The Kitchen and Its Discontents

The Kitchen and Its Discontents
Sep 27, 2026 – Mar 14, 2027

United States United States — Art Museum
5905 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90036

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents The Kitchen and Its Discontents, on view from 27 September 2026 through 14 March 2027 in the Resnick Pavilion. The exhibition 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.

Historically a site of women's labor, the kitchen has also been the subject of their design research and cultural critique. The understanding of the kitchen as a specialized, separate cooking space is both modern and largely Western. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, manuals and model homes demonstrated how scientific principles of efficiency and hygiene could be incorporated into domestic life. While advertisements promoted glistening countertops and continuous cabinetry punctuated with sparkling new appliances, documentary photography captured improvisational, multi-use spaces in ordinary homes.

Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen, designed for Ernst May's social housing project, was a narrow double-file kitchen measuring 1.9 by 3.4 meters. It was sometimes described as a "laboratory of housework," designed to rationalize the everyday life of the modern woman through optimized procedures oriented toward industrial production. For the first time, standardized modules were installed, allowing for massive industrial manufacturing of kitchens and efficient use of living space. The goal was to enable efficient housekeeping so that housewives could spend less time in the kitchen.

Perriand's kitchen for Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation represented a shift toward a more open space. Designed between 1948 and 1950 and made circa 1952, it incorporated oak, beach and oak plywood, aluminum, and stoneware. Over time, the ideal kitchen shifted from one managed by an expert with factory-like precision to a more flexible environment. Even so, improvements did little to lighten women's domestic burden, and artists continued to bear witness to the quotidian messes and simmering tensions that underlie the domestic terrain.

The exhibition examines the kitchen as a contested space for labor and living, depicting it as a microcosm for societal inequities and a stage for complex family dramas. It is presented concurrently with Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias, which traces six decades of domestic visions through architectural models, drawings, photographs, films, and objects. Together, the exhibitions explore design as an agent of social, political, and economic transformation in modern domestic life, fusing aesthetics and technology, social history and commerce.

Image: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #3, 1977, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, © 2026 Cindy Sherman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, photo courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.


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