The Modern Interior

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new synthesis that would not only facilitate modern life but that, through
the use of non-historicist forms inspired by the contemporary worlds of
nature and the machine, would actually embody it.
In the daring experiment that was Art Nouveau or Jugendstil,
depending on where and how it manifested itself, many architectdecorators
began to search for a new language for the interior. 2 The term
‘the New Interior’ came to be widely used to characterize the striking
results of their experiments. In that its designers sought to create a modern
interior style which would cross the divide between the private and
public spheres, to be as at home in an exhibition hall and a department
store as in a living room, Art Nouveau was the first modern style to fully
recognize the permeability between the spheres. The architect-designers
recognized that women were increasingly replicating the interiors they
saw outside the home in their domestic settings and that, conversely, the
creators of interiors in exhibitions and stores were working hard to
ensure that women felt ‘at home’ in the settings in they consumed.
Ultimately however, according to Walter Benjamin, although the
architects’ intentions were to individualize and personalize their creations
through the level of control that they exerted over all the elements of their
buildings, inside and out, the result was to undermine the subtle qualities
of domesticity and privacy that had been embodied in the mid-nineteenthcentury
domestic interior. For Benjamin this meant the death of the auto -
nomy of the ‘interior’ itself. 3 Indeed the totalizing effect of Art Nouveau
in the interior was to prove its ultimate undoing as a successful style for
the domestic interior. In that context it was really only fully successful in
the highly idealized homes that architects created for themselves and
their families, and in those of a relatively small number of ‘far-sighted’
wealthy clients who were prepared to live with a high level of aesthetic
control in their homes in exchange for the cultural capital they gained
from it. For the most part, however, Art Nouveau was successful – albeit,
given its innate fashionableness, for a limited time period only – in public
interiors dedicated to culture, leisure and commerce. It featured in depart -
ment stores, museums, world exhibitions, cafés and restaurants and in a
number of other inside spaces outside the home, especially those inhabited
by women.
The New Interior had its roots in the 1890s when a number of
architects began to seek innovative interior design solutions to what
they perceived to be the ‘problems’ of the historicism and eclecticism of
mid-nineteenth-century domesticity. In the face of what they saw as the