The Modern Interior

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created for the apartment building he designed in Lawn Road, London
consisted of a bed-sitting room and a small kitchenette, and featured
Isokon plywood items and pel tubular steel chairs. 15 It was shown at
the Exhibition of British Industrial Art in Relation to the Home held in
London’s Dorland Hall in 1933.
Unless they were created especially by Modernist architects for their
own spaces, or for the handful of private residential clients for whom they
worked, standardized mass-produced furniture items, such as pel’s
simple tubular steel side chairs, could only be produced if there was mass
demand for them. From the late nineteenth century onwards the serial
production of wooden and metal furniture pieces had developed in the
us, focused for the most part in Grand Rapids, near Lake Michigan, in
response to the demand from new offices, hospitals, restaurants and
other large-scale public sphere buildings which were being constructed at
that time. In addition to the growing presence of machine-made furniture
and furnishings in inside spaces, inter-war interiors in both the
public and the private spheres were also becoming more and more heavily
populated by mass-produced, standardized machines. Offices saw the
arrival of typewriters and duplicating machines; shops that of cash registers
and adding machines; while homes witnessed the influx of a wide
range of domestic machines, from irons to kettles, toasters and electric
fires. As the spaces designed for work and commerce were gradually
modernized and, with domestic spaces absorbing the products of the
new technologies, the need for the new machines to reflect that change
aesthetically became a priority. Also as the economic depression hit harder
in the us, putting increased pressure on manufacturers to differentiate
their products, those objects needed to be given modern visual identities
that would enhance their suitability for the spaces they were destined to
facilitate the introduction of modernity into.
In the late 1920s the members of the newly established American
industrial design profession focused on the creation of unified, modernlooking
identities for the new machines destined for the newly modernized
interiors of both the public and the private spheres. Like their European
Modernist architectural contemporaries, they looked to the public sphere
for an appropriate aesthetic. Like Le Corbusier, for example, they were
inspired by the new, modern machine par excellence, the automobile.
While the French architect was more interested in the manufacturing
principles underpinning it than the automobile itself (although he did
design a ‘Minimum Car’ with Pierre Jeanneret) his American counter-