In Frankfurt, Triangular. New Frankfurt Kitchen 2040 sets 21 prototypes against Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s kitchen a century later, imagining a kitchen of the future that is less isolated, more adaptable, repairable and shared.
The kitchen of the future may not look like a kitchen at all. It could be a table that moves to wherever people gather, an appliance powered by hand or foot, or a set of tableware that slows the act of eating and puts the focus back on food. This is the territory explored by Triangular. New Frankfurt Kitchen 2040, an exhibition that opened to the public on November 7 at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, and runs until November 29, 2026.
The timing is more than an anniversary. A hundred years ago, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurter Küche (Frankfurt Kitchen), the archetype of the modern fitted kitchen: a minimal, rational space organized to cut down the movements and time spent on housework. The exhibition revisits that promise of efficiency and turns its question on its head. If homes are shrinking and domestic functions are becoming mobile, shared or temporary, the issue is no longer just how to work faster. It is where, with whom and with what resources we will cook.
From the work triangle to a network of relationships: rethinking the kitchen of the future
The project brings together design students from Politecnico di Milano, TU Delft and İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi (Istanbul Technical University). Working with De’Longhi Braun Household and the rams foundation, they developed 21 projects shown as models and prototypes, alongside a further 30 concepts presented in short films. The involvement of a manufacturer is openly stated and offers a link to industrial scale; what the museum displays, however, remains first and foremost a research lab, not a catalog of market-ready products.
The curatorial framework is built around four words — economy, society, humanity, culture — that expand the traditional “work triangle” between sink, refrigerator and stove. Economy concerns the intensive use of ever-smaller floor areas; society introduces deceleration and community; humanity treats objects as understandable, repairable companions rather than merely efficient machines; culture recognizes that ingredients, rituals and gestures cannot be squeezed into a single domestic model.
This shift matters because many contemporary kitchens try to disappear, blending into the living area behind doors and panels. Triangular proposes a complementary direction: the kitchen does not vanish, but loses its boundaries and spreads out across furniture, objects, services and places where people meet.
Three prototypes, three paradigm shifts
The most convincing ideas come from projects that do not add technology for its own sake. Mesa by Nandus Lemlijn is a mobile station for preparing and sharing food: instead of confining the cook to a separate room, it brings the activity to wherever the group is. The countertop becomes a social threshold that works as well in a compact apartment as in a shared space.
The Turning Point by Babette Koppert imagines a multifunctional appliance operated by hand or foot and designed to be repaired. It is not a nostalgic exercise in living without electricity. It brings into the design the legibility of effort, maintenance, and the possibility of continuing to use an object when one component breaks. For manufacturers, this means treating access to mechanisms, spare parts and disassembly as formal parts of the product, not as services tacked on afterward.
With Savour, Stan Haenen works on tableware to fight food waste and slow down consumption. The form demands attention, invites diners to use their hands and makes the meal less automatic. Here, innovation does not mean a new electronic function: it is a choreography of behavior achieved through weight, surface and the way an object is used.
None of the three claims to deliver the 2040 kitchen on its own. Together, though, they point to a clear shift: from the performance of a single appliance to the quality of the experience, from a fixed workstation to an adaptable infrastructure, and from hidden obsolescence to visible maintenance.
When the kitchen leaves the room
Urban densification and the cost of housing, curator Sven Wuttig notes in his account of the exhibition, demand more value from less space. But a mobile or shared kitchen cannot simply be conceived as a piece of furniture on wheels. For interior designers, it raises very practical questions: where water, power and ventilation run; how clean and dirty surfaces are kept apart; which elements can move without compromising ergonomics, safety and accessibility; and how odors, acoustics and storage are managed in hybrid spaces.
Conviviality, too, has to be designed, not just evoked. A central counter can bring people together, but it must also accommodate different postures, heights and abilities. A repairable appliance requires accessible joints and a supply chain for components. An object that slows down a meal only works if cleaning and durability do not turn the ritual into an obstacle. These checks come before choosing finishes, and they make it all the more important to design your kitchen before ordering it.
The most useful lesson of Triangular. New Frankfurt Kitchen 2040 is therefore not a form to copy. It is a change in the unit of measurement. The modern 20th-century kitchen counted steps and minutes; the kitchen of the future imagined in Frankfurt measures relationships, adaptability, durability and how easily it can be understood by those who use it. The future does not abolish efficiency: it finally asks for whom, for how long, and at what human and material cost.
Sources: Museum Angewandte Kunst; Politecnico di Milano; World Design Capital Frankfurt RheinMain 2026; Frankfurter Rundschau.
