The Modern Interior

Part One Inside Out ...

A Victorian parlour in Manchester, England, c. 1890. ...

The private face of the modern interior was formed in the middle-class Victorian home. That space performed a number of simultan ...

the second half of the nineteenth century that language of Victorian domesticity had become a feature of the interior landscapes ...

who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions... his living room is a ...

supported on the shelf of the chimney-piece. When there was no fire, the grate, which for some reason it was thought necessary t ...

spaces of work and commerce. The idea of comfort emphasized the physical link between the bodies of the occupants of such spaces ...

with many of its artefacts, framed mirrors surmounting mantelpieces, for example, clearly echoing noble dwellings. Nowhere in th ...

Codman, Jr. Once again the opulence of the materials used – marble brought from Tunisia and Italy, alabaster, onyx, ormolu, crys ...

notwithstanding, those ‘cottages’ were still ‘homes’ – sites, that is, dedi- cated to privacy and intimacy as well as to enterta ...

to help make them respectable venues for middle-class audiences and to offset the ‘sexual energy’ potentially created by men and ...

parlour. Only the arrangement of the seating gave away the fact that it was a railway carriage. Even British mental asylums chos ...

white’, the journalist explained. ‘The panels of the walls, the hangings, and coverings of the furniture are in crimson Beresfor ...

of interiors which complemented a trip to the department store. In London’s Piccadilly the Criterion pleasure complex, designed ...

those buildings, with their grand, usually neo-classical, interiors, lay in their relationship with the new railway and road sys ...

‘A Drawing Room Corner’, frontispiece to Robert Edis’s Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses, 1881. ...

Britain in 1868 and in the usafour years later, provided them with infor- mation about the fashionable styles of the day. It was ...

attraction, fascination, aura and charm.’^33 Twentieth-century ‘personality’ broke down the distinction between private and publ ...

2 The New Interior The shattering of the interior occurs via Jugendstil at the turn of the century. Walter Benjamin^1 The emerge ...

new synthesis that would not only facilitate modern life but that, through the use of non-historicist forms inspired by the cont ...