The Modern Interior

their hands design had the capacity to turn values, desires and aspira-

tions into visual, material and spatial ideals and realities.

Industrialization, urbanization and an increased potential for

social mobility – the defining features of modernity – encouraged ever

larger numbers of people to regard the design of their interiors as an

increasingly important aspect of their lives. Indeed within modernity the

interior became a marker of people’s changing identities, one of the only

stable (if temporary) frameworks for the construction of the ‘self ’ and

social status. Design had the capacity not only to express social status and

aspiration, but also to link individual identities – formed by class, gender

and other cultural factors – to interiors and to focus on the meaning of

the individual in the age of the crowd. At the same time it was also able

to control large groups of people in public interior spaces, from shopping

malls to sports stadia. The protagonists of the Modern Movement set out

to further mobilize the potential of design in order to bring about social

and political change. Above all it was through design that the tensions

contained within the modern interior were managed and, when domestic

interiors were reproduced outside the home and public interiors found

their way into it, the necessary acts of negotiation and translation were

performed. ‘Designers’, in their various guises, had, therefore, the ultimate

responsibility of resolving the inner tensions within the modern interior,

of defining its appearance and of constructing its meanings.

The Modern Interioris presented in two main parts. The first section,

‘Inside Out’, looks at a number of the ways in which values and ideas

formed and developed within the domestic setting – the site of individual

interiority and feminine modernity – and then moved out of the home

and into the public arena. The socio-cultural and psychological faces of

the modern interior are emphasized in this context, manifested through

its relationships with mass consumption and the fashion system, and

its role in facilitating individual and collective expression. In contrast,

‘Outside In’, the book’s second section, focuses on the way in which the

artists, architects and designers associated with the Modern Movement

borrowed strategies which had been developed within the new, public

sphere interiors, and the outside world in general – in particular those

linked to the processes of rationalization and standardization, and to the

artistic avant-garde – and injected them into the modern private resi-

dence. The final chapter offers some thoughts about the ways in which

the themes which defined the modern interior as it developed between 17

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