Alice Constance Austin Designed Houses Without Kitchens in 1917

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In many posts on the subject of kitchen design, I’ve tried to answer the question: Why do kitchens look the way they look? I’ve found that it’s more than just cooking.

“Kitchen design, like any other type of design, isn’t just about how things look, it’s political. It’s social. Kitchen design is all about the role of women in society. You can’t look at kitchen design without looking at sexual politics. ”

Readers weren’t impressed, my favorite comment was, “I’ve never read so much stinking rubbish. Jesus, the color of the air can be turned into a sexual policy topic. Get drunk and get laid, you need to relax.”

That commenter should read Meg Conley’s wonderful article, “By Design,” which describes how “white communists, socialists, feminists and capitalists tried to shape society with kitchen design”.

The article covers the brilliant women we discussed on Treehugger, including Christine Frederick, who wanted to make women’s lives easier and more efficient to run the kitchen, just as Frederick Winslow Taylor made it easier for men to shovel coal. Then there was Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Frankfurt kitchen, which is supposed to get women out of the kitchen quickly and efficiently so that they can do more meaningful things. It was always about making cooking less work for women. I’ve found that the ultimate goal is to make it disappear like the sewing room by looking into “Is the End of the Kitchen Nigh?”

“Let’s be honest, half of North America can’t even bother making a cup of coffee, preferring to outsource it to their Keurig. The delivery industry is booming. According to UBS, most of our food is prepared in large quantities.” Robotic kitchens and delivered by drones and droids. So why should anyone need a kitchen at home any more than a sewing machine? ”

Yale Collection of Western Americana, beincke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Conley introduces us to another designer I’d never heard of: Alice Constance Austin, an architect who designed a socialist commune with no kitchens in the houses. Who needs Uber or DoorDash or drones when you have underground tunnels with automated trains? Conley points to an article in Pioneering Women of American Architecture by Dolores Hayden of Yale University, which describes in more detail Austin, who lived from 1862 to 1955.

Yale Collection of Western Americana, beincke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Between 1915 and 1917 she designed “an ideal socialist city”.

“Based on the communitarian socialist tradition in the United States, the Garden City movement in England and the feminist consciousness of their time, she proposed a city of kitchen-less houses. She believed that kitchen-free apartments would free women from the drudgery of unpaid households, and that the substantial savings in housing would enable the development of large-scale public facilities, including communal kitchens and kindergartens. ”

Courtyard house.

Yale Collection of Western Americana, beincke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

This city, Llano del Rio, was to be built near Los Angeles; Austin criticized the “suburban residential street where a Moorish palace bends a pseudo-French castle that frowns on a Swiss chalet,” suggesting simple courtyard houses with bedrooms on one side and living space on the other, and no clue in front of one Kitchen.

“Austin’s designs emphasized the economy of work, material and space. She criticized the waste of time, energy, and money that traditional houses with kitchens require and the “hateful monotonous” drudgery of preparing 1,095 meals a year and cleaning up after each one of her plans for hot meals in special containers from the central kitchens on the dining terrace be consumed, dirty dishes should then be returned to the central kitchens. In the other areas of the house, she provided built-in furniture and rollaway beds to avoid dust and sweeping in difficult spots, heated tile floors to replace dusty carpets, and ornate-framed windows to remove what they call “household scourges” referred to the curtain.

Yale Collection of Western Americana, beincke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

The kitchenless house was connected to a central kitchen via a subway network, which brought groceries and laundry to underground connection points or hubs, where they were transferred to small electric cars that were sent to the basement of each house. All services such as gas, electricity and telephone were also distributed through these tunnels.

She was off a hundred years with some of her ideas, as she preceded Amazon with their plans for home delivery of goods and products through these tunnels. “She believed that removing all business traffic from the center would result in a more relaxing city. The residents could walk to the center. Public delivery systems could meet all of their needs, and goods entering the city could arrive at a centrally located airport by air – cargo landing area. ”

The idea that cooking and washing clothes were drudgery and that unpaid housewife chores should go away did not work out; many socialist utopian projects in Russia and later in kibbutzim in Israel tried it. Nowadays, many people have outsourced their kitchen to convenience foods from supermarkets and delivery services, so I have found that “for most people, the kitchen is a reheating station and a disposal station for all of the take-away containers. Occasionally it becomes an entertainment station for that Cooking as hobby types. ” That’s why I wrote that the future of the kitchen might not be a kitchen at all.

Alice Constance Austin never managed to build her socialist city full of houses with no kitchens, but much can be learned from her plans and concepts. There is also a lot to learn from Conley and her great website Home Culture.

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