The Modern Interior

‘inside’ focus than her architectural contemporaries and aimed her
advice at ‘that large body of intelligent people who are seeking to create
for themselves expressive and individual environments of life.’ 18 Rather
than hiring a professional interior decorator she advocated letting homes
evolve to embrace the ‘new taste’. 19 The illustrations to her text revealed
a strong Austrian influence, several of the schemes – ironically, given
her views on decorating professionals – having been created by Paul
Zimmerman and others by E. H. and G. G. Aschermann, who had also
studied with Hoffmann. 20 The chequered floor, patterned wallpaper,
repeated vases of flowers and built-in furniture featured in one of the
Aschermann interiors illustrated in Adler’s book recalled Werkstätte
designs. The Aschermanns were part of the same generation of immigrant
decorative designers which also included Winold Reiss and Alfons
Baumgarten, who had left Munich and arrived in the us in around 1913.
Reiss went on to create modern, decorative interiors for numerous commercial
buildings in the us, including the Busy Lady Bakery, designed in
1915, which was later described as ‘the first modern store in New York’. 21
The Viennese movement also influenced modern decorative
Swedish interior design. Josef Frank had been active as an architect in
Vienna before moving to Sweden in 1932. In 1925 he had opened an interior
decorating shop, Haus und Garten, with Oscar Wlach, and in the
same year his firm had exhibited a small niche containing furniture items
at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels
Modernes. Striking for its lack of unity – Frank, like Poiret before him,
rejected the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk – its eclecticism, and its
embrace of the past. Frank’s work prefigured a new approach to the
domestic interior which opposed that promoted by the hard-line
Modern ists. Frank was open about his rejection of the Modernist inter -
ior, especially the use of tubular steel for furniture and standardization in
the interior, but, in their self-conscious response to the demands of
modern life, his proposals for the domestic interior were no less modern.
‘The modern person’, he explained, ‘who is increasingly more exhausted
by his job requires a domicile cozier and more comfortable than those
of the past’. 22 Later he explained that ‘coziness’ could be achieved through
a mixture of furniture items, some old and some new, the inclusion of
comfy sofas and cushions and the use of patterned surfaces. ‘The monochromed
surface’, he wrote, ‘has an unsettling effect, the patterned surface
is a calming one because the beholder is involuntarily affected by the
slow, calm mode of production’. 23 99