The Modern Interior

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the public arena to a significant degree – particularly spaces dedicated to
modern commerce and leisure. Through its engagement with fashionableness,
its ability to express modern personality, its proximity to mass
consumption and its link to the idea of lifestyle, a new psychological,
symbolic and cultural role for the interior was established as a representation
of industrial modernity. The strength of bourgeois domesticity did
not deter the Modernists from attempting to reject it by opposing as
many of its values as they could. Their radical programme of reform
sought to establish a set of alternative values for the interior and, beyond
that, to deny its very existence, so corrupted, in their view, had it become.
The second section of this book will focus on the strategies adopted by
the Modernist architects to wage war on the interior, and to create buildings
which had no interiors in the conventional sense of the term,
modern or otherwise. Ironically however, not only did the Modernists provide
the modern interior with a set of alternative values, it also generated
some of the most beautiful and lasting modern interiors of the twentieth
century. Modernism also rejected the interior decorator and spawned the
professional interior designer. Given the strong links that the Victorian
domestic interior had already forged with the commercial forces of
modernity, however, Modernism’s political and ideological ambitions
were not easily fulfilled. In the end bourgeois domesticity did not disappear
but, rather, took on a new mantle linked to the visual and spatial
language of architectural Modernism.