The Modern Interior

204
Conclusion
Wouldn’t you rather be inside?
Southside Shopping Arcade, Wandsworth, London, 2005
While the forces of industrial modernity that surfaced in the midnineteenth
century remained substantially in place through the twentieth
century, the speed at which they effected change inevitably accelerated.
Through the work of architects, designers, decorators and others, and the
dissemination of their ideas and practices through the mass media, the
appearance of the modern interior did change continually over that time
period. Those style changes did not disturb the basic role of the modern
interior, however, as the location for the key experiences of modernity. In
that capacity it was influenced by the ever-changing relationship between
privacy and publicity, and linked to mass production and mass consumption,
identity formation, the enhanced role of ‘art’ in everyday life and the
continually strengthening role of the mass media.
In the early twenty-first century the models of private domesticity
and public anti-domesticity that were established in the nineteenth century
are still visible, even though they continue to transform themselves
and to become almost indistinguishable from each other. The divide
between the separate spheres continues to exist. On the one hand, the
comfort, refuge and privacy, opportunities for self-reflection, and links to
tradition offered by ‘home’ remain in place, while the public spaces within
the giant ‘sheds’ housing shopping malls, cinemas, leisure centres
and exhibition spaces, continue to provide their paradoxical mix of
anonymity and surveillance. An anonymous crowd of people, for example,
go about their daily activities – some shopping, some resting – in the
public spaces of shopping malls, unaware that they are under continual
observation. On the other hand domestic ‘living rooms’, complete with
sofas and coffee tables, populate not only the home but also bookshops,
coffee shops, dentists’ waiting rooms and shopping malls. In addition,
with the advent of multiple television channels and the internet, the