The Modern Interior

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questioned (see A. Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories
and Chronology of English Women’s History’, in The Historical Review, xxxvi/2 (1993),
pp. 383–414), it was a dominant ideology at the time, and the existence of two sets of interiors
– domestic and non-domestic – helped to make it a physical reality as well.
10 The architectural historian Beatriz Colomina has suggested that ‘modern architecture
becomes “modern” not simply by using glass, steel, or reinforced concrete . . . but precisely
by engaging with the new mechanical equipment of the mass media: photography, film,
advertising, publicity, publications and so on.’ Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as
Mass Media (Cambridge, ma and London, 1994), p. 73.
Chapter One: The Private Interior
1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, ma
and London, 2004), p. 220.
2 Quoted in Penny Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London, 1995), p. 57.
3 Ibid., p. 63.
4 Ibid., p. 104.
5 See R. G. Saisselin, Bricobracomania: The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (London, 1985).
6 More recently the architectural historian, Hilde Heynen, has reminded us of the
Modernist’s belief that domesticity and modernity were fundamentally opposed to each
other. See introduction to H. Heynen and G. Baydar, Negotiating Domestictity: Spatial
Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture (London and New York, 2005). ‘A metaphorical
“homelessness”’, she has written, ‘is often considered the hallmark of modernity’. Christopher
Reed’s 1996 collection of writings, Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art
and Architecture (London, 1996), has also suggested that Modernism was deeply antagonistic
to domesticity.
7 See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
(Cambridge, 1991), for an extended discussion of the relationship between individualism and
modernity.
8 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 9.
9 Quotation from a pamphlet accompanying the exhibition At Home in Renaissance Italy at the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London (5 October 2006–7 January 2007), p. 4.
10 In his book Home: The Short History of an Idea (Harmondsworth, 1987), Witold Rybczynski
explained that the idea that ‘a room conveys the character of its owner’ first emerged in
the sixteenth century in Northern Europe, while intimacy and privacy became features of
seventeenth-century Dutch homes. Both, he explains, were responses to forces within early
modernity – the expansion of city life and of commercial activity; the development of new
forms of manufacturing; and the emergence of the middle classes. According to Rybczynski,
it was in seventeenth-century Holland that the modern concept of domesticity – a phenomenon
that, in his words, ‘has to do with family, intimacy, and a devotion to the home, as well
as with a sense of the house as embodying . . . these sentiments’ – was formed. Significantly
it was created for the most part by women who, with the growing exodus of men into the
public workplace, had been largely left on their own to form it, an early manifestation of the
‘separate spheres’ which spread to many other places over the next two centuries.
11 See C. Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London and
New York, 2007) for further discussion of this topic.
12 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Reflections, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (New York, 1986), pp. 155–6.