The Modern Interior

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settlements alone’, one writer has explained. As we have seen Lihotsky
took her inspiration from ship’s galleys and railroad dining-car kitchens
so the principle of standardization, inherent in those spaces, moved naturally
into the domestic context. 5 Indeed, the role of standardized interior
components in determining the appearance of interior spaces
became increasingly apparent within the implementation of archi tectural
Modernism in Europe, and in the us through the middle years of the
twentieth century. The concept of the idealized ‘model interior’, which
could be replicated through the mass availability of standardized goods,
had by that time captured the popular imagination through the media
of exhibitions, magazines and other forms of mass dissemination. At
the Weissenhof Siedlung of 1927, for example, the house designed by
J.J.P. Oud, which contained Erna Meyer’s rational kitchen, also featured
standardized furniture pieces in its combination living and dining room,
designed by Ferdinand Kramer.
The need to put any objects into interiors went against the grain of
the architectural Modernists and was often undertaken extremely reluctantly.
Indeed the Modernist interior was often conceived, at least in ideal
terms, as a near empty, uncluttered, dematerialized space. Many architects,
as we have already seen, found a solution in the idea of built-in furniture,
extensions of the architectural frame, which helped to diminish
the impact of the materiality of interior furnishings and to emphasize the
dominance of architectural space. ‘We would prefer’, wrote Le Corbusier,
‘that our fittings and our furniture be built into walls, stay there, invisible
and practical, leaving the home spacious and aerated’. 6 Given the
practical demands of occupying space, however, the total exclusion of
material objects was never a realistic option and, inevitably, the modern
interior became a container for a variety of material artefacts, both
mass-produced and otherwise. Indeed, a tension between abstraction
and materiality characterized the Modernist interior. Recognizing the
inevitability of the need for material objects in their otherwise abstract,
spatial settings, a number of Modernist architects, Le Corbusier among
them, chose to complement their built-in furniture with ‘free-standing’
furnishings, sometimes, as we have seen, mass-produced items bought
‘off the shelf’ and sometimes objects made to their own designs over
which they could maintain a higher level of control. The contemporary
materials utilized in many of their designs – tubular steel, glass and plywood
among them – determined a particular furniture aesthetic which
quickly came to characterize the Modernist interior. They offered a level