The kitchen takes center stage at the Museum of Modern Art this week with the opening of their latest exhibit, “Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen.” The retrospective takes an artistic view of the post-servant home kitchen over the past century, a room “previously hidden from view in a basement or annex,” MoMA explains, which “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.”
That translates into displays of items ranging from the first brown paper bag (designed in 1883), to the hourglass-shaped Kikkoman soy sauce dispenser, to Andy Warhol’s Brillo-box screen prints — not to mention what the New York Times describes as “a stupendous recent acquisition: one of the last surviving examples of a relatively complete Frankfurt Kitchen designed in 1926-27 by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000), Austria’s first female architect.” The show (which is cheekily sponsored by Silestone Quartz Surfaces — they produce, yes, counter space) is up through March 14, 2011.
Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen [MoMA]
The Heart That Beats, Heats, Chills and Whips [NYT]
