The Modern Interior

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intrusion of the media into our private spaces has reached new and
unprecedented levels.
As we have seen, Modernism’s legacy continues into the early
twenty-first century. However, the power of commerce has stripped it of
its ideological underpinnings and transformed it into just one more fashionable
interior style. Unable to resist the pull of consumerism it has
been transformed into the ‘minimal interior’, a result of the encounter of
modern art with architecture and a marker of modern luxury connoting
high levels of ‘cultural capital’ through what is absent rather than what
is present. In contrast to the nineteenth-century home interior, which
displayed its occupants’ social status through an accretion of objects,
the minimal interior has declared itself an artwork and a sign of the
enhanced social status that now flows from merging art with everyday
life. The approach towards the modern interior which, in the hands of
Gerrit Rietveld, Mies van der Rohe and other Modernists focused on
the immateriality of space and the idea of a new, anti-materialistic life -
style had, by the late twentieth century, succumbed to the power of the
marketplace and the imperatives of the fashion system. Another of
Modernism’s legacies – the adoption of the rational processes developed
in the workplace into the home – is less stylistically determined. That
approach is still visible today in women’s magazines and consumer advice
publications. The author of an article published in Good Housekeeping
magazine in January 2003, for instance, offered ‘50 expert ideas for organising
your home’, which included the implementation of a clothes storage
system involving ‘grouping tops and bottoms separately in co-ordinating
colours’, ‘filing appliance instructions in document files’ and ‘allocating
an area [of the house] for household administration’. 1 With the advent of
the ‘home office’, Frederick’s 1913 dream has, on one level, finally became
a reality.
By far the strongest force to influence the development of the modern
interior in recent years, however, has been its relationship with the
mass media. In the 1940s in the us, and later elsewhere, television began
to take on a parallel role to magazines in the home. As they had been in
nineteenth-century theatre productions and inter-war films, interiors
were presented to consumers through the medium of television in a variety
of ways. They were the subjects of advertisements, the backcloths for
other products in advertisements, and the settings for dramas and comedies.
This brought into play yet another version of the ‘interior within the
interior’, this time one located, like Loos’s ‘theatre’, within the domestic