One of the basic necessities of every person's existence is considered shelter, a home. It comes immediately after a primary necessity that is food. Starting from investigating the rooms and needs for physical well-being and considering how those areas of investigation have been inhabited over the centuries I came across the so-called heart of home: the kitchen. Today it is one of the main rooms of the house, even if it has not always been so. “We’re used to thinking of kitchens as a universal kind of room that almost everyone has as essential as a place to sleep, or a bathroom. Our great-great-grandparents were not.”(Archer 2019)

 

As the architect and researcher within interior architecture Forino says, in the history of the house, the kitchen has been a place that has given itself to many uses and interpretations, both symbolic and functional: workspace, family cradle, female enclosure, servile ghetto, laboratory. Compared to other more representative places in the house such as the living room or intimate places such as the bedroom, a slow evolution marks the design of the kitchen, maintaining for a long time its character of a microcosm, rich in stratifications of uses and customs. Gradual constitutions of the relationships between people, space and all its equipment (the furnishings and, from a certain moment on, the technological instruments) have characterized its significant variations over time, while the close correlation between function and living arrangements seems to have marked its history in the domestic sphere during the different eras. Before being an inhabited and organized space, a kitchen is then a place where man's life is unraveled. (Forino 2019)

 

Despite the fact that over the centuries cooking has not always been considered indispensable and sometimes, “Both the location and size of tenement kitchens varied and most were adapted over time by tenants to serve multiple purposes from bedrooms to bathing rooms to sweatshops” (Etherington 2016) and that still today some people deny its indispensability, this room has become indispensable when designing a house because everyone wants to make their kitchen as beautiful and welcoming as possible. “They buy kitchens for the price of a mid-size car, so as to spend time with friends and family there.” (Maak 2015) recognizing a symbolic value to this room even though by now “they have to work so much for the property and its innards, there is almost no time to live there.”(Maak 2015) Sometimes symbolical and functional meanings collide. To have a beautiful kitchen, with the best appliances and furniture, people forgot the original aim of the kitchen. They prefer to have a very well designed kitchen to show, without the mess that accompany the cooking in favour of a show kitchen as seen in design magazines.

 

Why is this, one of the spaces that has gone through many changes over the centuries from denial of necessity to being the best-organized room in the house? Kitchen is probably the one room that incorporates and reflects within its walls and shelves all the social and technological changes that have occurred over the years. Over the centuries, every great external change has been an internal change.

“The only fully-outfitted kitchens were, prior to the 20th century, true workspaces where household staff laboured in the service of a well-to-do (or even middle-class) family. For the poor and working-class, dwellings generally had no discrete kitchen”. (Archer 2019) After this, the kitchen has changed to adapt to the new type of person living in a new, increasingly industrialised and standardised modernity. The kitchen and its furnishings reflect the social and hierarchical models that are developing in this era. The evolution of customs, relations of authority within the family, relations between different classes under the same roof, the progressive emancipation of the social role of women animate their reality in different and sometimes contradictory ways. In such a perspective, the lived environment - but also its project - can represent one of the contested terrains of class, ethnicity, power, gender confrontation. (Forino 2019) In the first half of the century, appliances began to make their way into kitchens all over the world. “In 1923, an extraordinary invention appeared: the ‘Regulo’. This was a thermostat for a gas oven, so that for the first time meals could be cooked at a known temperature over a measured length of time. This turned cooking from an art into a science” (Worsley 2012) which allowed everyone to cook on the basis of instruction. It is in this 20th where economical  events, like the great depression have occured and many families had to begin to cook their own meals, without resorting to external help from the servants.

 

The arrival of electricity inside kitchens also brings  important changes, even though “in 1939 a mere 8 percent of e.g British homes had electric cookers, and 75 percent stuck with gas.” (Worsley 2012) But electricity began to power the first household appliances that  arrived into homes to "serve" the owners, which were the refrigerator first and then the others. The other great revolution of the century that allowed to bring, even in the homes of the less well-off, an organized and functional environment to be dedicated entirely to the preparation of food is the "frankfurt kitchen". “The fitted kitchen was in fact a German invention. They were inspired by the narrow galley kitchens of railway trains, and the space they contained was tight but very well planned.” (Worsley 2012) and this was a big step forward for the work that had been considered by servants first and exclusively for women later, in fact, “making housework easier was considered a form of emancipation for women.” (Archer 2019) One of major critique to this kind of kitchen was that its smallness isolated women there, and though it was theoretically emancipating due to its efficiency, it essentially guaranteed that wives and mothers would continue to bear the brunt of domestic work alone. Nearly a century later, though considerably improved upon since the 1920s, the gender imbalance in domestic labour remains stubbornly in place. (Archer 2019)

 

Although the spread of this kitchen has been remarkable, over the years we have increasingly moved towards what is considered "the kitchen of dreams" large spaces where you can cook and stay, which leads to having more objects accumulated and never used preferring the "maybe one day I need it" to the real utility. “…Storage is about organising, protecting, preserving, and, sometimes, forgetting. Daily, weekly, seasonal, or undetermined storage…”(Errazuriz 2019) The stuff for cooking are everywhere, the storage space is never enough. Storage is not a necessity for survival as was in ancient time because during some season it was possible to consume only what was conserved, but it is the desire to show that you have everything you need to have a kitchen worthy of the name, as well as continue to write the history of your home and consequently also of the kitchen, without throwing anything away and keeping memories even in objects.

 

From this point of view, we have come to have kitchens made to live more than cooking, but without often having the time and the desire to exploit them, that is the opposite of the need to cook food, which is the basic need that in ancient times permitted to create the kitchen that was reduced to a pot and a fire in the middle of the room.

 

The kitchen is as mentioned already a kind of nutriment and a mirror of the society it represents in that concrete period. If every social behaviour and technological invention has had a relapse inside the kitchen, can we say the same for this pandemic that radically changed the way of living in the house?

The arrival of the world pandemic of COVID 19 caused changes in all the households, in their way of living and especially in the dedicated rooms of symbolic and functional uses. In the case of kitchens, the Italian kitchens first of all, the ancient pleasure of cooking has been rediscovered, especially a food whose lack for many centuries meant suffering hunger: bread. “Bread is constantly the object of an almost unconscious precaution” (De Certeau, Giard, Mayol, 1998). The social and economic difficulties that have hit and are hitting the whole world hard, have allowed us to re-evaluate what the priorities are, allowing us to return to having a recognition of the kitchen, as one of those "dream kitchens" of magazines, where you eat and stay together. During the pandemic, at this time when homes have started to be inhabited again 24 hours a day –the only way, without home delivery service being active, to survive was to cook the food procured in supermarkets at home. You are back to relive the kitchen as it used to be: all that has been rediscovered as a family sits around a table, eating what is produced inside the home. Once again the kitchen has proved to be a reflection of the social changes. In the future, it is probable that the differences between the woman who cooks and the man who cooks in the home will be reset to zero again as it has been until now, but what in the 21st century has been understood as "living the kitchen", will certainly take on another turn.

 

In conclusion, it is possible to say that the combination of food and space, between design and culinary art, has evolved over the centuries into new forms, strictly in connection with family, economic and social structures. Throughout the centuries, the kitchen has been a space of work, of social conquests, a space in which domestic work has developed and then transformed into a place in which to express one's personality. Why forgotten kitchens? After the Frankfurt kitchen trend, today more and more people tend to have research and technology to give maximum satisfaction to those who use and live the kitchen: the latest trends want refined materials; beautiful and super performing appliances, elegant and well-equipped service areas. During this obliged confinement that forced us to re-inhabit the house in all its spaces, those who have a functional kitchen for cooking have benefited a lot from it, returning to the idea of Frankfurt kitchen that was born to fully meet the needs of work. While those who had a kitchen that did not have its own space inside the house, but found themselves sharing the space with other rooms, had a very important impact on the lives of those who live in it.