The Modern Interior

10 The Designed Interior
Whether a home is hand- or machine-built, it is no good unless it is
properly designed.
George Nelson and Henry Wright1 By 1945 all the components of the modern interior were in place. Its
formation had been driven by the shifting identities of the inhabitants of
the modern world and by the complex, and ever-changing, relationship
between the private and the public spheres that inevitably accompanied
that level of identity instability. While, on the one hand, the domestic
model had broken through the physical boundaries of the ‘home’ to
inhabit a wide variety of semi-public and public inside spaces, on the
other, through the intervention of reforming architects and designers,
aspects of the public sphere had also entered the private arena. As a result
a stylistic spectrum of modern interiors, developed by architects, designers
and decorators of all kinds, had emerged, communicating a wide
range of cultural, psychological, social, economic and technical values.
In the years between 1945 and the late 1960s the Modernist interior
reinvented itself yet again. It did so through the continuing movement of
its visual, material and spatial languages between the spheres. Above all
its defining characteristics – formed both within modern domestic spaces
and in interior sites dedicated to modern public sphere activities – came
closer together, both in the home and outside it. In essence a hybrid
aesthetic, defined both psychologically and technically, and referred to
in writings of the time as ‘humanised Modernism’, emerged, first in the
domestic context but almost immediately afterwards outside it as well. It
was ‘engineered’ by a new generation of reforming architects and designers
who extended the ambitions of the inter-war Modernists, in particular
their desire to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, to prioritize the role of the architect,
to create overtly modern spaces that reflected their own era and to
cross the private and the public divide. Although that new approach was
driven by idealistic architects and designers working at the highest social
and cultural levels, in that era of accelerated mass mediation it quickly 185