The Modern Interior

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The Café Museum in Vienna, designed by Adolf Loos, 1889.
modernity. As in his menswear shop, Loos used his interior fittings to
great effect. In the café a circular counter was added to create a sense of
drama. In stark contrast to the underplayed aesthetic of the Café Museum,
Hoffmann’s Café Fledermaus, attached to the cabaret and bar of the same
name and created eight years later, could not have been more decorative.
With its black and white chequerboard floor, colourful walls and purpose-designed
and -made furniture it offered Viennese coffee-drinkers a
totally new experience of modernity.
The new forms of public transportation also presented a challenge
to architects in the years leading up to 1914. Otto Wagner’s work on the
Viennese railway stations of the mid 1890s, Hector Guimard’s dramatic
additions to the Paris metro system in 1900 and Alfred Grenander’s
1901 Jugendstil entrance to the Berlin electric railway showed how it was
possible to bring decorative art and the public environment together.
Designers also sought to expand their sphere of influence to other forms
of transport. That was especially the case in Germany, where Bruno Paul
created a set of interiors for the new ocean liners, among them the George
Washington of 1908. By 1914, the year of a major German Werkbund
exhibition, the architect-decorators, August Endell among them, had
included the interiors of railway compartments as well. By that date there