The Modern Interior

over from the department store for the most part, offering, through their
more nuanced and complex ‘inside’ spaces, an even more ambiguous
retail experience than their predecessors.
Although the direct purchasing of objects for the interior did not
usually take place at exhibitions on a significant scale, they played a crucial
role, nonetheless, in the development of the representation of the
mass-consumed interior in the public sphere. 23 Walter Benjamin
described the world exhibitions as ‘places of pilgrimage to the commodity
fetish’ intended ‘to entertain the working classes’. 24 It wasn’t until the
last decades of the nineteenth century that complete (or at least two- or
three-sided) ‘room sets’ were exhibited in those settings. Prior to that isolated
items of furniture had been displayed either in elaborate cabinets or
in roped-off areas. At Philadephia’s Centennial Exhibition of 1876, for
example, finely carved wooden display cases containing free-standing
items of furniture had stood looking rather lost under the vast iron
trusses and plate glass of that vast exhibition hall. 25 Full-scale models of
workers’ houses had been shown at the 1867 exhibition in Paris, but the
emphasis at that time had still been upon their exteriors rather than their
interiors. 26 The Austrian critic Jacob von Falke, the author of the first
German language book on interior design, Art in the House (1871), was
among the first designers in Germany or Austria to create a complete
‘ensemble’ interior display in an exhibition. 27 By 1880 it had become a
fairly common strategy used by curators in applied arts museums and by
designers at trade fairs. A William Morris exhibit at The Foreign Fair of
1883–4, for example, held in Boston’s Mechanics Hall, was divided into six
compartments, or rooms. A pamphlet describing the display cautioned
that ‘the rooms must not . . . be taken to represent the rooms of a
dwelling, nor is the ordinary decoration of a house attempted. Morris
and Company are exhibiting here as manufacturers only, and the arrangement
of goods is that which seemed best for showing them in the ways
most accordant to their actual use.’ 28 That caveat could have been applied
equally well to all the exhibition room sets that came after it.
By the time of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, room sets
were being extensively used. That exhibition set out to celebrate modern
art, industry and commerce and for all the exhibiting countries the integrated
interior represented a level of achievement in all of those three
areas. It also demonstrated the degree of progressiveness, or modernity,
embraced by the countries in question. Examples of exhibited interiors
at Paris 1900 included those designed by German exhibitors, Richard 65