The Modern Interior

Conclusion

Wouldn’t you rather be inside?

Southside Shopping Arcade, Wandsworth, London, 2005

204

While the forces of industrial modernity that surfaced in the mid-

nineteenth century remained substantially in place through the twentieth

century, the speed at which they effected change inevitably accelerated.

Through the work of architects, designers, decorators and others, and the

dissemination of their ideas and practices through the mass media, the

appearance of the modern interiordidchange continually over that time

period. Those style changes did not disturb the basic role of the modern

interior, however, as the location for the key experiences of modernity. In

that capacity it was influenced by the ever-changing relationship between

privacy and publicity, and linked to mass production and mass consump-

tion, identity formation, the enhanced role of ‘art’ in everyday life and the

continually strengthening role of the mass media.

In the early twenty-first century the models of private domesticity

and public anti-domesticity that were established in the nineteenth cen-

tury are still visible, even though they continue to transform themselves

and to become almost indistinguishable from each other. The divide

between the separate spheres continues to exist. On the one hand, the

comfort, refuge and privacy, opportunities for self-reflection, and links to

tradition offered by ‘home’ remain in place, while the public spaces with-

in the giant ‘sheds’ housing shopping malls, cinemas, leisure centres

and exhibition spaces, continue to provide their paradoxical mix of

anonymity and surveillance. An anonymous crowd of people, for exam-

ple, go about their daily activities – some shopping, some resting – in the

public spaces of shopping malls, unaware that they are under continual

observation. On the other hand domestic ‘living rooms’, complete with

sofas and coffee tables, populate not only the home but also bookshops,

coffee shops, dentists’ waiting rooms and shopping malls. In addition,

with the advent of multiple television channels and the internet, the

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