The Modern Interior

The Wheeler & Wilson Sewing Machine Factory, illustrated in Scientific American, 3 May
1879.
Views from around 1913 inside Ford’s Highland Park factory show that
the rationality and efficiency of the work process remained overriding
preoccupations. In that context the appearance of the interior, like those
in Benjamin’s arcades, was achieved as a solution to a problem. Only at
the managerial level did domestic details make an appearance in the
factory at that time. The superintendent’s office at Highland Park, for
example, revealed the addition of a few personalized details – a photo on
the wall and a clock among them – which offset the otherwise basic
austerity and functionality of that overtly masculine workspace.
The office was scrutinized in a similar way to the factory in the
early twentieth century. Indeed it has been claimed that the changes made
to the office environment as a result of the process of rationalization
were ‘more profound than those in factories’. 27 Another work-based
space determined almost exclusively by function, rather than by aesthetics
or taste, the office resembled the factory in many ways. It did not focus
on the production of manufactured goods, however, but rather on the 123