The Modern Interior

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Workers assembling Model ‘t’ cars at the new Ford Motors’s Plant on South Western
Parkway, Louisville, Kentucky, 1925.
nineteenth-century domesticity, and of feminine domestic consumption,
within the interior of the modern home. Early ideas relating to
the application of standardization to the home were visible in early
twentieth-century Germany. In his furniture and interior designs for
the new garden city of Hellerau Richard Riemerschmid developed a
number of machine-made furniture programmes – his Maschinen -
möbel progrämme sets of series, that is, of simple, wooden furniture pieces
that could be used, in combination, to create basic interior settings. All
his pieces were given numbers – a 1905 kitchen chair was described as
‘number 825’, for example. They were made simply and their means of
manufacture was not concealed. Screw-heads were often left visible, for
instance. A model combination living and dining room of 1906, created
by Riemerschmid for Hellerau, contained a small table and chairs, a sofa
and a storage cupboard. Simple textiles – an embroidered runner for the
table and some patterned cushions for the sofa – were included to soften
the space as were some reproduced images on the wall, one depicting