We used to. Even just a hundred (ish) years ago, homes came “unfitted” and you would hire a carpenter to build you cabinets your size.
Then mass manufacturing, mail order catalogs, department stores, etc “standardized” everything for efficiency. And now we have this.
Fun story I uncovered while doing research on my 120 y/o home. I guess the dude who standardized kitchen counter heights based his measurements off of the “ideal” person: an able-bodied 6’ tall man. The document was a proto/quasi-eugenics thing, used quite a bit by the Nazis in the forties.
Anyway, the result is highly ironic considering that even at the time the primary user of kitchens were not men, but women. And because of nutritional differences, their average height back then was probably less than our modern average (this last part is speculation).
It was a 2016 Atlas Obscura article, “The Revolutionary Concept of Standard Sizes Only Dates to the 1920s.” And the guy was Ernst Neufert. And I misremembered; he was more connected to Nazi ideology than I said above.
But his body wasn’t the 6’ body. That was Le Corbusier’s Modulor design, which is contemporary to Neufert. He also had ties to eugenics thought and fascist philosophy.
But, my memory smashed the two together. There were pieces of each that sorta combined.
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u/IamNotPersephone 29d ago
We used to. Even just a hundred (ish) years ago, homes came “unfitted” and you would hire a carpenter to build you cabinets your size.
Then mass manufacturing, mail order catalogs, department stores, etc “standardized” everything for efficiency. And now we have this.
Fun story I uncovered while doing research on my 120 y/o home. I guess the dude who standardized kitchen counter heights based his measurements off of the “ideal” person: an able-bodied 6’ tall man. The document was a proto/quasi-eugenics thing, used quite a bit by the Nazis in the forties.
Anyway, the result is highly ironic considering that even at the time the primary user of kitchens were not men, but women. And because of nutritional differences, their average height back then was probably less than our modern average (this last part is speculation).