Single-kitchen home
The single-kitchen home was a reform model of urban residential development in which a centrally managed canteen kitchen within a multi-party house replaced the kitchens of the individual apartments. The concept was based on the ideas of the women's rights activist and social democrat Lily Braun. With the basic idea of liberating women from housework, at the beginning of the 20th century it was an explicit counter-design to the establishment of the isolated nuclear family in mass housing. Single-kitchen houses, sometimes also called central kitchen houses, were implemented in various European large cities in isolated and different ways until the 1950s. As key works of an idea of modern living, some of these buildings were nominated for the European Heritage Label in 2009, expressly as a network of common European architecture spread across various countries.
The concept of the one-kitchen house
The basic idea behind the single-kitchen houses was to set up a central kitchen within a multi-party house or complex of houses, with the simultaneous absence of private kitchens in the individual apartments. Instead, these were connected by a dumbwaiter and a house telephone to the supply facility, which was usually located in the basement or on the first floor. In many cases, the equipment consisted of contemporary modern appliances. The communal kitchen was run by paid staff, from whom meals and dishes could be ordered. Many of the houses also had central dining rooms and, depending on the design concept, the apartments were also equipped with sideboards and simple gas stoves for emergencies.In almost all of the single-kitchen houses built, there were also other communal facilities and services, such as roof terraces and laundry room, and in some cases also stores, libraries and kindergartens. The new housing facilities at the beginning of the 20th century included central heating, hot-water supply, garbage disposal and central vacuum cleaner systems with a domestic pipe system, and the residents had access to services in various ways.Originally conceived as a reform idea in worker housing, in which the costs of communal facilities would be eliminated through savings in the layout of the housing and through centralized management, the realized projects were based on different forms of ownership and organization. Both on a private economy and cooperative basis, single-kitchen houses offered the better-off bourgeoisie an alternative model of living in the middle of the city. In contrast to other Reformkonzepte at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, such as the garden city movement, the cohesion of the residents was not achieved through shielding, but through social exchange with the surrounding urban environment.
Historical prerequisites
The housing question in the 19th century
During industrialization in the second half of the 19th century and the accompanying massive population growth in the cities, there was a radical break with the pre-industrial way of living. The rural population moving to the industrial centers left their extended-family housing and supply structures. In the cities, they encountered increasing spatial, social and health problems, which were summarized under the term housing misery. Urban expansions and mass housing construction were speculative regulated via the market, as the social upheavals were embedded in a liberalization of the economic order. The housing shortage and housing shortage affected almost all city dwellers, but it seemed almost insoluble for non-permanent, i.e. not permanently employed and frequently changing the place of work, poorly paid workers and their families. The problems were the subject of constant criticism from labour movement organizations, as well as social policy associations, academics and housing reformers. The housing question became one of the central political issues of the late 19th and early 20th century.The basic problem was to reduce the discrepancy between housing costs and the income of the working class. If one reduces the aspects of the housing issue to a socialist and a bourgeois labeling, the positions differed right from the start. For the workers' movement, the housing shortage was a class issue that could not be solved under capitalism, but only with the appropriation of the means of production through collective forms of housing. On the other hand, there was the position of the housing and social reform movement, which saw a moral, health and ethical problem in housing misery. Affordable and self-contained small apartments were to be created, in which a family division of labor would take place according to the bourgeois model, according to which the man would pursue employment and the woman would be responsible for housework. The home also had the function of an educational program for the proletariat:
Solutions to the problem were seen in the subsidizing of capital costs in housing construction, the formation of cooperatives and even hire-purchase strategies for owner-occupied homes. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, did not develop any housing concepts of their own until well after the turn of the century, rejecting the models introduced by the women's movement and in particular by Lily Braun for single-family homes. After the process of transformation into the Democratic-Socialist Reform Party, it followed the guidelines already developed, modified by the demand for a state housing policy. In practice, the self-contained apartment prevailed for the nuclear family. for immigrants from the countryside and the proletariat, it was the visibly better form of housing with its private sphere and self-determined furnishings and organization.
The ideals of the Utopian Socialists
The utopian ideal of a community provided a template for the concept of one-kitchen houses. ideal of a community, which the early socialist social theorist Charles Fourier had conceived with the model of the Phalanstère. Fourier drew the term from the Greek word Phalanx' '' and the Latin Monasterium, and these very economic and living communities were to overcome the division of labor and the split between production and consumption, contrary to the capitalist economic system. Family households would be dissolved into communal houses with collective infrastructure, there would be public kitchens, dining rooms, schools, festival halls, recreation rooms, stores, libraries, music rooms and areas for children and the elderly. The models included equality for women and free sexuality.The French factory owner Jean-Baptiste Godin, also a supporter of early socialism, took up Fourier's design and from 1859 realized a communal housing complex in the French municipality of Guise, next to his Iron Foundry and furnace factory. It offered space for 1500 people and consisted of three residential complexes, school buildings, a crèche, a bathhouse and a theater. In addition, there were the buildings of the Économat, a farmyard with kitchens, halls, restaurants, a pub, stores, a pigsty and a henhouse. In contrast to Fourier, Godin did not strive for the dissolution of the family, as he emphatically emphasized with his name. In theory, women were equal to men, but as they were not trusted to do the hard and dirty work in the factory, many of them remained unemployed. As a result, individual kitchens were soon installed in homes. In 1880 Godin transferred the entire complex, including the factory, to a cooperative, which existed until 1960.
As early as 1816 the British entrepreneur Robert Owen founded an educational institution for the betterment of his employees, the Institution for the formation of Character, at his cotton mill in New Lanark, Scotland. He developed a model concept for industrial villages in which homes were built without kitchens. Instead, the preparation of food and the food itself was organized centrally and collectively. In 1825, Owen sold the factory in Scotland and went to the United States to implement his ideas more extensively. In the state of Indiana, he founded the settlement New Harmony, which offered space for around 1000 residents. However, its implementation failed due to both economic difficulties and personnel problems:
Just three years later, Owen sold the estate again. Opponents of the early socialist utopias saw their unfeasibility confirmed. Karl Marx analyzed the failure of the early socialist systems as not radical enough and at the same time too radical, because they demanded the leap into an ideal final state, but thought of this as insularly limited instead of society as a whole, they "see no historical self-activity on the part of the proletariat, no political movement peculiar to it."
The collectivization of the domestic economy
Despite their failure, the early socialists had a considerable impact on the concepts of utopian settlements with a centralized domestic economy that emerged from the middle of the 19th century and the attempts to implement them. In the US and in Europe, a network of various reformist and revolutionary tendencies developed that sought to reorient the division of labor, the domestic economy and forms of housing. Among them were representatives of the labor movement, the socialist and bourgeois women's movement in Germany, anarchists, feminists and the settlement movement in the US, supporters of architectural reform and the garden city movement in Great Britain and Germany.In Boston, the feminist Melusina Fay Peirce planned a housewives' and production cooperative from 1868. She designed both the structural and conceptual background and coined the term cooperative housekeeping for her facility. In a community of 36 houses grouped around a courtyard based on neighborhood help, paid services such as cooking, washing and sewing were to be offered in a central workplace and a communal kitchen was to be set up. The project soon failed due to resistance from the husbands of the women involved. Peirce developed her experiences and findings further and published Co-operative Housekeeping: How not to do it and How to do it in 1884.The concept of the household cooperative was taken up by the feminist writer Marie Stevens Howland and further developed around 1890 by Mary Coleman Stuckert, who attempted to establish a model of urban row houses with central communal spaces, a central kitchen and cooperative childcare in Denver. The architect Alice Constance Austin also took her cue from Peirce when she designed a complete urban development plan on a cooperative basis with centralized housekeeping in Palmdale, California from 1910 with the Llano del Rio project. The commune existed from 1915 to 1918. Influence on the European one-kitchen house movement is also attributed to the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who around 1900 described her radical concepts of the innovation of gender relations, family and household in both theoretical treatises and novels. The first German written reflections on collective housework can be found in the work of the women's rights activist Hedwig Dohm. In her publication Der Jesuitismus im Hausstande, she argued that due to the historical development of industrialization and the division of labour, the domestic economy was losing more and more of its content and the trend was towards centralization:
August Bebel, in his 1878 publication Die Frau und der Sozialismus, known as the classic of emancipation theory, also outlined a vision of society in which the private household was to be dissolved, food preparation, clothing and the education of children organized in collective institutions outside the home and an end put to the great waste of time, energy, heating and lighting materials and food.
The Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin is also regarded as the father of the idea of the central household. In the discourse history of the one-kitchen house, reference is made to Kropotkin in various treatises over the decades, including by Lily Braun and Henry van de Velde. Nevertheless, this background is often not mentioned to conceal "any connection with the unsubtle past of the one-kitchen houses". It is above all Kropotkin's memorable criticism of the individual household that is widely quoted:
Kropotkin's influence arose not only from his theoretical work, but also from his role as an intermediary in various circles. He was a frequent guest at Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago, had contacts with English art reformers, where he met Lilly Braun, the German Garden City Society and considerable influence on Ebenezer Howard, the founder of Letchworth Garden City.