The Modern Interior

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fronts were a deep blue (although even this could be justified functionally
as it was a colour which was believed to repel flies), and the employment
of strikingly modern materials, linoleum, glass and metal among them.
While they could also be justified functionally, they made a significant
contribution, nonetheless, to the kitchen’s modern look. The impact of
the Frankfurt kitchen, which quickly went into mass production, was
enormous. It took the idea of rationality into the home on a significant
scale and, through the control it gave to her, became a symbol of the professionalization
of the housewife. At the same time it removed much
drudgery from food preparation. The same principles were soon applied
to the bathroom and to the laundry. The emphasis on the kitchen, however,
had implications for the conceptualization of the modern house, or
apartment, as a whole such that, in the words of Schütte-Lihotzky herself,
‘the arrangement of the kitchen and its relationship to the other rooms
in the dwelling must be considered first.’ 20 That seemingly simple statement
had dramatic implications for the evolution of the modern domestic
interior, suggesting, as it did, that houses should be designed from the
inside out, rather than the reverse. That strategy was soon to become one
of the lasting tenets and legacies of architectural Modernism. While on
the one hand it had the effect of minimizing the autonomy of the interior
by merging it with the architectural shell, on the other, the idea of letting
the plan determine the façade imbued the interior with a new level of
importance. By giving the elements within the plan utilitarian definitions
– the kitchen, the bathroom and the living space for example – they
became driving forces behind architectural design as a whole. Indeed
the interior became the pivot around which all architectural decisions
were made.
The idea of following the processes of efficient production led to
a similar level of rationalization in the role of furniture in the ‘minimum
dwelling’. Bruno Taut addressed the subject in his book Die Neue
Wohnung (1924), in which he also made references to Christine Frederick,
and Ernst May took the idea forward in the Frankfurt project. Indeed
May saw a wholesale need to reform the house inside and out. ‘Because’,
he wrote, ‘the outside world of today affects us in the most intense and
disparate ways, our way of life is changing more rapidly than in previous
times. It goes without saying that our surroundings will undergo corresponding
changes. This leads us to layouts, spaces and buildings of which
every part can be altered, which are flexible, and which can be combined
in different fashions.’ 21