The Modern Interior

room at home. On the other hand the stark simplicity of Walter Gropius’s

kitchen in his Dessau home of 1925 – 6 was a direct result of the fact that

it had been organized according to the rational principles underpinning

factory production. The apparent boundaries between private and pub-

lic interior spaces were continually under threat, therefore, as they and

the values they embraced constantly invaded each other’s territories,

taking with them as they did so the visual, the material and the spatial

languages through which those values were expressed. In short the

boundaries between the ‘separate spheres’ were fundamentally unstable

and it was that instability, rather than the separation per se, that, I will

suggest, defined modernity, and by extension the modern interior, reflect-

ing the constantly shifting identities and the increasingly fragmented

experiences of the inhabitants of the modern world.

Unlike the modern painting, the modern poem and the modern

novel, all of whose high cultural forms are fairly easily identified by their

rejection of one set of cultural traditions and values and their adoption

of new strategies, the modern interior, which crossed the bridge between

high and everyday culture, was a much more complex phenomenon. Its

inherent complexity was further compounded by the fact that the modern

interior can be understood in a number of different ways, that is, as an

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The kitchen in Walter Gropius’s house in Dessau, with furniture by Marcel Breuer,

c. 1925 – 6 , illustrated in Hans Eckstein’s Die Schöne Wohnung: Beispiele Neuzeitlicher

Deutscher Wohnräume, 1931.

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