The Modern Interior

post-war movement of that language, humanized through its encounter
with domesticity, back into the interior spaces of the public arena, the
two spheres had come to resemble each other much more closely. The
distinction in people’s lives between the private world of domesticity and
the public world of work, commerce and leisure did not collapse completely,
of course, but the languages and values of those different spaces
came to have more and more in common with one another and to facilitate
movement between them. While a negative interpretation might
suggest that privacy became more elusive and that enhanced levels of
engagement with work and consumption were encouraged, a more positive
reading could highlight the emergence of a less enclosed and repressive
domesticity and of more humanized public interior spaces.
Whatever the interpretation of the desire on the part of architects
and interior designers to create a closer relationship between the interiors
of the private and the public spheres, the presence of that rapprochement
was acutely felt in the us, and in many European countries as well, in the
years after 1945. Several of the latter also used the arrival of the ‘designed
interior’ as a vehicle through which to express the distinctiveness of their
modernized, post-war national identities. Italy was particularly quick to
build on its pre-war relationship with international Modernism, the existence
of a post-war generation of trained architects willing and able to
work on interior, furniture and product design projects, and its wide
availability of small-scale manufacturing firms specializing in furniture
production. These came together to exchange the development of a neo-
Modernist interior and furniture movement predicated upon the named
designer as a ‘guarantor’ of enhanced social status and added value. The
names of Gio Ponti, Achille Castiglioni, Marco Zanuso, Ettore Sottsass, Jr,
Vico Magistretti, Joe Colombo and others filled the pages of Italy’s glossy
interior magazines – Interni, Abitare and Domus among them. A living/
dining room created by Osvaldo Borsani for the Tecno company in Milan
and containing a flexible sofa/day-bed also created by that designer, provided
just one example of the way in which many Italian designers, educated
as architects for the most part, worked on both individual furniture
pieces and their interior settings (see overleaf). While, in the 1940s, the
Italian neo-Modern Movement set out with the aim of building new, furnished
homes for the homeless and the working classes, it was rapidly
transformed in the 1950s and ’60s into a more elitist phenomenon
embracing new materials and forms and aligning itself with the idea of the
‘good life’. An aesthetic of modern luxury marked out the culturally aware 197