The Modern Interior

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A combined living and dining area containing mass-produced furniture, designed by
Osvaldo Borsani, Milan, 1955, illustrated in Roberto Alois’s L’Arredamento Moderno,
1955.
middle classes from the rest of society at that time. As in the us the new
Italian interior could be found both in private homes and in the inside
spaces of public buildings. While also designing interiors for private clients
Achille Castiglioni created interiors for the Splügen Bräu Brasserie in
Milan in 1960 and the Gavina shop in the same city two years later. 23
Joe Colombo also created a number of commercial interiors including,
between 1962 and 1964, an entrance hall for Sardinia’s Pontinental hotel,
and interiors for the Lella Sport store and the Mario Valentino shoe shop,
both in Milan, in 1966 and 1967 respectively. 24
The Italian neo-Modernist interior was more strongly rooted in
domesticity than its American equivalent, however. In Italy itself it represented
the domestic modernization of a population that had not long ago
been working on the land and that had had to engage with modernity very
quickly. In the international marketplace, however, it stood for middleclass
domestic sophistication. In 1972 an exhibition titled Italy: The New
Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian Design was held
at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which positioned the domestic
interior at the heart of Italian post-war design, questioned the continuing
relevance of the optimistic Modernist project in an era that was characterized
by the impact of popular culture, and emphasized the emergence of a