The Modern Interior

10 The Designed Interior

Whether a home is hand- or machine-built, it is no good unless it is

properly designed.

George Nelson and Henry Wright^1

By 1945 all the components of the modern interior were in place. Its

formation had been driven by the shifting identities of the inhabitants of

the modern world and by the complex, and ever-changing, relationship

between the private and the public spheres that inevitably accompanied

that level of identity instability. While, on the one hand, the domestic

model had broken through the physical boundaries of the ‘home’ to

inhabit a wide variety of semi-public and public inside spaces, on the

other, through the intervention of reforming architects and designers,

aspects of the public sphere had also entered the private arena. As a result

a stylistic spectrum of modern interiors, developed by architects, design-

ers and decorators of all kinds, had emerged, communicating a wide

range of cultural, psychological, social, economic and technical values.

In the years between 1945 and the late 1960 s the Modernist interior

reinvented itself yet again. It did so through the continuing movement of

its visual, material and spatial languages between the spheres. Above all

its defining characteristics – formed both within modern domestic spaces

and in interior sites dedicated to modern public sphere activities – came

closer together, both in the home and outside it. In essence a hybrid

aesthetic, defined both psychologically and technically, and referred to

in writings of the time as ‘humanised Modernism’, emerged, first in the

domestic context but almost immediately afterwards outside it as well. It

was ‘engineered’ by a new generation of reforming architects and design-

ers who extended the ambitions of the inter-war Modernists, in particular

their desire to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, to prioritize the role of the archi-

tect, to create overtly modern spaces that reflected their own era and to

cross the private and the public divide. Although that new approach was

driven by idealistic architects and designers working at the highest social

and cultural levels, in that era of accelerated mass mediation it quickly 185