The Modern Interior

Le Corbusier’s ‘Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau’, designed for the Exposition Internationale
des Arts Décoratifs Industriels et Modernes, Paris, 1925.
Germany was not the only European country to take ideas developed
in the public arena into the private domestic arena, however. Although he
was less systematic and more intuitive than his German counterparts, the
French Modernist architect, Le Corbusier, was equally keen to bring ideas
generated in the early twentieth-century factory and office into the private
residence. His famous statement that ‘the house is a machine for dwelling
in’ indicated his commitment to the influence of the world of industry in
the home. His little Citrohan house of 1914 was designed according to the
principles of mass production that underpinned automobile manufacture.
Interested more in the evocative modernity of factory production, and in
the work of the ‘heroic’ engineer, than in efficiency per se, Le Corbusier
envisaged a modern dwelling modelled on the aesthetic implications of
rational production. His admiration for open-planning and transparency,
and his commitment to the spatial continuity between the outsides and
the insides of his buildings, informed much of his domestic architecture, 141