The Modern Interior

The staff canteen at the Bijenkorf department store, The Hague, designed by P. L. Kramer,
1924, illustrated in Wendingen in 1925.
the unique’, and what he called ‘models in the proper sense of the word’,
interiors, that is, which contained items that were, through mass production,
accessible to a large sector of society. 4
Although Christine Frederick’s rational kitchens, discussed in the
previous chapter, were based on the principles of efficiency and productivity,
and similar objects appeared in all of them, she had stopped short
of advocating the principle of industrialized standardization. Instead she
had remained committed to the craft process. By the 1920s, in Germany,
the question of ‘standards’ had emerged as an important issue however,
manifested, for example, in the formulation of the din (Deutsches Institut
für Normung) standards. It was within that climate that Grete Schütte-
Lihotzky developed her famous kitchen design, the standardized compon -
ents of which were manufactured in huge numbers. ‘The Frankfurt
Kitchen was a factory-assembled module delivered to a building site and
lifted into place by crane. Ten thousand were installed in the Frankfurt 151