became a popular ideal as well. The mass media also brought architects
and designers themselves into the public arena and the modern ‘designed
interior’, understood both as a mechanism for social elevation and as a
means by which large numbers of people could participate in the excit-
ing new world of progressive modernity, became a mass phenomenon, as
the modern idioms of Art Deco and Streamlining had been in the inter-
war years.
The message of inter-war European architectural and design
Modern ism was especially strong in the usin the years after 1945. Follow -
ing the migration of Josef Urban, Gilbert Rhode, Rudolph Schindler and
others across the Atlantic, the additional presence of German Modernists
such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer on
American soil – as well as that of a number of other Europeans, including
the Finnish Jugendstil architect Eliel Saarinen, who took the directorship
of Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy – helped to further disseminate
that message. The ideas adopted by those Modernist giants relating to
the interior – the open plan, the continuity between inside and outside,
the use of built-in furniture and items of ‘equipment’, and the emphasis
upon spatial articulation, among many others – inevitably fed into
American post-war developments. The ‘organic’ inter iors of the
American Modernist, Frank Lloyd Wright, were also frequently refer-
enced in both contemporary architectural and interior maga zines as well
as in more popular publications. Attention focused on his commitment
to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, on his use of texture – exposed stone
on chimney breasts, for example – and on the hearth as a focal point for
open-plan living spaces. The interiors of his own home, Taliesin, were
widely reproduced in those years offering a seductive model for others to
follow. An image of Wright’s living area in that house appeared in a 1955
Italian publication titled L’Arredamento Moderno.^2 George Nelson and
Henry Wright, in their influential book To m o r r o w ’s H o u s e( 1945 ), which
appealed for a new architecture that would break free from the bonds of
stylistic revivalism, described Taliesin as ‘one of the most wonderful
houses ever built’.^3
Nelson and Wright’s commitment to move beyond the shadow
of stylistic revivalism, nostalgia and the obsession with antiques that had
dominated both elite and popular American domestic interiors through
the twentieth century was echoed by others. In Goodbye, Mr. Chippendale,
published in 1944 , the American interior designer T. H. Robsjohn-186 Gibbings, for example, blamed the decorators. ‘The words “interior