The Modern Interior

parts went one step further by designing cars and subsequently emulating
the streamlined aesthetic they developed for them in the interior.
Their objects of transportation were styled to eliminate ‘drag’ and maximize
speed. The symbolic implications of that new, dynamic aesthetic
were immediate and compelling and were quickly transferred to inanimate
objects such as pencil sharpeners and refrigerators. Inevitably those
objects found their way into interiors, both public and private, enabling
the interior itself to be ‘streamlined’.
The American industrial designers who took upon themselves the
ambitious task of streamlining the entire environment, both interior
and exterior, came from a variety of commercial backgrounds. 16 Very few
were architects by training, the majority having worked in advertising
and, in some cases, in theatre and retail design. 17 They were extremely
adept, therefore, at creating high levels of visual rhetoric and spectacle
in interior spaces. Their work crossed a spectrum from experimental to
live projects. While they dreamed of redesigning the city and imagined
extraordinary futuristic objects of transport for the ‘world of tomorrow’,
for the most part their everyday work consisted of product redesigns and
the commercial interior projects that were associated with them. The link
between product and interior design initiated by the American industrial
designers offered an alternative approach to the creation of the modern
interior to that which had been formulated by the European Modernist
architects. While the forms and materials both groups used were often
superficially similar – tubular steel and simple geometry featured widely,
for example – the contexts in which they worked and their working
methods were utterly different. Mass-produced artefacts provided the
starting point for the industrial designers and they worked outwards
from them into the spaces that contained them. Given that they worked
predominantly in the commercial arena their primary aim was to ensure
that the objects they designed looked modern, attractive and desirable.
The work that Norman Bel Geddes undertook for the Simmons
Company, for instance, had that end in sight. In his deliberations about
the design of a bed, which in his view had to ‘consist of the simplest
possible horizontal and perpendicular sections, perhaps molded out of one
sheet of metal’, he demonstrated the industrial designer’s characteristic
concern for economical manufacture. He was also interested in ensuring
that the bed could be dusted and dismantled easily and, above all, that it
‘possess[ed] sheer, graceful lines’. 18 When he moved his focus on to the
showroom in which the bed was to be displayed his main preoccupation 159