Lihotzky became the first female student at the Kunstgewerbeschule, today the University of Applied Arts Vienna), where renowned artists such as Josef Hoffmann, Anton Hanak, and Oskar Kokoschka taught. Lihotzky almost did not get in. Her mother persuaded a close friend to ask the famous artist Gustav Klimt for a letter of recommendation. In 1997, celebrating her 100th birthday and reminiscing about her decision to study architecture, she remarked that "in 1916 no one would have conceived of a woman being commissioned to build a house – not even myself." Lihotzky studied architecture under Oskar Strnad, winning prizes for her designs even before her graduation. Strnad was one of the pioneers of sozialer Wohnbau in Vienna, affordable yet comfortable social housing for the working classes. Inspired by him, Lihotzky understood that connecting design to functionality was the new trend that would be in demand in the future. After graduating, among her other projects, she collaborated with Adolf Loos, planning settlements for World War I invalids and veterans. During this time she also worked alongside architect Josef Frank and philosopher Otto Neurath in the context of the newly founded Austrian Settlement and Allotment Garden Association where she developed core houses. Her memories of these and many other Austrian architects and intellectuals are collected in her book Warum ich Architektin wurde ('Why I Became an Architect').
Housing design
In 1926 she was called to the Hochbauamt of the City Council of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, by the architect and city planner Ernst May where she worked on the New Frankfurt project. May had been given the political power and financial resources to solve Frankfurt's housing shortage. He and Schütte-Lihotzky, together with the rest of May's assembled architectural staff, successfully brought functional clarity and humanitarian values to thousands of the city's housing units. Lihotzky continued her work by designing kindergartens, students' homes, schools and similar community buildings. Schütte-Lihotzky designed kindergarten pavilions based on the ideas of Maria Montessori. In Frankfurt she met colleague Wilhelm Schütte, whom she married the following year.
Frankfurt kitchen
As part of the New Frankfurt-project Lihotzky created the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926, which was the prototype of the built-in kitchen now prevalent in the Western world. Based on scientific research by U.S. management expert Frederick Winslow Taylor and her own research, Lihotzky used a railroad dining car kitchen as her model to design a "housewife's laboratory" using a minimum of space but offering a maximum of comfort and equipment. The kitchen measured just 1.9 x 3.4 meters. Kitchen surfaces were painted blue-green as scientists claimed the color repelled flies. The Frankfurt City Council eventually installed 10,000 of her mass-produced, prefabricated kitchens in newly-built working-class apartments. On her 100th birthday Schütte-Lihotzky commented "You'll be surprised that, before I conceived the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926, I never cooked myself. At home in Vienna my mother cooked, in Frankfurt I went to the Wirthaus [restaurant-pub]. I designed the kitchen as an architect, not as a housewife." In September 2024, in central Vienna, a 1970s version of the Frankfurt kitchen, restored by architect Renate Allmayer-Beck on the basis of Schütte-Lihotzky's original plans and photos, was opened to the public.
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