The Modern Interior

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that time, governed consumption decisions. In spite of that volte-face on
the part of one of the most important pioneers of the rational household,
by the 1920s its impact on the formulation of the modern interior was
complete and for many years it remained, in aesthetic if not in ideological
terms, one of its key characteristics. As we have seen it found its stylistic
expression in the ‘machine aesthetic’. Indeed by the inter-war years the
modern interior was defined by the modern-looking furniture items,
furnishings and decor that appeared in it, made possible by new manufacturing
techniques and the use of new materials – aluminium, plastics and
bent plywood among them. In spite of the idealism of its protagonists –
whether social reformers, feminists or Modernist architects – such was the
power of the marketplace and the dominance of the ‘irrational’ values
linked to consumption that, by the 1930s, the modern interior had come
to be recognized more by the visual language that represented it than by
the efficiency of the work undertaken within it.
The strong desire to embed the rationality underpinning the
activities that went on in the production- and work-related interiors of
the public sphere in the private dwelling represented a real commitment
to its radical transformation. For women it had offered the possibility of
their liberation from the drudgery and amateur status of the private
sphere, while for the Modernist architects and designers it provided a
means of ridding the home of bourgeois domesticity (and thereby defeminizing
it), of making it a healthy environment and of realigning it
with the ‘masculine’ values of work and rationality. In Le Corbusier’s case
it allowed him to bring the middle-class male camaraderie and companionship
of the male club into the home. Ultimately, however, those diverse
agendas were all overtaken by the logic – or rather the lack of logic – of
the marketplace that transformed that set of abstract idealisms into yet
another stylistic option available to consumers.