By Daniel Falcone
This is a great book from 2008, that I recently reread, perhaps it is of interest. (Great resource for any history teacher)
While Francesca Bray looked at “embodied practices” to explain how technology within China was gendered in everyday life, Cold War Kitchen has a similar argument regarding domestication as a scripted phenomenon. Bray is interested in domesticated space and her writing sets up nicely the subsequent arguments advanced by Cowan (who argues that “labor saving appliances” did not reduce labor) as well as Oldenziel and Zachmann.
1959 marked an “act of diplomatic high drama” that “thrusted the Cold War kitchen onto center stage.” This book uses that summer’s Moscow General Electric kitchen as backdrop for a debate between Nixon and Khrushchev. In this book kitchen is defined as “a complex technological artifact that ranks with computers, cars and nuclear missiles.” The authors argue that “the modern kitchen embodies the ideology of the culture to which it belongs.”
Although kitchens have large amounts of “gadgetry” they share close associations with general infrastructure “via an intricate web of large technical systems.” Understanding kitchens means understanding on how they rely on a host of social actors that define their social and political space. The USA and USSR demonstrated how the kitchen combined artifacts with politics.
This book reviews prior scholarship that explained how artifacts articulated politics, interest groups, interactions between citizens and the state and how “the Cold War became a heated political arena” re: the kitchen. The kitchen as an industrial complex offers an investigation of a “broader geopolitical context.” Post war societies in Europe had housing shortages that lasted until1960. This book traces the “transatlantic clash between American corporations and the European welfare state versions of technological development.”
In the 20th centuries, the kitchen became a performance stage for competing command economies struggling to brand themselves as the model for development and ‘modernization within a single generation.’ Cold War Kitchen “seeks to examine how a host of social actors” formed “mediation junctions.”
The authors are interested in this in the context of 20th century Europe, where kitchens “were embedded in state housing policy.” They argue that a focus on the users of the Frankfurt Kitchen were not merely passive consumers. Socialist architects attempted to rationalize Taylorism or scientific management to create new kitchen spaces. Actor-network theory is also included in the book to illustrate how women had agency and expertise and “a temporary alliance between women's organizations and nation states emerged in many countries.”
The authors focus on 1) consumers not just producers, 2) new professionals, 3) governmental agencies, 4) businesses and 5) opinion leaders. The book forces the reader to consider Europe and the transatlantic technological transfer, not just the USA/USSR. Kitchens functioned “as tools of normalization of radical technologies.” The “good” US vs. the “evil” USSR has silenced the history of the kitchen debate, one that should look at how “material practices of a specific European condition and of modernizers were linked to the welfare state.”
Heßler’s work in Chapter 7 regarding Schutte-Lihotsky’s Frankfurt kitchen, analyzes “the gap between modernist ideas and housewives’ practices.” Frankfurt housewives “protested against the architects’ rules and ideas that were inscribed in the kitchen design.” Heßler discusses the German Frankfurt kitchen of the 1920s as not just the kitchen, “it was a materialized concept of modern life,” “a laboratory for the housewife,” as she goes beyond a summary of the users but their resistance to Taylorism. The Frankfurt Kitchen was intentionally designed with task-based features, clean, ventilated, and colored blue.
The design project did not just consist of architects and politicians but women's associations. The goal was neither an Americanized nor Sovietized kitchen, but a socialist conception of a kitchen based on American values. Without this historical explanation there's no complexity within the history of the kitchen as the scholar wants us to focus on the tenant response to Frankfurt and the dialogue between the designers and the users. In 1933, the fascists banned modern architecture and were opposed to the Frankfurt kitchen, thus furthers its ability to be “appropriated as a Cold War weapon.”
This reading reminded me of the “trickle down,” concept. I understand trickle down to mean that when it comes to the American and Soviet perspectives of technological development, that the citizens are not really participants, and they just have limited choices and whatever benefits they receive from the command economy they receive. In the case of the Soviet Union this looked very harsh. The United States finessed a human face on capitalism but decisions about technology were still coming from the Pentagon without any input from the public arena.
Also, this reading got me to think about how architecture can be abused when the artist puts the design above the functionality of the building or the structure. Architecture is supposed to be a practical art but if you are just focused on the production of something and not the human consequences then that will pose an obvious problem.
Lastly, the most interesting notion regarding this in my view are the unintended consequences of the actors and producers on the kitchen creations in the cold war era. In other words, the Americans, and Soviets both claimed their top-down kitchen models as respectively exceptional. Both created a notion and standard of modernization that allowed them to maintain compliant consumers. On the other hand, kitchen design in the context of the European welfare state worked the opposite way: rational social planning to deliver equitable and fair housing with kitchen design central, created a resistance within the kitchen construct.