The Modern Interior

9 The Abstract Interior
We are in need of a new interior.
Theo van Doesburg 1
As well as allying itself with the twin forces of rationality and efficiency
rooted in the world of modern technology and industry, the early twentieth-century
modern interior also developed a close relationship with
the highly irrational world of contemporary art. Early twentieth-century
avant-garde fine art, particularly as it was manifested in Cubism, the
Dutch De Stijl movement and Constructivism, sought to distance itself
from the domesticated, pictorial aesthetic of the nineteenth century and,
by embracing abstraction, to align itself with the spirit of modernity. In
the years after 1914 it also sought an alliance with Modernist architecture
in the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Together, their protagonists believed,
art and architecture could bring about a transformation of the environment
that would unite the separate spheres. That new alliance reinforced
the approach towards architecture and the interior that defined them, first
and foremost, as the results of the manipulation of space. In turn space
was seen as being continuous and unbroken, existing both within and
beyond the picture plane, the piece of sculpture, and the architectural
construction. In that sense, at least conceptually, the abstract interior had
no fixed boundaries and existed both inside and outside at the same time.
By extension, architectural constructions were not restricted to exclu -
sively private or public functions. Space was simply space and the artists
and architects associated with those avant-garde movements set out to
reclaim it as a neutral concept, cleansed of all the ideological baggage
it had acquired in the nineteenth century through its relationship with
domesticity.
By the 1920s an increasing number of progressive architects sought
to erode the boundaries between the inside and outside and to enhance the
porosity of their architectural structures. As we have seen they linked
the house, metaphorically, with the machine, and they defined the artefacts 167