Table Of Content

The Modern Interior PennySparke 001_005_Modern_Prelims:Layout 1 30/5/08 15:17 Page 1 THE MODERN INTERIOR 001_005_Modern_Prelims:Layout 1 30/5/08 15:17 Page 2 001_005_Modern_Prelims:Layout 1 30/5/08 15:17 Page 3 The Modern Interior Penny Sparke reaktion books 001_005_Modern_Prelims:Layout 1 30/5/08 15:17 Page 4 For Molly, Nancy and Celia Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2008 Copyright © Penny Sparke 2008 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sparke, Penny The modern interior 1. Interior decoration –History I. Title 747'.09 isbn-13: 978 1 86189 372 7 001_005_Modern_Prelims:Layout 1 30/5/08 15:17 Page 5 Contents Introduction 7 Part 1: Inside Out 1 The Private Interior 21 2 The New Interior 37 3 The Mass-consumed Interior 55 4 The Fashionable Interior 73 5 The Decorative Interior 91 Part 2: Outside In 6 The Public Interior 113 7 The Rational Interior 129 8 The Mass-produced Interior 147 9 The Abstract Interior 167 10 The Designed Interior 185 Conclusion 204 References 213 Bibliography 227 Acknowledgements 234 Photo Acknowledgements 236 Index 237 006_018_Modern_Intro:Layout 1 30/5/08 15:31 Page 6 006_018_Modern_Intro:Layout 1 30/5/08 15:31 Page 7 Introduction An estate agent’s photograph of an interior space in Montevetro – a Richard Rogers-designed, riverside apartment building in Battersea – published in a south-west London magazine in July 2007, portrayed an all-white living room furnished with hard-edged white sofas, a Le Corbusier chaise longue upholstered in white leather, low ‘Japanese- style’ white coffee tables and a huge plasma screen television. Described as ‘contemporary and stylish’, this room, and others like it, would undoubtedly fulfil most people’s expectations of a ‘modern interior’. Countless images of a similar nature reveal themselves to us through the glossy home-oriented magazines, furniture retailers’ catalogues and television advertisements that form part of our daily lives. Indeed our sense of the early twenty-first-century modern interior is, arguably, largely formed by its presence in the mass media, where it is frequently repre- sented as a highly desirable, uncluttered backcloth to an increasingly complex existence. For those with a more historical frame of reference, however, the term ‘the modern interior’, may evoke an open-plan space from the 1920s featuring chromed tubular steel, black leather chairs and large expanses of glass. Whichever image comes to mind – contemporary or historical – it is likely that the epithet ‘modern’ is understood stylistically and that the interior in question is located in a domestic setting. This book adopts a different starting point, however. The Modern Interior sets out to demon- strate that ‘the modern interior’, which was formed and developed between the middle years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, went beyond style and encompassed many more inside spaces than those con- tained within the home. The modern interior addressed in this study is defined by its relationship with the everyday experiences of modernity during those years, which were as profound in the office, the factory, the 7 006_018_Modern_Intro:Layout 1 30/5/08 15:31 Page 8 A shopping mall in Calgary, Alberta, 2005. department store and the café – as well as in the modern hospital and church – as they were in the home. In addition, the visual languages through which it was expressed could range from Louis Quinze to Streamlined Moderne. The modern interior addressed in this study can be understood, therefore, in a very general sense, as the inside location of people’s experiences of, and negotiations with, modern life. One of the best documented of these negotiations was initiated by a group of progressive architects and designers who were committed to the idea that modern inside spaces not only mirrored modern experi- 8 ences but that, more importantly, they also played a role in constructing