The Modern Interior

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and another a mountain scene. Bruno Paul
worked in a similar way at that time, developing what he called his
Typenmöbelprogrämme and, like Riemerschmid, numbering his series of
replicated furniture pieces. One of his model interiors from 1908/9 was
illustrated in Die Kunst magazine (see below). The utilitarian appearance
of the items of mass-produced furniture it contained was offset, as
in Riemerschmid’s earlier interior, by a patterned wallpaper, cushions,
flowers and paintings hung on the wall.
As we have already seen 1914 saw the eruption of a heated debate
about the merits or otherwise of standardization in design between the
Belgian architect designer, Henry Van de Velde, and the German cham -
p ion of modern industrial design, Hermann Muthesius. While the former
defended the nineteenth-century ideal of individualism in designed
environments, the latter supported an approach towards the manufacture
of objects that aligned itself with factory production systems. Within
the Modernist architectural model, which dominated progressive ideas
A living room with ‘standardized furniture’ designed by Bruno Paul, 1908–9, illustrated
in Die Kunst, 1909.
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