The Meaning of a Junk Drawer – Kitchen Architecture, Organization, and Efficiency

This chapter explores the adoption of “scientific management” principles by home designers and domestic advice manuals, which yielded the modern galley kitchen and its junk drawer. We show how the affordances of our homes and a disciplined labor force of housekeepers achieved efficiency, minimizing the amount of time and number of steps it took to do “house work.” Depicted as circuits within home spaces, these labor pathways are expedited by access to a fully stocked, conveniently located junk drawer. We hope the paradox of this is immediately clear and eventually resolved: a drawer full of “et cetera” plays a critical role in maintaining a highly organized, maximally efficient home. We argue that viewing junk drawers through the lens of household labor and interior architecture draws our analytical attention to all the work and activity that is necessary to bring junk drawers into existence and to maintain them. And because people complete very similar tasks at home, and junk drawers facilitate shorter circuits, the contents of our drawers are similar. It is our lifestyles and the structures of our homes that best explain the contents of our junk drawers, not our individual idiosyncrasies.