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Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| I'm posting early today because I have a dentist thing that will a) take all morning and b) leave me in no shape to form coherent sentences (worse than usual, I mean) in the afternoon. Speaking of posting schedule, I'll be going on a little trip next week, so blog posts will be erratically timed. For today, though, I'll try not to make any tired old "place is in the kitchen" jokes about today's article from Gastro Obscura. No promises. Meet the Feminist Resistance Fighter Who Created the Modern Kitchen  Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky left an indelible mark on Austria, architecture, and how we cook. Sexist jokes notwithstanding, this scene is set in Austria in the 1940s, and it was a central platform, in that era, of a certain political party led by a certain Austrian that women were for children, kitchen, and church. Which should be enough right there to rebel against the entire idea of rigid gender roles. Schütte-Lihotzky had been imprisoned since 1941 for her work as a courier for the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ), which led the resistance against the Nazi regime in her home country. While she managed to narrowly avoid a death sentence, Schütte-Lihotzky remained in jail until the end of World War II in 1945. The incarceration would forever split her life in two. On the one side were her beginnings as a precocious and successful architect spurred on by the desire to create a better life for working-class women. On the other, what she would refer to as her “second life,” as an active communist, political activist, and memoirist who was professionally shunned in Austria for her political beliefs and received her much-deserved accolades only in the final decades of her life. I suppose it could have been worse. Some people don't get recognized until after they croak. Schütte-Lihotzky led a remarkably long and full life, dying a few days short of her 103rd birthday in 2000. But her name remains forever connected to a space she designed when only 29 years old: the Frankfurt Kitchen, the prototype of the modern fitted kitchen. Which is so ubiquitous in developed countries now that it's hard to imagine a time when it didn't exist. Designed in 1926 as part of a large-scale social housing project in Frankfurt, Germany, the “Frankfurt Kitchen” introduced many of the elements we now take for granted... So the concept of a kitchen as we know it today is just under 100 years old. That's not too surprising; 100 years ago, we were still arguing over things like the size of the Universe and what powers the Sun. Still, I'd have said "take for granite," because of the proliferation of granite countertops in kitchens and because I can't resist a gneiss play on words. ...a continuous countertop with a tiled backsplash, built-in cabinets, and drawers optimized for storage—all laid out with comfort and efficiency in mind. Whoever put my kitchen together must have forgotten about the "optimized for storage" bit. “She didn’t just develop a kitchen,” says Austrian architect Renate Allmayer-Beck. “It was a concept to make women’s lives easier by giving them a kitchen where they could manage more easily and have more time for themselves.” Thus leading inexorably to women joining the workforce, which, if you think that's a bad thing, boy are you reading the wrong blog. The article even addresses the obvious: While the Frankfurt Kitchen was marketed as a kitchen designed for women by a woman, Schütte-Lihotzky resented the implication that her gender automatically endowed her with secret domestic knowledge, writing in her memoir that “it fed into the notions among the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie at the time that women essentially work in the home at the kitchen stove.” I vaguely remember featuring a bit back in the old blog about the invention of the automatic dishwasher, which predated the Frankfurt kitchen (I suppose that rolls off the tongue and keyboard more easily than "Schütte-Lihotzky Kitchen") by a few decades. That, too, was a woman's work. And that's the closest I'm going to get to making a "women's work" joke; you're welcome. The Frankfurt Kitchen was efficiently laid out and compact, to save both on costs and the physical effort required to use it. Here, a woman could move from sink to stove without taking a single step. This quest for efficiency also led Schütte-Lihotzky to move the kitchen from a corner of the family room into its own space—a choice that baffled contemporary homemakers. And then, decades later, they'd take away the wall separating the kitchen from the family room, putting it back into one big open space. I spent my childhood in a house with an open-concept kitchen/living area, and I have nothing inherently against it. What I have a problem with is all the remodeling shows that insist on that kind of layout. Not because they insist on it, but because they're thinly-veiled ads for home improvement stores, and they enable that bane of the housing market in the US: house flippers. The article even addresses the open-concept change, if obliquely: When the Frankfurt Kitchen came under fire from second-wave feminists in the 1970s for isolating women in the kitchens and making domestic labor invisible, the critique hit her hard. She defended her design in her memoir. “The kitchen made people’s lives easier and contributed to women being able to work and become more economically independent from men,” she wrote. Still, she conceded, “it would be a sad state of affairs if what was progressive back then were still a paragon of progress today.” I feel like a lot of people would defend their life's work to the last, but that quote demonstrates a willingness to keep an open mind, even later in life, and to acknowledge that nothing is ever truly completed. As they used to say, "a woman's work is never done." There's a lot more at the link, which I found interesting because I was only vaguely aware that today's kitchen designs owed a debt to something called a "Frankfurt Kitchen," but I didn't know anything about how it came to be. I figured maybe someone else might want to know, too. |
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