The Modern Interior

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which were characterized by their ‘massive initial impact and small
sustaining power’. 25 Seen as a highly transient area of visual, material and
spatial culture that could be changed at will to suit to the shifting identities
of its inhabitants, the interior was heavily implicated in that crisis of
values. From the poster-festooned bedrooms of young people, to the spaces
in the clubs in which they danced, to the brightly coloured patterned
surfaces of the retail stores where they shopped for clothes and other life -
style accessories, the ‘Pop’ interior quickly became a reality. Retailers, from
Terence Conran to Dodo Designs, supplied young British consumers with
many of the objects they needed to embellish their interior spaces.
By the 1970s however, the progressiveness that had characterized
Pop design had been replaced by a new mood of retrospection that
encouraged a reworking of the modern interior. Beginning its journey by
reviving the Arts and Crafts Movement before quickly moving on to Art
Nouveau and thence to Art Deco and on to 1950s’ ‘Mid-century Modern’,
the style-based ‘retro’ movement embraced, in only a few years, the entire
historical period of the modern interior. In so doing it was re-enacting
the Victorian interior’s embrace of the past as a means of addressing the
present. By the 1970s however, the past being revisited was a modern,
rather than a pre-modern, one. That spirit of retrospection also stimulated
a popular interest in the history of modern architecture, and by implication
in the modern interior. The ‘period room’ concept – hitherto
restricted to pre-modern spaces – was extended over the next few decades
to include interiors created within the era of industrial modernity.
International organizations, such as docomomo, dedicated themselves to
restoring modern buildings and their interiors. In Germany the Bauhaus
building in Weimar was restored, in Poissy in France the Villa Savoye was
made accessible to visitors, and in Utrecht Rietveld’s Schroeder House
was also opened, marking the growing interest in those iconic Modern
buildings and their interior spaces. In England, the National Trust opened
a number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century houses to the
public, including Edwin Lutyens’s Castle Drogo in Devon and Erno
Goldfinger’s family house in Willow Road in London. 26 Driven by developments
in social, rather than architectural history, homes that had been
inhabited by people located at the margins of society, such as those located
in New York’s tenement buildings, were also restored and opened to
visitors. Tinged with nostalgia, they proved to be highly popular.
Adding the revival of early modern spaces to its more contemporary
stylistic alternatives, the modern interior continued to develop