The Modern Interior

150
about the interior through the inter-war years and beyond, Muthesius’s
view proved to be the more influential. The issue of standardization in,
and of, the modern interior was not a straightforward matter, however,
and it was interpreted in a variety of ways. While the European Modernists
of the middle years of the twentieth century used it to underpin their
democratic, egalitarian ideals, and to emphasize the social, the spatial and
the functional roles of objects, the American commercial industrial designers
of the 1930s utilized standardized machine manufacture to align the
interior with the market-led values of industrial modernity.
The architectural Modernists set out to standardize both individual
furniture items and the interior as a whole, as far as that was feasible.
The latter was most easily achieved in new, large-scale, utilitarian spaces
– open plan offices, hotel kitchens, work canteens and student halls
among them. Spaces like these were frequently dominated by the presence
of mass-produced artefacts, from office chairs to kitchen equipment, to
knives and forks. In the canteen of the Bijenkorf Department Store in The
Hague (p. 151) the architect P. L. Kramer arranged long trestle tables in
straight rows, and included plain white items of standardized crockery to
encourage a sense of communal dining. The use of standardized components
was also possible inside objects of mass transportation (themselves
mass produced), particularly in the more utilitarian spaces destined for
lower-class travellers. The interior of one third class railway carriage, or
of a third class cabin in an ocean liner, for example, looked very much
like the ones either side of them. Both contained minimal levels of comfort.
Even in the home – the site, more usually, of individualism and social
aspiration – the same issue was enthusiastically addressed by the Modern -
ists. ‘Of course a home is a much more complex organism than a car, and
is conditioned by many more human functions’, the Swedish architect
Stig Lindegren admitted in 1949. ‘But’, he added, ‘that only increases the
demand for a technical solution of the problem.’ 3 Two decades later the
French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard devoted a section of his book
The System of Objects (1968) – a study of the neo-Platonic relationship
between the ideas of the ‘model’ and the ‘series’ in mass production – to
the concept of the ‘model interior’ in which he emphasized its class implications.
He made a distinction between the unattainable, aristocratic
interiors depicted in contemporary French magazines such as Maison
Française and Mobilier et Decoration, those ‘old eighteenth-century mansions,
miraculously well-equipped villas, Italian gardens heated by
infra-red rays and populated by Etruscan statuettes, in short the world of