At MoMa, everything and the kitchen sink

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Kitchen design objects exhibit at N.Y. museum gives historical, social and aesthetic context.

Sometimes a kitchen is just a kitchen, but not often. If a house is a machine for living, as Le Corbusier said, then the kitchen is its engine. If that machine is seen as a living organism, then the kitchen is its heart and brain.

The many-splendored thing that is the modern kitchen - as a coherent workspace, object of study, model of efficiency and a leading indicator of the state of design ever since - began to take shape sometime around 1900.

It has also been a battlefield of conflicting belief systems, not least regarding the role of women in society. As the use of servants declined, housewives became at once early adopters of new products meant to free them from drudgery and the corporate advertising that relentlessly defined them as household fixtures themselves.

Which is to say, kitchens were heavily symbolic sites long before any of us became involved with the ones that bless or blight our individual lives. This is elaborately demonstrated by "Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Using a tantalizing sprawl of design objects, artifacts and artworks, "Counter Space" places the modern kitchen in a broad historical context.

It is bound to invite personal memories: I rediscovered the Ekco vegetable peeler, Chemex coffeemaker and copper-bottomed Revere Ware saucepan of my mother's kitchen; the Terraillon plastic food scale and timer from my first New York apartment; and the old domed Magnalite tea kettle that an ex-boyfriend cherished.

But in the main, this exhibition sprints with dazzling speed and pinpoint precision across an amazing amount of social and aesthetic history and shows how these histories are connected. The kitchen's design evolution meshed with the new availability of gas and electricity; with the rise of cities, the middle class and health consciousness; with early stabs at prefab housing; with the growing independence of women.

Of course, the kitchen evolved with the emergence of modern design itself, as a self-consciously forward-looking, socially minded discipline whose brief was to improve everyday life for all.

The show's centerpiece is a stupendous recent acquisition: one of the last surviving examples of a relatively complete Frankfurt Kitchen designed in 1926-27 by Margarete Schuette-Lihotzky (1897-2000), Austria's first female architect.

It was mass-produced for housing blocks built in Frankfurt to meet housing shortages caused by the devastation of World War I, and remains a model of cockpitlike clarity and purpose. Including a grid of small metal bins (for storing rice and the like) that resembles a hardware store, it was one of several modern kitchens designed mostly in Germany in the late 1920s.

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