The Modern Interior

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employed by nineteenth-century engineers into their residential buildings,
the Modernists also brought commerce into the home.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the public face of the
modern interior determined many people’s experiences of the modern
world as well as playing a key role in the dramatic transformations of
many urban spaces. 4 Most accounts of the late nineteenth-century
metropolis, and of modernity, have ignored those new public interior
spaces, choosing instead to emphasize the outside, visual spectacle of the
urban streets which was experienced by men for the most part. 5 Walter
Benjamin’s famous flâneur, for example, first observed by the nineteenthcentury
French poet Charles Baudelaire, defined modernity as an essentially
outside, masculine experience. Free to wander the streets of the
modern metropolis, he looked in shop windows, but had no intention of
purchasing goods. His was an undirected wandering of the city streets. 6
Benjamin wrote extensively about the making of the modern metropolis,
focusing on the roles played by commodification and display and highlighting
features like the shift from gas to electrical street illumination. In
his work on the Parisian arcades, however, he captured an in-between
world which was half inside and half outside.
Created between the eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries,
and building on the idea of covered markets, Benjamin’s Parisian arcades
were covered rows of shops, constructed in the gaps between other buildings,
created to accommodate the increased production of goods,
especially textiles, and to make shopping a more pleasant experience in a
city which, at that time, had no sewers or pavements. In the Passage de
l’Opera, what had been the exterior walls of buildings were suddenly
transformed, through the addition of an iron and glass roof, into inter -
ior walls. The Journal des Artistes of 1827 described the arcades as a solution
to the ‘ingenious need to increase the number of shops in order to
increase capitalists’ profits’. 7 Those pedestrian-focused alleyways allowed
flâneurs, and later flâneuses as well, to wander without the discomforts
that had hitherto been created by horse-drawn carriages, crowds, dust
and mud. Dining and drinking, bathing in public baths, playing billiards,
attending the theatre and prostitution were also undertaken in those new
inside/outside spaces. The early arcades had had timber roofs with skylights
inserted into them. Iron- and glass-domed structures were built
over the later ones, however, allowing more light to penetrate their inter -
ior spaces, thereby reinforcing the sense, for the shoppers and crowds
within them, of being both outside and inside at the same time. Walter