The Modern Interior

aesthetic’. It denoted a high level of functionality and came to be seen by
many as the modern interior aesthetic of the twentieth century. Although
the style was initially only applied to domestic kitchens, bathrooms and
other work-oriented areas, as it increasingly came to represent modernity
itself, and, by extension, the modern lifestyle, it quickly spread to other
areas of the house as well, the living room and dining room among them.
The effect was yet another blurring of the distinction between the appearance
of interiors outside and inside the home. That function-driven,
rational, essentially non-domestic – or, as it became in the hands of the
Modernists, ‘anti-domestic’ – approach to home interiors appealed, at
one and the same time, to housewives seeking to put their domestic role
on a professional footing, to a group of early twentieth-century feminists
who sought to develop collective housing as a means of supporting a
way of life that rejected the Victorian ideology of domesticity, and to
politically-motivated Modernist architects and designers who set out
to develop standardized social housing projects that would provide
large numbers of people with access to basic living standards.
By the first decade of the twentieth century the principles of
scientific management that had transformed the factory and the office
were also beginning to have an impact in the home. Particularly in the
us, where acquiring servants was especially difficult, many middle-class
women sought to professionalize their domestic activities by comparing
them to work undertaken in the factory or the office. 3 They also sought
to reorganize their household work and to apply rational principles to
it. Aided by new technological developments both inside and outside
the home – the advent of sewing machines, refrigerators and factory
food processing among them – many housewives, or ‘home-makers’ as
they increasingly called themselves, began to engage with the infatuation
with efficiency that was becoming increasingly widespread in the workplace.
By the end of the nineteenth century women such as Ellen
Swallow Richards – the first woman to enter the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and the founder, in 1910, of The Journal of Home Economics
– had helped turn what was called, alternatively, ‘domestic economy’,
‘domestic science’ or ‘home economics’ into a discipline capable of being
taught.’ 4 The title of Richards’s 1882 article, ‘The Chemistry of Cooking’,
demonstrated her uncompromisingly scientific approach to her subject.
Back in the middle of the nineteenth century a number of female
advocates of household efficiency had already begun to articulate ideas
about its effects on the workspaces of the home. It was the American, 131