A new MoMA exhibit shows how progressive design in the ?20s and ?30s still shapes our living space Design trends and social shifts come and go, but if any space in the home tracks how modern architecture has shaped the way we live, it?s the kitchen. From the day-glo, pastel domesticity promised by ?50s homes to the high-end, open plan spaces favored by today?s foodies, the modern hearth has been the site of countless technological, material, and social evolutions.
A new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), How Should We Live: Propositions for the Modern Interior, which opens this weekend, argues that the social shifts kicked off changes in our domestic spaces began in the late ?20s and ?30s, when a cadre of radial designers and architects, often women who haven?t fully gotten their due, reshaped space in a way that still influences modern life. Ideas of efficiency, free-flowing space, modern materials, and better design unshackling us from household drudgery?still part of the dialogue today?were pioneered generations ago.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Joan R. Brewster in memory of her Husband George W.W. Brewster, by exchange and the Architecture & Design Purchase Fund
Charlotte Perriand. Dormitory furnishings from the Maison du Brésil, Paris. 1959. Wood, tubular steel, plastic, formica, fabric, and aluminum.

According to curator Juliet Kinchin, at a time when the jump from cooking with solid fuels to electricit...