The Modern Interior

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nonetheless – fulfil the same market need as couture clothing and handcrafted
objects.
Alongside the erosion of ‘place’, a result of the corporate standardization
of the interior, the well-documented lack of differentiation
between shopping malls and theme parks is another consequence of the
branded interior. As the appeal of lifestyle dominates everything else
within consumer culture it becomes increasingly hard to differentiate
between the experiences of pleasure and leisure and the act of consumption.
Themed interiors can be found in both leisure spaces and shopping
malls. SeaWorld in San Diego for example, has been described as a ‘mall
with fish’. Much has been written about Canada’s West Edmonton Mall
in Alberta which, until fairly recently, was the largest mall in the world.
At its centre is an enormous artificial seaside complete with beach and
waves. The spectacular nature of that surprising element within a shopping
mall parallels the use of spectacle in early department stores. Its
presence evokes an endless debate about the nature of authenticity and
pushes to an extreme the idea that fantasy is an inherent feature of the
modern interior. Given its long-standing role as a ‘stage set’, this is, perhaps,
not surprising.
Another notable feature of contemporary urban and suburban
life is the merging of spaces and the interiorization that have gone on
within commercial buildings. As a result ever larger conglomerations
of spaces, and of spaces within spaces, have emerged. In Shibuya, one of
Tokyo’s busiest shopping areas, for example, the spaces that house the
railway and subway stations also contain a department store and a large
food court boasting a wide variety of restaurants. The travellers/shoppers/
eaters passing through Shibuya can move from one area to another without
ever needing to go ‘outside’. That phenomenon is familiar to many of
us living in the early twenty-first century, experienced in both the shopping
mall and the leisure complex, among other places. Tropical Islands,
a huge covered resort in eastern Germany, contains a rainforest and a
Balinese lagoon inside what was previously a zeppelin hangar, a favourite
structure of the Modernists. The mall in Caesar’s Forum in Las Vegas
takes the idea of being ‘outside inside’ to an extreme, providing shoppers
and tourists with an overhead ‘inside’ sky and clouds. That phenomenon,
an example of the ‘hyper-reality’ observed by Jean Baudrillard, has an
obvious relationship with the need to control the weather. 3 In Las Vegas
it provides protection from the scorching summer heat. In the interior of
the Venetian hotel, for example, the narrow streets, bridges, canals and