The Modern Interior

absence of bourgeois comfort. As has already been demonstrated in the
very different social context of the ‘cottages’ of Newport, the design of the
interior was an important agent in class formation. 30
Like work in the factory, office activity was divided into a number
of discrete tasks, each of which had an ‘optimum method’ for its implementation,
and, like the factory employee, the clerical worker gradually
ceased to be a craftsman in charge of a complete process from beginning
to end. Departmentalization flowed naturally from those developments
and the application of scientific management ideas followed. Efficiency
was controlled by the addition of the time clock. New items of furniture
were added to deal with the new ‘divided’ tasks, filing cabinets, for example,
and with the adoption of standard systems, standardized flat top
desks allowing for none of the privacy for individual office workers that
had been provided by the earlier roll-top desks. Their introduction
enabled easier supervision of the work being undertaken. An impression
of efficiency was frequently enhanced by the presence of straight rows of
desks, closely resembling those of the work benches in factories. In his
design for the interior of his Larkin Administration Building of 1904, for
example, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright created an impression
of efficiency through the disposition of the furniture items within it.
The interior of the building contained five stories (see overleaf). Balconies
on each floor looked down into the courtyard below, and the open space
was topped by an iron and steel roof similar to those which crowned
exhibition halls and department stores. Air conditioning and radiant heat
controlled the temperature within the space and Wright designed special
metal furniture to go in it. The use of metal in office furniture reinforced
the modern look of the spaces they occupied, serving to align them more
closely with the factory than the domestic interior. From the 1890s onwards
the production of mass-produced metal furniture items became increasingly
widespread in the us. A company called A. H. Andrews & Co., for
example, created metal furniture for offices, restaurants, factories and
hospitals, among other places. 31
The last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the
twentieth centuries saw the arrival of women into the office in significant
numbers. In the 1880s typists worked on large machines placed on iron
framed tables resembling those which supported treadle sewing machines
in the same period. Women’s entrance into the workplace was one of the
most dramatic and immediate ways in which they embraced modernity
and they brought elements of domesticity with them into their work 125