2 The New Interior
The shattering of the interior occurs via Jugendstil at the turn of the century.
Walter Benjamin^1The emergence of the aesthetic interior in the last decades of the nine-
teenth century marked a new interest in the appearance of middle-class
domestic spaces and, most significantly, in the need for them not only to
be modern but also to look modern. Not everybody suddenly threw out
their old belongings and brought in interior decorators to modernize
their domestic spaces of course, nor were period styles (especially those
like the French revival styles, which facilitated a lighter, brighter, more
unified approach towards domestic spaces) completely rejected. However,
the ideas of the ‘new’, the ‘modern’ and the ‘fashionable’ increasingly
pene trated popular attitudes towards the design of the domestic sphere.
Like its mid-nineteenth-century antecedents, the new turn-of-the-century
interior also developed within the context of private domesticity but
moved quickly into the public arena. That momentum was increasing-
ly driven by the reforming ideals of architects, however, as well as by the
more conservative practices of upholsterers and decorators working with
middle-class housewives.
The new interior emerged in a number of guises in the years
between 1890 and 1914. Manifested through the simple forms of Britain’s
Arts and Crafts Movement, the sinuous curves of French and Belgian Art
Nouveau, or its rectilinear Northern European equivalent, Jugendstil –
or, a little later, the undecorated, standardized, machine-inspired forms
created by a group of designers based in Germany – it sought above all to
address its own era. Most significantly, whatever their preferred style, a
number of architects located in Europe and the USbegan to think of the
interior as an integral feature of their projects and to develop the idea of
a Gesamtkunstwerk, a ‘total work of art’, in which a sense of visual unity
brought together every element of their buildings and their inner spaces.
They aimed to bring together architecture and the decorative arts into a 37