By Katy Kramer
Illustrations by Stephanie Milewski

You remember the scene in the film All the President’s Men. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward walks the length of a dismal parking garage.

A lighter flashes in a corner. Deep Throat pulls on a cigarette and, as Woodward moves toward him, steps out from the shadows. “Where are you?” he asks.

“The story is dry,” says Woodward. “All we’ve got are pieces. We can’t seem to figure out what the puzzle is supposed to look like.”

“Forget the myths the media’s created about the White House,” Deep Throat says. “Follow the money.”

A decade ago, when architecture professor Elizabeth Cromley set out to solve a mystery in her own work, she discovered its key was just as obvious—and just as overlooked.

She followed the food.

Or more precisely, the “food axis.” That’s what Cromley, an expert in a field known as vernacular architecture, calls the spaces in a typical home devoted to preparing, storing, and serving food. And the mystery? Explaining how—and why—the American kitchen has evolved, from the seventeenth century into the twenty-first.

Like Woodward and Bernstein gumshoeing their way through the Watergate labyrinth, Cromley has followed the trail of fireplaces, bake ovens, root cellars, and cisterns, studying how kitchens have moved from basements and outbuildings to become the epicenter of the modern household.

And she’s discovered what some might consider a shocking twist: Eating influences architecture. House design adapts to accommodate meal preparation. As Laura Ingalls Wilder’s open-hearth spits and pots morphed over time into Julia Child’s commercial range and Cuisinart, the structure of our houses shifted around them.

Cauldron of change

Through her research, Cromley has documented the gradual changes in American kitchen culture, from a Pilgrim Thanksgiving; to a middle-class version of Upstairs, Downstairs, complete with cook, maid, and pantry; to a Home Improvement kitchen, an all-in-one space that contains not just the entire food axis, but neighborhood, parental, and coming-of-age dramas as well.

Bake day: Typical kitchen and appliances, circa 1880.

She’s found the modifications in kitchen design—and, by extension, house design—spring less from architectural ideals than from transformations in women’s roles and household economy. “The function of a specific space in a house,” she says, “starts with food.

“Every time a new kitchen concept comes in, it changes the architecture of houses where owners can afford to remodel or developers sense a market advantage,” Cromley explains. “Quite often, the new kitchen idea reshapes the plan, and therefore the exterior as well as the interior—the way that house owners in the 1980s added huge family-room/kitchen additions onto the backs of older houses.”

Traditional architectural theory holds that major change is driven by innovators, figures like Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, or Mies van der Rohe. They create new ways of seeing space, new building plans; everyone else follows suit. At the high-style end of architecture, this is indeed often the case.

Victorian behavior: Though advice books preached order to the American housewife, room restorations (like this one in Baltimore’s Peale Museum) indicate the average nineteenth-century kitchen was rarely a model of systemization.

But if you study vernacular architecture—the architecture of ordinary buildings—you see another kind of development, one more organic and incremental. “Buildings are interesting over life spans,” Cromley says, “as opposed to the architecture [notion] that says, Once you’ve built it, it’s done.” She’s interested in what happens to buildings after they’re “finished.” For instance, when a well-to-do family sells its house to a couple who takes in boarders, who then sells it to a landlord who uses it as rental property.

In traditional architectural history classes, students analyze Jefferson’s Monticello, Bulfinch’s Massachusetts State House, and other crowning achievements of design. In vernacular architecture classes, students investigate, as Cromley puts it, “the average and the ordinary.” Like the difference between formal and vernacular speech, vernacular architecture is everyday architecture, the buildings we routinely see, the ones that satisfy most people’s needs.

“There’s a way to study architectural history by studying the architects,” Cromley says. The other way, her way, takes a lot more time and legwork. To get to the bottom of a run-of-the-mill building, you have to locate its deed. Check city atlases for a construction date and the federal census for documented residents. Investigate building materials and room relationships. Look at old photographs. Interview neighbors and residents.

Vernacular analysis focuses on quantity, not quality. It seeks to discover why certain types of buildings evolved as the best solutions. For example, some houses are designed with vestibules. Others let visitors walk through the front door directly into an interior room.

What accounts for the variation? The vestibule entry originated in neighborhoods where social class mattered; it allowed servants to serve as bouncers of sorts, turning away the riffraff. Neighborhoods where guests could tromp right into a house, on the other hand, tended to value close, personal relationships more highly. And so vernacular investigation not only documents space, it reveals social trends and cultural patterns as well.

Ordinary spaces

According to Cromley, the current interest in vernacular architecture is rooted in the historic preservation movement, which gained strength in the 1970s. It’s also influenced by the work of social historians, who, by the 1960s and 1970s, were less interested in a “great men, great events” view of history and more interested in the lives of common people, including what they built and what those buildings said about them.

Vernacular architecture’s first pillar was England’s Vernacular Architecture Group (VAG), which, from its formation in 1952, studied churches, houses, and other typical buildings in the British Isles. “VAG had been documenting houses and building techniques, fabrication and construction materials,” Cromley explains, “and got interested in farm buildings, field settings, frontier fences, slave cabins, and all sorts of stuff.”

In 1980, VAG held a conference in Washington, D.C. It turned out to be a watershed event for Cromley, who, having earned a master’s from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1966, was working toward a PhD in art history at the City University of New York. “I knew I was frustrated, but I didn’t know what bothered me,” she recalls.

Back in her undergraduate days at the University of Pennsylvania, Cromley had written an honors thesis on Palladian architecture, surveying how eighteenth-century English gentlemen designed their homes around the drawings of sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. “Studying wealthy gentlemen and country houses would have been the norm,” she says. “But I was interested in where the servants lived.

“I kept veering off into social architecture instead of the style and the ornament,” says Cromley. “It was more interesting to me.” In 1978, she wrote an article on Catskills resort architecture. The doctoral dissertation she was working on followed the development of the New York apartment from 1860 to 1905.

Up until the VAG conference, Cromley believed her architectural philosophy and interests ran counter to traditional thinking. Still, the meeting agenda looked encouragingly off the beaten path; perhaps others thought the way she did.

“At the time, I was working with sociologists in New York City who were looking at how people renovated the exterior of older housing stock,” Cromley says, “and I thought I could say something about that.” The job gave her access to renovation photographs and owner interviews, which she assembled for a conference presentation. She pointed out trends, made comparisons. Maybe that’s what I do, she mused.

Her VAG talk began the remodeling of her career. “All of a sudden, I was in a room with a hundred people who did what I did, and all of a sudden I had a name for it. I came back thinking, My life has been saved.” Sort of like finding Watergate’s Deep Throat—someone who verifies what you’ve been putting together and nudges you in the right direction.

Not long after, the U.S. version of VAG, the Vernacular Architecture Forum, held its first meeting. The focus was “ordinary architecture,” or, as Cromley puts it, “what regular architecture ignored.” It was right up her alley. Now she knew she was on to something.

In 1980, Cromley became an assistant professor of architectural history at SUNY Buffalo. By 1995, she was the chair of the Architecture department there, had coedited two books, written four book chapters, and published numerous articles with titles like “Sleeping Around: A History of the American Bedroom” and “Modernizing—or, ‘You never see a screen door on affluent homes.’” Cromley came to Northeastern in 1997; she chaired the Art and Architecture department for four years before stepping down to concentrate on teaching and research.

Who moved my cheese?

Along the way, she heard the siren’s song. “I began my research on food spaces about ten years ago,” Cromley says, “informally listening for stories, or clipping articles, or visiting house museums.” She learned kitchens and dining rooms had been placed in a variety of spots around the American home, depending on time period, geographic region, and the homeowner’s social class.

In fact, during America’s early years, food might be kept all over the house, not just in kitchens or pantries. A building contract for one 1684 dwelling called for a second story strong enough to store corn. A 1793 inventory of a Philadelphia house noted the two dozen canisters of tea stored in a bedroom. And records show a bedroom in an 1800 Massachusetts house also doubled as the “cheese chamber,” where cheeses were aged.

Even so, there were food-axis commonalities. Cooking required a heat source located where it wouldn’t burn down the house, a way of cooling and preserving food, a rodent-proof storage area, a means of eliminating unpleasant food odors. These necessities often meant food-preparation areas were kept separate from food-serving rooms.

Miracle of science: A “laboratory kitchen,” circa 1925. The design’s smaller dimensions allowed for more efficiencies.

As technology made heat sources less volatile and cooling sources more reliable, the supplementary spaces required for cooking and keeping food—outdoor bake ovens, smokehouses, root cellars, springhouses, wood sheds—were reduced, and food preparation and storage gradually moved inside.

The nineteenth-century kitchen may have come indoors, but it often languished as other rooms got spruced up. “A parlor of circa 1800 might have the most up-to-date, fashionable moldings and paneling, fine furniture and wallpapers,” says Cromley. “Yet the kitchen in the same house would be as primitive as the kitchen from a century earlier.”

By 1850, the typical kitchen was placed at the rear of the house, separate from parlor and dining room. Servants—then critical to the functioning of the middle-class home—and their work areas provided an additional buffer between the kitchen and the rest of the house. Considerable thought and energy were devoted to keeping genteel social spaces free from cooking odors, food waste, and other socially unacceptable kitchen “matter.”

“Dining rooms had to act as the separator of conceptually clean social spaces and conceptually dirty food-preparation and servants’ spaces,” wrote Cromley in a 1996 Material History Review article titled “Transforming the Food Axis,” the seed for her upcoming book Food and Function. “The [Victorian-era] housewife is a central figure in both the clean and dirty poles of the food axis. She is both mistress and servant, both producer and consumer in the food system; she manages both the overt and the covert spaces of the house.”

But technological advances were about to have a significant impact on women’s roles. By the early twentieth century, the woman of the house no longer had to rely on a dwindling servant supply. Gas and electric stoves, refrigerators, and grocery stores selling prepared goods—canned vegetables, butter, soap—allowed her to make her family’s meals herself.

The rise of the assembly line revolutionized food preparation as much as it did Ford Motor. Suddenly, everyone was seeking the most efficient way of completing tasks. Kitchens were to work like machines; unnecessary movement was discouraged. Hooks, racks, and special shelving were designed to keep kitchen spaces small. The goal was a room so streamlined, a cook could just turn in place as she prepared a meal. This new emphasis on “home economy” freed women from many labor-intensive kitchen chores and gave them more leisure time at home and in the community.

New heart of the house-hold: Sears cabinets, 1951.

In the 1940s and 1950s, as new cleaning products like Ajax, “the foaming cleanser,” were developed to fight odors and mess, the service and social zones of the middle-class house finally began to merge. Countertops, linoleum flooring, and new appliances opened up the kitchen to the rest of the house. Now, according to Cromley, “housewives at their sinks and stoves could become part of the social activity.” Television also helped bring a once-hidden room into the social flow. After all, viewers were regularly invited into the Kramden, Ricardo, and Cleaver kitchens.

Not that the transformation of kitchens and kitchen life happened in lockstep fashion. Or that all women embraced the change. Even in America’s first centuries, Cromley says, “the early reaction to cook stoves was ‘Over my dead body. My cooking in the fireplace is better.’”

Technology always has to find its niche, she says. “Look at the zipper; it took thirty to forty years for it to find its place in the culture. And there was a testing period for electricity, when people thought it was good for the factory, for the workplace, but not for homes.”

The biggest shift in kitchen design? Probably the current trend toward kitchen expansion, says Cromley. That efficient, closet-sized kitchen of the early twentieth century has become a cavernous all-in-one dining room/family room/media center/kitchen. “The home economist of 1910 would be shocked,” she says with a laugh.

It’s not surprising to learn that Cromley loves to cook. “I spend a lot of time in the kitchen,” she says, “which gives me more opportunities to understand my kitchen, and everyone else’s, too.”

And she’s feeling very at home in her kitchen studies, now that her vernacular bent has become more mainstream among architecture historians. Like Woodward and Bernstein, Cromley followed the clues, and found affirmation.

“It’s so nice,” she says, “to be part of a group.”

Katy Kramer, MA’00, took a look at nontraditional world maps in the March 2003 issue. She regularly writes the “Husky Tracks” department.

Catharine Beecher Living

A few years after the end of the Civil War, American housewives began consulting a book that quickly became a popular road map to domestic harmony. Its coauthors were sisters, two luminaries of their day. Their mission: To provide “a guide to the formation and maintenance of economical, healthful, beautiful, and Christian homes.”

Aimed at the middle-class mistress of the house, The American Woman’s Home: or Principles of Domestic Science, first published in 1869, was written by Catharine Beecher (1800­1878) and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811­1896). Catharine is credited with primary authorship, though Harriet was by far the more famous name, having earned worldwide acclaim for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin seventeen years earlier. Catharine was an educator; she established the Hartford Female Seminary in 1824, and devoted much of her time to encouraging and writing about higher education for women.

She did not, however, see education as a means for women to take their places outside the home. Hearth and family, Catharine believed, were a woman’s highest calling. It was just that women, unlike men, often lacked the learning to excel at their work, which she described as “the many difficult and sacred duties of the family state.”

So The American Woman’s Home was a training manual, designed to show women how to organize their houses, care for children and the elderly, behave with servants, and accomplish chores efficiently. Topics ranged widely: from selecting nutritious foods, treating cuts and burns, and decorating and ventilating rooms; to making a bed, repotting house plants, and constructing an “earth-closet.”

Catharine, who never married, didn’t stop there. In 1873, she published Miss Beecher’s Housekeeper and Healthkeeper, which promised “five hundred recipes for economical and healthful cooking; also many directions for securing health and happiness.”

— Katy Kramer