The Modern Interior

7 The Rational Interior
Around this time the real gravitational center of living shifts to the office.
Walter Benjamin 1
For many Modern Movement architects the interior had become so
inextricably linked with Victorian middle-class domesticity, fashion,
personal expression and mass consumption that they felt compelled to
develop an architecture which minimized its existence. They found an
alternative model, which they believed to be both rational and functional,
in the spaces inside the new public sphere buildings – factories, stores and
exhibition halls among them. They were also inspired by the functional
spaces in new objects of transport, including Pullman train kitchens and
ships’ galleys. 2 Several of them focused on social housing projects and
developed the idea of the ‘minimal dwelling’, but many of their commissions
came from progressive, middle-class clients who wanted a taste of
what was rapidly becoming a new, clutter-free lifestyle.
In spite of the numerous hesitations expressed about it a Modern
Movement domestic interior inevitably emerged. Unlike its nineteenthcentury
predecessors which had been dominated by materiality, however,
it was primarily spatially defined. Its roots lay in what the Modernists
believed to be the unconscious, utilitarian, ‘engineered’ aesthetic of the
new public sphere interiors and they introduced it into modern residential
spaces in their efforts to address what they saw as the ‘problem’ of
bourgeois domesticity. Rapidly, however, it was recirculated back into the
public arena and applied to a wide range of building types – restaurants,
shops, leisure centres, schools, hospitals and churches among them –
some of which were new and others of which were being ‘modernized’
for the first time. In that new context it became a highly self-conscious
aesthetic which openly declared its alliance with modernity. In effect,
therefore, once it had been reformulated within the Modernist dwelling,
the modern public interior was transformed into a metaphor of and for
itself. The Modern Movement architect-designers also embraced the idea 129