The Modern Interior

6 The Public Interior
Others talk about the street, the café, the gallery.
Virginia Woolf 1
The public face of the modern interior was formed in the second half of
the nineteenth century in the new inside spaces of commerce, culture,
work and public leisure. Like its private, domestic counterpart, which
was reproduced in a range of semi-public and public spaces, the public
modern interior developed its own visual, material and spatial language
which, in this case, found its way back into the home. Early signs of the
emergence of a new, public sphere interior aesthetic were visible from the
early nineteenth century onwards in a range of buildings from shopping
arcades, exhibition halls, museums, railway stations to department stores.
From a ‘separate spheres’ perspective, that development could be seen as
a form of anti-domesticity. Its primary relationship was with commerce
and its light, airy, neutral forms were made possible by new building
technologies and new materials. Glass, iron and steel facilitated the construction
of those large, open plan interior spaces and the high levels of
transparency which helped to emphasize the objects frequently located
within them. In search of a new architectural aesthetic to represent the
modern age the Modernist architect-designers of the first decades of
the twentieth century adopted those highly engineered commercial build -
ings, and their interior spaces, as models for a modern architecture which
sought to side-step the values of Victorian domesticity. As Le Corbusier
proclaimed, ‘Our engineers produce architecture, for they employ a
mathematical calculation which derives from natural law, and their
works give us the feeling of harmony.’ 2 Twenty-five years later the
Modernist apologist Siegfried Giedion echoed that same sentiment when
he wrote that, in contrast to the upholsterer who in his view ‘debased
the cabinetmaker’s craft’, in 1850s and 1860s America, ‘inventive fantasy
and the instinct for mechanization were the common property of the
people’. 3 Unwittingly, however, by injecting the methods and materials 113