The Modern Interior

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the nineteenth century, therefore, all the components of modern interior
decoration were in place and it was understood that the decorated interior
provided its occupants with an expressive frame. While its role was un -
doubt edly at its most intense in the privacy of the home, it was quickly
extended, along with many other values engendered within the context of
domesticity, to work and public leisure environments as well where the
thoughts and feelings of communities of users could be expressed. In the
process the separate spheres were, once again, blurred.
The desire to embellish interior spaces has, of course, characterized
the entire history of civilization. For centuries people have applied patterns,
colours, and textures to structural surfaces, and arranged non-fixed
items within their interior spaces. In the modern era, however, decoration
moved from being a communally understood symbol of shared
values – familial, religious, political, national and civic among them – to
have the potential of becoming an expression of individualism. Prior to
industrialization decoration had communicated through sets of visual
languages, or styles, which had expressed fairly consistent messages and
reinforced established social hierarchies. As representations of power and
wealth, shared decorative languages had acted as forms of control, marking
and sustaining fixed social structures. 8 With the high level of social
mobility that came with industrialization, however, interior decoration
gradually moved away from confirming stable social structures to actively
seeking to renew or transform them.
Interior decoration was also linked to personal memory and identity.
Walter Benjamin frequently referred to the role of the collector in
that context, while much has been written about the significance of the
collection of artefacts that filled Sigmund Freud’s consulting room in
Vienna. 9 Many of the nineteenth-century design reformers realized that
decoration was an important means of linking people to their environments
and of making them feel ‘at home’ in a modern world which was
characterized by increasing levels of social flux and psychological alienation.
In their search for a link between decoration, tradition and spiritual
values, William Morris, Owen Jones, Christopher Dresser and others, for
example, looked both to the medieval past and to the exotic world of nonwestern
decoration. 10 With the advent of Art Nouveau the emphasis turned
to the world of nature, to, that is, a contemporary source of decoration
that would suit the requirements of the modern age.
Stylistically the Art Nouveau experiment led to two distinct paths
of development for the modern interior. The first built on the abstract,