The Modern Interior

dral’ of modernity had to strike a delicate balance between representing
a post-Victorian world in which women were free to enter the public
arena without fear, while simultaneously providing them with an aspirational,
luxurious space which would stimulate the consumption of the
new goods on offer. The department stores were undoubtedly the most
striking of the commercial interiors of nineteenth-century modernity to
build on the language established by the Great Exhibition. Their restaurants,
lounges and tea rooms were, however, part of the network of
domesticated public spaces that belonged to the same era and that played
an important role in the female experience of modernity. Marshall Field’s
store in Chicago had an equally spectacular interior consisting of an open
central atrium which could be looked down upon from the open balconies
of the building’s four floors. The whole interior was covered by an
enormous domed ceiling covered with mosaic tiles, which was designed
by Louis Comfort Tiffany, one of the us’s most fashionable decorators of
the period. Garlands of flowers were suspended from the ceilings to soften
the repetitive arrangement of rows of horseshoe-shaped glazed counters
and storage cabinets with multiple drawers which covered the store’s
floors. Once again the rational, open structure which exposed the goods
on sale was offset by decorative features, adding a level of domestic comfort.
22 Museums and art galleries were also affected by the advent of iron
and glass. Edinburgh’s Royal Museum building on Chambers Street, built
between 1861 and 1888, contained behind its Venetian façade a dramatic
iron and glass main hall that had much in common with the open spaces
of department stores.
While the exhibition space, the department store and the museum
were public spaces dedicated to commerce and culture, the work spaces
of the factory and the office, which were equally important to the creation
of economic capital but not accessible to the general public in the
same way, also went through a radical modernization process at that
time. This was based, in these cases, on the need for enhanced productivity
and efficiency. In the spaces of the factory and the office visuality was
subordinated to utility and the process of rationalization was applied to
that end. Rationalism had been one of modernity’s driving forces from
the era of the Enlightenment onwards, given momentum by the increasing
secularization of society and the growing importance of science. It
affected society and culture in a number of different ways, including the
manner in which industrial work was organized. Driven by the profit
motive underpinning economic capitalism, factory work practices, such 119