The Modern Interior

admired, a strategy on the part of the exhibition organizers which served
to augment the visitors’ (unrequited) levels of desire. Benjamin fully
understood the commercial impact of that event, and others like it, when
he wrote that, ‘World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity.
They create a framework in which use value recedes into the
background. They open a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order
to be distracted.’ 12
Paxton’s earlier experiences of designing buildings had been in the
world of garden design. In the 1940s, a writer described his ‘great conservatory’
of 1851 as being ‘an acre in extent, and it was considered by the
early Victorians to be almost one of the wonders of the world. One
could drive a carriage through its vast expanse, while fern and palm and
cedar waved amongst its girders.’ 13 Paxton’s vast interior was defined by
the visible, structural iron columns around its edges, an inner balcony
created by more iron pillars, and its vast open space. The Hyde Park
building was, on one level, an enormous shop window, its simplicity and
neutrality serving to enhance the spectacle of the highly decorated
objects displayed within it. As well as acting as an inspiration for
Modernist architects later on in the twentieth century, the Crystal Palace
provided a model for several other types of commercial interiors built in
the latter half of the nineteenth century, above all those of department
stores. Whiteleys store was, among others, a direct descendant of it. 14
William Whiteley had visited the Crystal Palace many times and been
impressed by the way in which the exhibition ‘made goods available to
the eye but ultimately unattainable’. 15 The department store turned the
flâneuse into a consumer. 16 It built on women’s experiences at exhibitions
where idealized domestic interiors were often displayed. By the
first decade of the twentieth century stores had begun to introduce ‘sets’
into their windows complete with life-size mannequins. The stage set
nature of those displays introduced a strong link between public inter -
iors created for commercial ends and the theatre.’ 17 When the Selfridges
store had its ceremonial opening in London in 1909 the watching crowds
were stunned by its windows which, rather than being filled with
goods, contained ‘mannequins [which] held lifelike poses in front of
painted backgrounds’. 18
By allowing in as much light, and creating as much open space as
possible so as not to detract from the visual effects of the goods on sale,
as well as being fantasy environments, the interiors of department stores
emulated the visual strategies of the exhibition hall. Although the late 117