Table Of ContentThe Modern Interior
PennySparke
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THE MODERN INTERIOR
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The Modern Interior
Penny Sparke
reaktion books
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For Molly, Nancy and Celia
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2008
Copyright © Penny Sparke 2008
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Sparke, Penny
The modern interior
1. Interior decoration –History
I. Title
747'.09
isbn-13: 978 1 86189 372 7
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Contents
Introduction 7
Part 1: Inside Out
1 The Private Interior 21
2 The New Interior 37
3 The Mass-consumed Interior 55
4 The Fashionable Interior 73
5 The Decorative Interior 91
Part 2: Outside In
6 The Public Interior 113
7 The Rational Interior 129
8 The Mass-produced Interior 147
9 The Abstract Interior 167
10 The Designed Interior 185
Conclusion 204
References 213
Bibliography 227
Acknowledgements 234
Photo Acknowledgements 236
Index 237
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Introduction
An estate agent’s photograph of an interior space in Montevetro – a
Richard Rogers-designed, riverside apartment building in Battersea –
published in a south-west London magazine in July 2007, portrayed an
all-white living room furnished with hard-edged white sofas, a Le
Corbusier chaise longue upholstered in white leather, low ‘Japanese-
style’ white coffee tables and a huge plasma screen television. Described
as ‘contemporary and stylish’, this room, and others like it, would
undoubtedly fulfil most people’s expectations of a ‘modern interior’.
Countless images of a similar nature reveal themselves to us through the
glossy home-oriented magazines, furniture retailers’ catalogues and tele-
vision advertisements that form part of our daily lives. Indeed our sense
of the early twenty-first-century modern interior is, arguably, largely
formed by its presence in the mass media, where it is frequently repre-
sented as a highly desirable, uncluttered backcloth to an increasingly
complex existence.
For those with a more historical frame of reference, however, the
term ‘the modern interior’, may evoke an open-plan space from the 1920s
featuring chromed tubular steel, black leather chairs and large expanses
of glass. Whichever image comes to mind – contemporary or historical –
it is likely that the epithet ‘modern’ is understood stylistically and that the
interior in question is located in a domestic setting. This book adopts a
different starting point, however. The Modern Interior sets out to demon-
strate that ‘the modern interior’, which was formed and developed
between the middle years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, went
beyond style and encompassed many more inside spaces than those con-
tained within the home. The modern interior addressed in this study is
defined by its relationship with the everyday experiences of modernity
during those years, which were as profound in the office, the factory, the 7
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A shopping mall in Calgary, Alberta, 2005.
department store and the café – as well as in the modern hospital and
church – as they were in the home. In addition, the visual languages
through which it was expressed could range from Louis Quinze to
Streamlined Moderne. The modern interior addressed in this study can
be understood, therefore, in a very general sense, as the inside location of
people’s experiences of, and negotiations with, modern life.
One of the best documented of these negotiations was initiated by
a group of progressive architects and designers who were committed to
the idea that modern inside spaces not only mirrored modern experi-
8 ences but that, more importantly, they also played a role in constructing
