The Modern Interior

12
image, as an assemblage of material objects or as a space. In turn it can be
represented through architectural plans, drawings, photographs, ensembles
of objects or constructed spaces. 1 Interiors are rendered even harder
to discuss by the fact that they are constantly being modified as life goes
on within them. In combination these characteristics constitute a significant
challenge to the student of the interior and probably account for the
paucity of serious literature on the subject. Unlike the multitude of widely
available, visually-oriented books about interiors, The Modern Interior
will not approach its subject primarily as a stylistic concept, nor will it
limit its remit to the minimally-decorated interiors created or inspired by
the architects and designers associated with European Modernism. Nor
will it interpret ‘modern’ as simply meaning ‘fashionable’ or ‘up-to-date’.
It will aim, rather, to offer its readers an account of the complexity of the
forces that were at play in the formation and development of the modern
interior as it is defined in the pages of this book.
The era of industrial modernity was fully formed by the mid-nineteenth
century and reached a level of maturity in the years around the
First World War. Where the modern interior was concerned the two
decades which followed saw a re-affirmation and a consolidation of the
changes that had occurred in that earlier era, as well as a stylistic response
to them. In the half century or so since 1945 the modern interior has
depended, as the final chapter of this book will suggest, upon a continual
reworking of the themes, ideas and tensions that were all in place by
around 1914 and which, by 1939, were expressed through a number of
alternative visual languages. The subject of ‘modernity’ – the historical
and theoretical frame for this study – has preoccupied many writers. Like
the interior it contains its own inner tensions and contradictions. For
some it represents an experience of the world which, as a result of the
accelerated expansion of mass communications; the loss of a single, unifying
belief system; and the breakdown of familiar social structures, was
rendered fragmentary, discontinuous, fleeting, incomplete and confusing.
Others have defined it as an extension of the essential rationalism of mass
production into all other aspects of daily life. Yet others have portrayed it
as the result of the continual turnover of goods and images created by
‘consumer desire’. 2 Most have seen it, however, as being characterized by
its innate sense of progress, its ‘forward-lookingness’. 3 For the German
cultural critic Walter Benjamin, the advent of modernity coincided with
the emergence of the private individual. 4 By extension the emergence of
the private domestic interior, and its capacity to facilitate self-reflection,