The Modern Interior

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of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Architecture took the lead, therefore, while the
so-called ‘decorative arts’, a catch-all term which embraced the interior,
followed meekly after it. For the Modernists the interior was simply the
space within buildings, an inevitability which, in order for daily life to
take place, had to be ‘equipped’ – albeit as minimally as possible.
By the 1920s the international Modern Movement in architecture
and design, part of a more broadly based cultural response to modernity
also encompassing literature, music and drama, was fully formed. It
embraced new materials and building techniques – reinforced concrete,
plate-glass and steel-frame construction in particular – which had a dramatic
impact on the development of the interior spaces of its buildings.
Above all, the Modernist architects transferred the key characteristics of
new commercial interiors – large open-planned spaces, high levels of
transparency and porosity and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of
inside/outside ambiguity – into the domestic arena. By taking those features
into private spaces they set out to eradicate the domestic interior’s
role as an overt expression of beauty, as a space for interiority and identity
formation, and its links with fashionableness and social status. In
their place they emphasized its utilitarian features and the efficiency of
the processes undertaken within it. That latter ambition had first
emerged, as we have seen, in factories and offices as well as in a number
of other public sphere workspaces such as commercial kitchens and laundries.
Of the three main drivers of modernization – industrialization,
rationalization and standardization – the first two came together in that
context. No sooner had they been implemented in the public sphere,
however, than Modern Movement architects sought to transfer them into
the home, hoping in the process to dedicate that arena to rational production
and social equality.
The Modernists’ rational approach to space planning inevitably
impacted most strongly on those areas of the home dedicated to work
rather than to leisure, display, social relations or interiority. That was
especially the case as household servants became increasingly scarce and
the housewife had to take on more household tasks. In its early formulation,
the domestic rational interior focused exclusively on process rather
than aesthetics. In the hands of Modernist architects, however, a new
aesthetic for the interior also began to emerge. In line with modernity’s
prioritization of the visual, by the inter-war years the idea of the modern
interior had become increasingly associated with a simple, abstract,
geometric, undecorated interior style, often referred to as the ‘machine