Second coming

September 8, 2023 10:39 AM

A neglected workers’ housing project by Alvar Aalto is being lovingly revived by design-minded Finns. New residents, who include museum directors and high-ranking public servants, have been restoring the interiors to their original state and giving façades gentle nips and tucks.
posted by folklore724 (21 comments total)

For Laura and her husband, this meant making the kitchen larger than the original so that they could comfortably cook meals and host guests.

No duh. My first thought upon viewing the photos was WTF? -- which lifestyle genius designed a kitchen narrower than a closet in the first place?
posted by y2karl at 11:24 AM on September 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

No duh. My first thought upon viewing the photos was WTF? -- which lifestyle genius designed a kitchen narrower than a closet in the first place?

In Europe, the model was the Frankfurter Küche, a kitchen designed for efficiency rather than comfort. It was a bad idea, but since most architects back then were people who never cooked, it gained a wide following, and not just for worker's housing. There were of course exceptions, but I can't find active links to my favorite examples.

Even during my childhood in the 1960s and -70s, an "American kitchen" was an exotic luxury.
posted by mumimor at 12:22 PM on September 8, 2023 [11 favorites]

Do architects ever do anything that isn't architecture?

I ask as an extremely frustrated librarian conducting a several-years-long fight with the architects of the new building we're gonna be railroaded into to have anything in it at all that I can recognize as a library. (And losing, damn it. Losing real, real bad.) That, and the several libraries designed by hotshot architects in the last decade or so that have been total unadulterated crap as actual libraries.

And it comes down to architects having no idea (other than maybe some of the usual bullshit stereotypes) how libraries work, and refusing to learn.
posted by humbug at 12:54 PM on September 8, 2023 [20 favorites]

I feel like that's more the fault of whoever's employing the architect, then, if you're not empowered to veto things?
posted by sagc at 1:05 PM on September 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, that's as much your employer telling you that having an icon as a building is much more important to them than your opinions about how the building actually should work as it is about the architects not knowing how to do things (although they deserve blame for not caring).

Architects are pretty much required in the US for every building that's not a single family residence or a duplex, so yeah, architects do tons of non-fussy utilitarian work all over.
posted by LionIndex at 1:23 PM on September 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

And it comes down to architects having no idea (other than maybe some of the usual bullshit stereotypes) how libraries work, and refusing to learn.

As an architect who specialized in listening to users before I gave up and became an academic, I designed two libraries in close dialogue with the librarians. The first time I was ghosted by the municipality and one of my students finished the project (which was weird), the second time I was fired by the (different) municipality for spending too much time listening to the librarians and citizens involved in the project.

I'm not saying don't blame the architects, because plenty architects are arrogant and don't give a shit about the future use of their buildings. I am saying many politicians prefer those architects to someone who cares, for reasons I don't entirely understand. It's not like I wasn't an award-winning big-shot architect at the time, because I was. The difference was that I had learnt on one of my first jobs that good dialogues lead to good long-time care of the structure. In the second of the two library projects, the librarians forced the new architect to do exactly what we had proposed! But architecture is layered, so the new architects couldn't provide the details we were planning, which meant the material quality wasn't sustainable.
posted by mumimor at 1:25 PM on September 8, 2023 [17 favorites]

I lived for a couple of months in an old fancy-but-small apartment in Helsinki that had a kitchen pretty much exactly like that. It was built a couple of decades before Aalto’s housing project. Kitchens at the time were just in that style. Using it took a couple of weeks to get used to, but once I did it was perfectly functional. I even ended up doing some fairly complicated cooking in there.

The current apartment I live in, built in the 40s in Helsinki, has a larger kitchen, but not dramatically so, and it’s also quite easy to use, because it was designed for that sort of space.

Also, while I’m at it, Aalto designed a bunch of libraries, including in Reykjavík, and the librarians I know who’ve worked there think they’re great.
posted by Kattullus at 1:30 PM on September 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

I want to defend the Frankfurt Kitchen a little - it was designed by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, who definitely was intending to provide a humanitarian, useful space, even though she admits she did not cook. As a response to a housing crisis it is, however, extremely small - i think to provide more living space in an era where the kitchen was not considered "front of house". Here's a good article in MoMa that dives into some of the research that supported the design, including user interviews and studies.

I'm also an architect, and totally agree with mumimor. Plenty of architects (including my colleagues) use user group and stakeholder feedback as an integral part of their process. The are also plenty that don't, and plenty of outside pressures (desire for monument, owner vs occupant, cost and schedule) that make it the harder row to hoe. With libraries, in my county we have two major libraries, one that was designed (and recently renovated) with extensive community and librarian input and the other that is an enormous boondoggle that is not only an ineffective library but also an ineffective school. Build the process that leads to the building you want.
posted by q*ben at 2:00 PM on September 8, 2023 [10 favorites]

I love Aalto but all I could think was "this workers' housing is being lovingly restored by people who can all afford second homes."
posted by fedward at 2:18 PM on September 8, 2023 [14 favorites]

My mom totally loves that kind of kitchen! She's pretty much gotten my dad to renovate every house they've had to give her the "galley" kitchen. The last place he moved a wall to make the kitchen smaller. Which blew my mind a bit at first, like, Dad why would you go through all that trouble to spare her a step or two in the kitchen? then I realized that it expanded his workshop on the other side of the wall.
The thing about a kitchen like that is it's great if you just want to be cooking by yourself. One person can be super efficient working in that space, so if you don't actually like cooking with other people, it's ideal.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 2:26 PM on September 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

In Europe, the model was the Frankfurter Küche, a kitchen designed for efficiency rather than comfort. It was a bad idea, but since most architects back then were people who never cooked, it gained a wide following, and not just for worker's housing. There were of course exceptions, but I can't find active links to my favorite examples

These seem commonplace in Seattle apartments I've lived in and visited. I'd imagine this to be the case in a number of space-confined apartments in major metropolitan areas.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:50 PM on September 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

If an architect isn't listening to you then you almost certainly aren't the client that's paying their invoices.
posted by deadwax at 3:57 PM on September 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

Yeah, you might adopt the persona in that commercial where the young homeowners lament that their new house "has aunts."

"I hope we can keep it clean."
posted by rhizome at 4:01 PM on September 8, 2023

More photos of the various buildings.
posted by Ideefixe at 4:07 PM on September 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

These seem commonplace in Seattle apartments I've lived in and visited. I'd imagine this to be the case in a number of space-confined apartments in major metropolitan areas.

Yes of course, the difference is that in Europe, you will see this type of kitchens even in suburban luxury homes, right up to the 1970s, unless the client had been in the US and seen alternatives (with a few noteworthy exceptions).

Even today, European appliances are much smaller than US appliances, because they have to fit into historical spaces.

When my dad and stepmother moved to the suburbs, they moved the kitchen from a tiny space in the ground floor to a big space in the basement, and it was a very nice big kitchen with space for eating and socializing in general. But it also meant we spent a lot of time underground and that the ground floor was rarely used. Today I think people in that development are making big kitchens on the ground level, sacrificing what was probably meant to be a den or small dining room in the original lay-out. But that would have been too radical in the 1960s.

Homes that were built before WW1 usually had relatively big kitchens, because there needed to be space for the wood or coal fired stove and tons of storage, and even middle-class households would have help, while in working class families, the kitchen would be used for bathing and eating and sleeping as well as cooking, so it made sense that it took up a large part of the apartment. On my mother's side of the family we always lived in that type of home, until in 1974, when my grandparents moved to a new terraced house with a galley style kitchen. That was the first time I really experienced such a thing (rather than saw it at friends' houses). And it was sleek, clean and efficient. But not a place where everyone helps out with Christmas dinner. Whenever my grandparents had more than four guests, they would order in from a catering business, and we had a lot of family events at restaurants.
posted by mumimor at 4:35 PM on September 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Frankfurt kitchen, previously on Metafilter.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 5:37 PM on September 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

I spent my non-military (siviilipalvelus) year when I was about 20 working in IT in University of Jyväskylä so I spent a lot of time in different buildings and spaces of his design and loved it. As said above those kitchens are extremely common in Finland, the apartment building where I live was built in 1965 and my kitchen layout/space is pretty much like in that Frankfurt kitchen wikipedia article photo.
posted by fridgebuzz at 2:35 AM on September 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

I wish I had a Frankfurt kitchen. It would occupy 1/4 of my entire studio, but still.
posted by hototogisu at 3:40 AM on September 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

I've had a number of galley kitchens before that were clearly at least somewhat based on the Frankfurt model. Like someone said, mostly it is great if you are cooking alone, very efficient, but not great if others want to be in that space as well. My current house has a needlessly large kitchen -- it is beautiful and you could have a dozen people standing in there during a party, but for day to day cooking it is inefficient because the distances between fridge, sink, stove, etc. are larger.

I agree with the irony of having worker housing become vacation/second-home housing for the wealthy. But it also seems like a much better outcome than letting it continue to deteriorate or be torn down.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:49 AM on September 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

I have cooked meals for many since I was a teenager, including for huge partys. Once I cooked a couscous royale for several hundred people on two burners in a lower Manhattan art gallery. I was offered a job as a private chef. I've cooked over open fire at garden parties. I think this all started while cooking on a trangia on a camping trip when I was 15. I've cooked many, many meals in my former Frankfurt style kitchens.

But, what I want to say is that of course it is possible to cook excellent food in a small kitchen. But it is a lot more fun to share the work with friends and family and have enough space that people can gather in the kitchen.

I really understand why our mothers and grandmothers didn't want to be trapped in those kitchens, all the power to them. But as opposed to making the kitchen a tiny factory where the housewife could be super efficient, my dream has always been to have a kitchen where all the interesting stuff happened, and where everyone participated.

Anyway, this kitchen stuff is a bit of a derail. The article is inspiring, I never thought of reusing those brilliant social housing projects for second homes, which would make a lot of sense in many places.
posted by mumimor at 7:46 AM on September 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

If we repeat the Great Compression of wealth the nicely kept up second houses will get sold as only homes and we won’t need to rebuild them. Distant result though.

I see small houses and apartments with the kitchen along one wall of a room-with-the-big-table, and a curtain or sliding wall as optional divider. Meant to switch between working like a country kitchen with everyone in it and like a kitchen-for-work with a distinct socializing space. But I’ve never lived with one!

I did really like an apartment that had a shuttered window between the galley kitchen and the main room; we put the table right under it and we could talk through it, use it as a pass, or let the cook concentrate, cooks choice. Pretty good! I personally often want to concentrate briefly in the kitchen and then come socialize.
posted by clew at 10:16 AM on September 9, 2023 [2 favorites]