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Why Are Kitchen Counters 36 Inches High?
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A lot of offices now have adjustable height desks, which you can set at the proper height when standing. It's basic ergonomics. As one supplier noted, "Using standing desks correctly may seem like a no-brainer from an outsider’s perspective: You stand. You work. You repeat. However, ergonomics is not an exact science because every human body is different. The optimal height for your desk will be different for you than for someone else." The general rule for standing desk height is that "as your elbows are positioned at a 90 degree angle from the floor, measure the distance from the floor to the bottom of your elbow."Get more news about oem kitchen countertop,you can vist our website!
Yet when you go into a kitchen, everybody is the same, and just about every kitchen counter is 36 inches high. Alexandra Lange wrote in Slate a few years ago that it was not supposed to be this way. Kitchen design pioneer Lillian Gilbreth, herself a very tall 5 foot 7 inches, thought the height should vary according to the task and the person. Lange explains:
Some have suggested that kitchen counters are 36 inches because it worked for Gilbreth, but an article in Quartz points to a source I had not read before, "Counterintuitive: How the Marketing of Modernism Hijacked the Kitchen Stove" by "cook, food writer, food editor, and short person"
Leslie Land, who also wondered why kitchen stoves and counters are 36 inches tall. It's in a book titled "From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies" that can be downloaded from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
It wasn't always this way. As noted in my history of the kitchen, the famous Hoosier kitchen was adjustable in height. This was a marketing feature: "Now you can get a HOOSIER that is exactly as high or as low as you need it. No matter how tall or how short you may be, your NEW HOOSIER exactly fits you." Land notes that both kitchen design experts Christine Frederick and Gilbreth favored different heights for different functions.Lenore Thye, the designer of the wonderful step-saving kitchen and source of our first photo, also noted: “The practice in modern kitchen layouts of having all surfaces on a level, using the 36 inch height of the range as the unit of measure, places more emphasis on appearance than suitability. Different tasks performed in the kitchen frequently require work surfaces of different heights.”
But as we have noted before, the Bauhaus and the modern movement was a reaction to the tuberculosis crisis. It was all about health, or as Paul Overy titled his book, about "Light, Air and Openness." The design of almost everything was about cleanliness and washability, with no nooks and crannies for bacteria to hide. A kitchen had to be hospital-clean.
This, rather than fashion or marketing, was probably the source of the closed and fitted kitchen. But if a kitchen is going to have continuous counters, what height should they be? In her search for the source of the 36-inch counter, Land found what she calls "the smoking sink."
She writes: "In the early ’30s, countertops were generally about 31 inches tall, while the tops of the—freestanding—sinks were a sensible 36 inches...When the mania for continuous counters decreed that everything from the breadboard to the stove burners to the sinktop must be the same height, the sinktop won, and the 36-inch stove was born."