The Modern Interior

the interior. The architect’s total control, both of the pace of movement
through the house, either on the ramp or the spiral staircase, and of the
vistas experienced en route, all of which took in aspects of both the inside
and the outside in a single glance, was evident throughout the house. The
view from the interior out on to the exterior ramp through the large
expanses of plate glass that were used in the house indicated the high
level of inside/outside ambiguity in the house. The absence of distracting
colour, the importance given to built-in furniture – from tables canti -
levered out from walls and pillars, to cupboards with sliding doors positioned
under the windows – the open-endedness of many of the spaces,
made possible by new construction techniques and the extensive use of
glass, combined to force the occupant to focus exclusively upon the articulation
of space and its interplay with light within the building.
The Modernists’ desire for transparency was double-edged, however.
13 While it symbolized the death knell for the heavily interiorized
middle-class home it could also create unwanted exposure for the occupant.
Edith Farnsworth’s experience of living in a house designed by
the German Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built
between 1945 and 1951 brought that point home forcefully. When she
lived there Edith Farnsworth furnished the interior of her glass house
with a combination of traditional and modern items (see overleaf).
Emphasizing the strongly ideological base-line of its Modernist interior
Mies’s grandson commented that, ‘So unconventional was the house that
every move and every activity in it assumed an aesthetic quality which
challenges behaviour patterns formed in different surroundings.’ 14 The
difficulty of living up to that level of idealism in the course of everyday
life, of being an ‘art object’, proved to be excessively demanding in that
instance.
Mies van der Rohe had been one of the pioneers of the abstract
interior. From as early as 1923, in a design for a brick country house
which was never built, he had been searching for a way of creating open,
fluid spaces within his architectural constructions, of defining areas
according to their functions by clustering appropriate items of furniture
together, as Frank Lloyd Wright had done before him, and partially
separating them with free-standing wall elements. 15 In 1927 his ambition
was realized in two projects, a Glass House created with Lilly Reich for
the Werkbund’s exhibition in Stuttgart and a Velvet and Silk Café, also
designed with Reich, for a Berlin trade fair. In both cases he used materials
– glass, velvet and silk – to create spaces within his constructions. The 179