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A kitchen is a room used for food preparation. A modern kitchen is typically equipped with a stove or microwave oven and has a sink with water on tap for cleaning flood and dishwashing. Modern kitchens often also feature a dishwasher. Some installations to store food usually also are present, either in the form of an adjacent pantry or more commonly cabinets and a refrigerator.

Although the main function of a kitchen is cooking, it can be the center of other activities as well, especially within homes, depending on its size, furnishing, and equipment. If a washing machine is present, washing and drying laundry is also done in the kitchen. The kitchen may also be the place where the family eats, provided it is large enough. Sometimes, it is the most comforting room in a house, where family and visitors tend to congregate.

The development of the kitchen has been intricately and intrinsically linked with the development of the cooking range or stove. Until the 18th century, open fire was the sole means of heating food, and the architecture of the kitchen reflected this. When technical advances brought new ways to heat food in the 18th and 19th centuries, architects took advantage of newly-gained flexibility to bring fundamental changes to the kitchen. Water on tap only became gradually available during industrialization; before, water had to be collected from the nearest well and heated in the kitchen.

[edit] Ancient history
The houses in Ancient Greece were commonly of the atrium-type: the rooms were arranged around a central courtyard. In many such homes, a covered but otherwise open patio served as the kitchen. Homes of the wealthy had the kitchen as a separate room, usually next to a bathroom (so that both rooms could be heated by the kitchen fire), both rooms being accessible from the court. In such houses, there was often a separate small storage room in the back of the kitchen used for storing food and kitchen utensils.

In the Roman Empire, common folk in cities often had no kitchen of their own; they did their cooking in large public kitchens. Some had small mobile bronze stoves, on which a fire could be lit for cooking. Wealthy Romans had relatively well-equipped kitchens. In a Roman villa, the kitchen was typically integrated into the main building as a separate room, set apart for practical reasons of smoke and sociological reasons of the kitchen being operated by slaves. The fireplace was typically on the floor, placed at a wall--sometimes raised a little bit--such that one had to kneel to cook. There were no chimneys.

The idea of standardized dimensions and layout developed for the Frankfurt kitchen took hold. The equipment used remained a standard for years to come: hot and cold water on tap and a kitchen sink and an electrical or gas stove and oven. Not much later, the refrigerator was added as a standard item. The concept was refined in the "Swedish kitchen" using unit furniture with wooden fronts for the kitchen cabinets. Soon the concept was amended by the use of smooth synthetic door and drawer fronts, first in white, recalling a sense of cleanliness and alluding to sterile lab or hospital settings, but soon after in lively, friendly colors, too. A trend began in the 1940s in the United States to equip the kitchen with electrified small and large kitchen appliances such as blenders, toasters, and later also microwave ovens. Following the end of World War II, massive demand in Europe for low-price, high-tech consumer goods led to Western European kitchens being designed to accommodate new appliances such as refrigerators and electric/gas cookers.

Parallel to this development in tenement buildings went the evolution of the kitchen in homeowner's houses. There, the kitchens usually were somewhat larger, suitable for everyday use as a dining room, but otherwise the ongoing technicalization was the same, and the use of unit furniture became a standard also in this market sector.

General technocentric enthusiasm even led some designers to take the "work kitchen" approach even further, culminating in futuristic designs like Luigi Colani's "kitchen satellite" (1969, commissioned by the German high-end kitchen manufacturer Poggenpohl for an exhibit), in which the room was reduced to a ball with a chair in the middle and all appliances at arm's length, an optimal arrangement maybe for "applying heat to food", but not necessarily for actual cooking. Such extravaganzas remained outside the norm, though.

In the former Eastern bloc countries, the official doctrine viewed cooking as a mere necessity, and women should work "for the society" in factories, not at home. Also, housing had to be built at low costs and quickly, which led directly to the standardized apartment block using prefabricated slabs. The kitchen was reduced to its minimums and the "work kitchen" paradigm taken to its extremes: in East Germany for instance, the standard tenement block of the model "P2" had tiny 4 m? kitchens in the inside of the building (no windows), connected to the dining and living room of the 55 m? apartment and separated from the latter by a pass-through or a window.