The Modern Interior

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Metropolitan Museum of Art, the aesthetic of streamlining was applied
both to the contents of the interior and to its frame. The walls were covered
with curved, horizontal metal bands. The same metal was also used
as edging on the curved cantilevered desks, for the frame of an upholstered
chair, and for the support for a display stand. Repetition was used
to accentuate the unity of that streamlined environment as it had been by
the Gesamtkunstwerk architect-decorators, Henry Van de Velde and Peter
Behrens, earlier in the century. The space was dominated by the objects
within it, however, from Loewy’s model for his Hupmobile automobile,
which was positioned on a plinth centre stage, to his drawing for the
Princess Anne ferryboat, to his dramatically modern-looking glass and
metal furnishings.
The same designers also worked on numerous shop interiors.
Loewy created the W. T. Grant store in Buffalo, among others, while
Walter Dorwin Teague designed Eastman Kodak’s New York store in 1931.
The scheme for the latter shop interior exhibited the same horizontal
metal strips, albeit on a different scale, that the designer had used in his
redesign of one of the company’s cameras. The design for the camera
shop was a low-key affair, however, in which the visibility of the goods
on sale was paramount. Lighting was concealed behind wall cases fitted
flush with the walls. Commenting on that interior, a contemporary critic
explained that, ‘The entire design was conceived as providing a neutral
setting for the display of the photographic enlargements and the various
colourful objects of Eastman Kodak manufacture. It was executed, therefore,
in varying tones of silver, gray and black. The finish of the various
materials was chosen with the same object in view. The display space
draws the eye because it is of a light, dull finish in contrast to the dark,
polished enframement’, adding that: ‘The display counters have been kept
low, better to attract attention, and the objects are displayed on plain
standards of a similar finish to that of the walls.’ 21
Some of the American industrial designers’ most overtly modern
ideas were reserved for their designs for the interiors of objects of transportation.
Transport was their first love and they developed exciting
visions of, and wrote extensively and rhetorically about, their streamlined
planes, trains, boats, automobiles and even their space rockets, of the
future. Only a few of their designs were realized, however. Bel Geddes was
responsible for the interior of the Chrysler Airflow of 1933, while the automobile’s
exterior was the creation of the engineer, Carl Breer. Loewy’s
powerful locomotive designs for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and