In the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, there is currently held exhibition Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen. It explores the transformation and the social role kitchen played in the period after the Second World War in the West, especially in the lives of women. For me, it was particularly interesting too see it as there was similar exhibition organized in Belgrade, covering the same period. I wrote about it in the post Women’s Socialist Corner.

On the web site, the concept of the exhibition is described in the following way: 

Counter Space explores the twentieth-century transformation of the kitchen and highlights MoMA’s recent acquisition of an unusually complete example of the iconic “Frankfurt Kitchen,” designed in 1926–27 by the architect Grete Schütte-Lihotzky. In the aftermath of World War I, thousands of these kitchens were manufactured for public-housing estates being built around the city of Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany. Schütte-Lihotzky’s compact and ergonomic design, with its integrated approach to storage, appliances, and work surfaces, reflected a commitment to transforming the lives of ordinary people on an ambitious scale. Previously hidden from view in a basement or annex, the kitchen became a bridgehead of modern thinking in the domestic sphere—a testing ground for new materials, technologies, and power sources, and a spring board for the rational reorganization of space and domestic labor within the home.

I took some photos (not of the greatest quality, but still):

I like NPR interview with the exhibition's curator Juliet Kinchin in which she explains that designing kitchen was a political act.

Here is an excerpt: 

"For centuries, really, the kitchen had been ignored by design professionals, not least because it tended to be lower-class women or servants who occupied the kitchen space," she says.

"The kitchens were often poorly ventilated, shoved to the basement or annex, and caused a lot of drudgery in the kitchen."

It was women who led the reform of the kitchen into an efficient space — one to be proud of. Kinchin says, "they were trying to adopt a scientific approach to housework and raise the status of housework."

"The designer of [The Frankfurt Kitchen], Grete Schuette-Lihotzky, was passionately concerned about the quality of women's lives," Kinchin continues. "She felt without sorting the drudgery they were involved in, they'd never have time to develop themselves in a professional way."

What I think after seeing exhibitions in Belgrade and in New York is that visually they are quite alike. There was the Cold War and the Iron Curtain, but the kitchen was and is still that warm place to gather and to share. The change that has happened in the last fifty years is kitchen becoming not only women's but men's corner as well.