were few traces of Jugendstil left however, as it had been overtaken by a
more simplified, machine-inspired aesthetic which was to become much
more widespread after 1918. Otto Wagner, a pioneer of the new simpli city
in design, made a significant impression in the design of interiors in the
semi-public and public sphere in these years. Committed to a highly
rational and functional approach towards construction and to the use of
new materials such as aluminium, his interiors and furniture designs for
the telegraph office of the newspaper, Die Zeit, of 1902 , and for the
Austrian Post Office Savings Bank of 1904 – 6 indicated a direction of
travel that went beyond the social elitism of Josef Hoffmann’s work and
the transient fashionableness of Art Nouveau. Together with the German
architects and designers, who began to embrace industrial manufacture
and to understand the need to create low-cost sets of furniture, Wagner’s
approach offered a way out of the impasse of the inherent elitism of the
New Interior.
Although the New Interior was an ephemeral phenomenon it pro-
vided many lasting lessons which went on to underpin the development
of the modern interior through subsequent decades. The debates it
engendered were especially interesting. Josef Hoffmann’s determination
to control every detail of the Palais Stoclet was, for example, strongly criti -
cized by his fellow countryman, the architectural critic Adolf Loos. In his
essay ‘The Poor Rich Man’ ( 1900 ), Loos described the way in which a
wealthy man brought in an architect to create a sumptuous artistic interi-
or for his apartment and pointed out the possible enslavement of the
individual by the artistic interior. Not only did the architect that Loos
described supervise all the tradesmen he used to create the impressive
space, he also had to educate his client into knowing where everything
went.^15 The heated discussion held in^1914 between Van de Velde and
Hermann Muthesius grew out of the encounter between the New Interior
and ideas about standardization. While the former believed in the concept
of individualism, which had been born in the years of the Enlightenment
and sustained through the development of the idea of the ‘modern self ’ in
the nineteenth century, the latter defended the collective principles under-
pinning industrial mass production and standardization.^16
Although as a fashionable style Art Nouveau was short-lived, its
impact on the development of the modern interior was highly significant.
It established the idea of a link between the exterior and the interior of a
building, and it supported the dominance of the architect over the
upholsterer and the decorator. It also suggested the importance of fitted 53