Early twentieth-century kitchen efficiency: a contrast of ideals

Efficiency in the kitchen became increasingly topical in the first half of the twentieth century. The story of the AGA oven (named after the Swedish company Aktiebolaget Gas Accumulator) illustrates several concerns people had for the kitchen that are still relevant today, such as time and fuel effectiveness, spatial arrangement, heating, a safe kitchen environment for children and the ideal of the ‘heart of the home’. This project takes the premise that assessing the invention and marketing of the AGA will allow for wider examination and contrasting of ideals for efficiency in the kitchen and, to an extent, how traditional values prevail and synthesise with progress. Since women traditionally spent more time in the kitchen they were also the main group affected by these changes, thus marketing was primarily directed at their needs which will also be considered.

Originally the AGA was developed to solve part of the problem of kitchen time-management. It was produced in 1922 by a Swedish inventor called Gustav Dalen for his wife Elma. He noticed that she had trouble with their old iron stove which needed constant attention to keep it at a set temperature. He therefore developed an all-in-one cooker, water heater and laundry dryer based on the principles of radiation heat that would be more efficient and save her time and effort but maintained a rather traditional design. In 1929 the right to produce and sell AGAs was also made possible in Britain, and from there AGAs were soon exported to the rest of the world.

The AGA was marketed in Sweden, Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and other countries. Although adverts emphasised slightly different things about the AGA, many of them tried to sell the oven based on saving money and energy. However, above all its time efficiency and what this meant for women, the main target audience, was emphasised. This is also reflected in the British sales manual for AGAs written by David Ogilvy in 1935 which encourages the salesman to inform cooks of households that purchasing an AGA will give the cook an extra hour in bed and keep the kitchen “as clean as the drawing room.” Even children could be allowed to run freely in the kitchen, which would be an environment safe from burning and gas explosions with an AGA. In adverts, women were depicted as liberated from the drudgery of constantly tending to an old fashioned oven. Instead they could spend time with the children, or take walks or luxurious baths in hot water from their AGA. Moreover, when they are cooking at an AGA, it is portrayed as an easy and joyful activity.

At around the same time as the AGA was developed; there were also radically different ideas in circulation of how efficiency in the kitchen could be achieved. In Germany the Bauhaus school constructed several progressive housing estates based on modern design and functionality. An estate in Frankfurt opened in 1927 included kitchens designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, who made this room into an efficient ‘laboratory’ where shelves, drawers and worktops were conveniently placed, based on influence from literature by American housewife and author Christine Fredrick. This contrasts with the AGA, which also appealed to the emotions of the customers in the way it was marketed. This demonstrates that although efficiency was at the heart of what people wanted, it was approached in different ways. Contrasting these two cases I hope will illustrate how varying approaches to efficiency have led to very different living experiences which are both still popular today.

Efficiency is at the heart of modernity, and also at the heart of the modern kitchen. The kitchen and the way that food is prepared for the household demonstrates different ideals for approaching modern living as it emerged in the early twentieth century. The AGA is symbolic of a more emotional approach to the kitchen, instead of being classified as an efficient laboratory as propagated by the Shütte-Lihotzky kitchen. Thus this project will consider different approaches to efficiency in the kitchen and how these led to different living experiences.