of developments in social housing, many of them on German soil.
Although the re-domestication of women that took place in that country
in the years after the First World War was linked to the need for popula-
tion growth, it also inspired a new approach towards the construction of
the domestic sphere.^15 That new way of thinking engaged the minds of
both female activists and Modernist architects, who realized that collab-
oration was the only possible way forward. Many of the ideas were rooted
in Christine Frederick’s concepts, made available to a German audience
through the 1922 translation of her book. One of the first manifestations
of rational planning in the domestic context on German soil was the real-
ization of the interior of an experimental house called the Haus am Horn
(House at the Horn), which was designed by Georg Muche and Adolf
Meyer and built as part of a 1923 exhibition mounted by the Bauhaus
design school in Weimar. Colour was used to denote the different interior
spaces of the house and built-in furniture was extensively utilized. The
Haus am Horn kitchen was designed by Benita Otte and Ernst Gebhardt.
It contained a work bench and a stool for the housewife in line with
Frederick’s recommendations. It went further as well, adding eye-level
cupboards, with doors to avoid dust accumulating, and standardized,
efficiently labelled containers for cooking ingredients, designed by
Theodor Bogler. Christine Frederick’s German equivalent was the house-
wife and writer, Erna Meyer, whose book on the same subject, entitled
Der neue Haudsbalt(The New Housekeeping), was published in 1926.
Meyer collaborated with the Dutch architect J.J.P. Oud in the creation of
a kitchen in a house designed by the architect and exhibited at the
Weissenhof Siedlungheld in Stuttgart in 1927.^16 Meyer and Oud’s kitchen
realized a number of Frederick’s proposals, among them the familiar
open shelving, the housewife’s stool and workbench and the rational
arrangement of its contents.
One of the visitors to the Oud/Meyer kitchen at Stuttgart was
Ernst May, an architect involved in a huge redevelopment of Frankfurt.
Impressed by what he saw at the Weissenhof Siedlung, he initiated a thor-
ough programme of research as part of the Frankfurt project. ‘His design
team studied psychology, material and product evaluations, and of
course scientific management principles as applicable to the home. They
scrutinized every aspect of household design to produce efficient and
content housewives: color brightened the housewife’s world, making
housework more tolerable; enamelled surfaces made for easy cleaning;
and furniture with smooth lines eliminated dusting in hard-to-reach 137