Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000) was an Austrian architect born in Vienna and one of the first women in Austria to study and practice architecture. She trained from 1915 to 1918 at the Kunstgewerbeschule (now the University of Applied Arts) under Oskar Strnad and worked with Adolf Loos on settlements for World War I veterans. In 1926 Ernst May brought her to Frankfurt's building department, where she designed the Frankfurt Kitchen, a compact, fully built-in kitchen planned with time studies to save labor; it was installed in about 10,000 municipal apartments and is a forerunner of the modern fitted kitchen. She later worked in the Soviet Union and Turkey, was imprisoned for four years for her role in the anti-Nazi resistance, and practiced as an independent architect in Vienna from 1947 until 1969. LACMA's "The Kitchen and Its Discontents" presents her Frankfurt Kitchen from its collection.