Historically a site of women’s labor, the kitchen has also been the subject of their design research and cultural critique. The Kitchen and Its Discontents brings two influential kitchens from LACMA’s collection into conversation: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s 1926–30 kitchen for the New Frankfurt social housing program in Germany, and Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier’s 1948–50 kitchen for L’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France. These designers applied modern principles of efficiency and modularity to the home, with the aim of improving women’s lives. However, the reality was always more complicated, as revealed in photographs, prints, and advertisements from LACMA’s collection, which examine the everyday messes and simmering tensions in the domestic terrain, depicting the kitchen as a contested space for labor and living. It is presented concurrently with Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias.
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