The Modern Interior

9 The Abstract Interior

We are in need of a new interior.

Theo van Doesburg^1

As well as allying itself with the twin forces of rationality and efficiency

rooted in the world of modern technology and industry, the early twen-

tieth-century modern interior also developed a close relationship with

the highly irrational world of contemporary art. Early twentieth-century

avant-garde fine art, particularly as it was manifested in Cubism, the

Dutch De Stijl movement and Constructivism, sought to distance itself

from the domesticated, pictorial aesthetic of the nineteenth century and,

by embracing abstraction, to align itself with the spirit of modernity. In

the years after 1914 it also sought an alliance with Modernist architecture

in the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Together, their protagonists believed,

art and architecture could bring about a transformation of the environ-

ment that would unite the separate spheres. That new alliance reinforced

the approach towards architecture and the interior that defined them, first

and foremost, as the results of the manipulation of space. In turn space

was seen as being continuous and unbroken, existing both within and

beyond the picture plane, the piece of sculpture, and the architectural

construction. In that sense, at least conceptually, the abstract interior had

no fixed boundaries and existed both inside and outside at the same time.

By extension, architectural constructions were not restricted to exclu -

sively private or public functions. Space was simply space and the artists

and architects associated with those avant-garde movements set out to

reclaim it as a neutral concept, cleansed of all the ideological baggage

it had acquired in the nineteenth century through its relationship with

domesticity.

By the 1920 s an increasing number of progressive architects sought

to erode the boundaries between the inside and outside and to enhance the

porosity of their architectural structures. As we have seen they linked

the house, metaphorically, with the machine, and they defined the artefacts 167