One of the reasons the Germans lost WWII, it has been argued, was because they failed to mobilize their female labor force to the same degree as their enemies. This had much to do with a "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" (children, kitchen, church) mentality that consigned women to a world of old-fashioned domestic chores and child rearing.

But it didn't have to be this way, as "Bauhaus Taste — Bauhaus Kitchen" at the Shiodome Museum demonstrates in an exhibition that pays testament to the role some German designers had in freeing women for other duties through the modernization of the kitchen.

The exhibition focuses on improvements made in the design of kitchen utensils, appliances and work space by the renowned Bauhaus school, which operated in Germany from 1919 to 1933. As the dates suggest, Bauhaus was the quintessential Weimar Republic institution and, like that well-intentioned but ill-fated state, had a similar quality of slightly naive progressivism. But it was this idealism that enabled Bauhaus designers to eschew time-honored cultural patterns and apply an uncompromisingly rationalist approach to overhaul the existing notions of the kitchen.