This new edition of Interior Design Since 1900 provides an opportunity to reflect on the subject since the book’s first appearance as Interior Design of the 20th Century in 1990. The original Foreword signalled the breadth of interior design as a subject, covering the areas of architecture, decoration, design and fine art within the context of social and economic history. This broad coverage remains at the heart of this updated account of recent interior design. The book’s approach combines my knowledge of the history of architecture and design with my experience of practice working in my father’s architectural firm and within the art and design school environment. As a practice, interior design covers so many areas of specialism from issues of sustainability and selecting the best services and materials through to understanding the subtleties of human belonging and emotion. It is this breadth that continues to make the subject so fascinating. Since the publication of the first edition, interior design has been the subject of increased academic attention, with the establishment of the academic journal Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture and expanding interest in the popular media. This survey includes the work of professional architects, interior designers and interior decorators as well as the world of amateur design and decoration. The wealth of contemporary media coverage devoted to interior design makeovers, available styles and materials attest to the significance of our surroundings at home and in public spaces. The successful interior can provide comfort, promote psychological wellbeing, increase efficiency or promote a brand. Interiors also have the capacity to signal exclusion or jar the senses.
Style remains an important consideration in the study and understanding of interior design: for example, interior designers need to understand the historic traces they are working with during the repurposing of existing buildings or recreating interiors from the past, as exemplified by recent building in China and the Middle East. Amateur designers may need a knowledge of past styles to select the most appropriate look for their own projects. This volume begins its account of the narrative of style with the development of Victorian eclecticism, particularly as applied to the domestic interior as a refuge from the new and threatening world of modernity beyond the parlour and the front door. The fetishization of comfort in the home plus rules of etiquette and behaviour were key features of the Victorian domestic interior. But these structures of feeling were to be challenged by design reformers who collectively harked back to the medieval past as a way of improving interior design. A.W.N Pugin, followed by William Morris and the arts and crafts movement, endeavoured to educate popular taste through the written word and their own design practices.
This was a movement based in Great Britain and subsequently in North America, but this Western dominance was challenged with the opening up of trade with Japan in the later nineteenth century. The trans-cultural exchange between East and West led to the creation of the aesthetic-movement style that glorified the sparse and elegant style of Japan. In turn this led to the global phenomenon of art nouveau, which flourished throughout Europe, including Scandinavia and Russia, as well as the United States. The organic, whiplash curve and innovative use of metal, glass and wood symbolized the start of a new century.
Modern methods of printing and production from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards meant that interior design styles could circulate globally and be quickly adopted around the world. This is particularly true of the most prevalent style to affect interior design since 1900, that of modernism. The leading architects of the modern movement ensured that their message of form follows function and minimalism in everyday living reached a wide audience through manifestos, illustrated magazines and avant-garde practice. Modern architects including Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were self-appointed pioneers of a new style for the design of every aspect of life. The driving force behind this spare, geometric style was to promote cleanliness and hygiene rather than comfort. Decoration was anathema to the modern movement and their designs for public and private interiors alike. This could be regarded as excessively controlling, as the clients and end-users of modern buildings were left with little scope to personalize their surroundings. As authors such as Penny Sparke (The Modern Interior, 2008) and Hilde Heynen and G. Baydar (Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, 2005) have argued, this dominance over the domestic on behalf of modern architects was not without its problems. It could be argued that this drive for rationalism in the design of interiors was anti-gemütlich and had an anti-feminine dimension to it.
In direct contrast to modernism, the art deco style of the 1920s and 1930s celebrated femininity, glamour and surface decoration. This was a popular, commercial style and was used for homes, cinemas and offices throughout the world. From Miami Beach to Napier in New Zealand, and from Mumbai to Asmara in Africa, this style signified pleasure and frivolity. It was associated with Hollywood cinema and jazz music, ancient Egypt and modern materials. Art deco has been constantly revived ever since as the signifier of luxury and hedonism, whether on cruise ships or in bars and restaurants around the world. Many of the original art deco sites have been awarded UNESCO’s World Heritage status to preserve them and protect them from redevelopment.
The first four chapters of this edition establish the vocabulary of style as an important theme, from Victorian eclecticism, the arts and crafts movement, art nouveau, the modern movement and art deco. With this story of interior design styles mapped out, attention is then turned to the creative professionals involved in interior design – the interior decorator and designer. The fifth chapter charts the development of interior decoration as a profession in the United States and beyond. While the history of modern architecture is dominated by the hero, usually male, architect, the history of interior decoration is the domain of the female and queer practitioner. Recent work by John Potvin has tracked the queer design history of interior decoration which has been overlooked for too long. In his Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (2014) he argued for the importance of a consideration of sexuality and identity in accounting for the history of interior decoration and the interior decorator.
The perennial history of modernism is then revisited in Chapter Six, with an examination of its increased dominance in the post-war world as the symbol of both democracy and socialism. The profession of interior design grew out of interior decoration and modern architecture in the 1950s and 1960s with new courses and professional organizations. The triangle of interior decoration, interior design and architecture presents a complex and fraught set of relationships that remain largely unresolved.
Another important aspect of interior design in addition to style and the designer is the end user or consumer. Chapter Seven examines the role of the inhabitant in the interior. It looks at the development of do-it-yourself and consumer culture in shaping the lived-in environment. Shopping habits began to change with the growth of a new building type, the supermarket and car ownership boomed. Colour and pattern marked the era of consumer culture in the 1950s and 1960s.
Conversely, the growth of consumer culture in the post-war economic boom inspired architects and designers in the creation of a pop sensibility in the shape of pop art and design. This was a youthful and colourful style that epitomized the swinging sixties and acted as a style and approach for teenage identity. A throwaway aesthetic, it epitomized an era when the ephemeral was valued in opposition to the permanence of modernist ethics. This challenge to modernism was furthered in the era of post-modernism, as Chapter Seven demonstrates. A mixture of past styles was ironically combined by groups such as the Italian outfit Memphis to present a more theoretically driven yet playful approach to interior design.
Post-modernism emerged at a time of economic prosperity in the West, and expressed an attitude of playfulness and wit. However, a dawning crisis in terms of global, environmental issues ushered in an era of concern for the sustainability of the design of the interior, and this is covered in Chapter Eight. New regulations in terms of materials, insulation and the recyclability of the stuff of interior design are now a feature of a new world of sustainability, if not basic survival. As the architect Jeremy Till has archly commented, architecture is but waste in transit (Architecture Depends, 2013). And the forms of modernism evolved into the aesthetic of minimalism in the interior, stripping out and paring back the perceived mess of human habitation. Interior design of the twenty-first century also has an ever-changing and complex relationship with technology, with digitally projected decoration and intelligent systems controlling services at our command from a smartphone or voice-activated controls. The digital presence is all but invisible, but style remains significant for interior design: even if there are no completely new styles to play with, what is left is unique combinations from the existing palette of possibilities.
Visual styles continue to represent different aspects of power, prestige and identity. And interior design can also be used to disrupt the status quo and insert new understandings of politics and society. The new additional chapter at the end of this edition takes the theme of ‘Transnational Interiors’. It takes a post-colonial view of global interior design and looks beyond the usual Western range of examples to interior design in Africa and Asia. The modernist work of Le Corbusier is considered within an Indian context, with a consideration of the new capital city of Chandigarh in Punjab. The Sri Lankan designers Minnette de Silva and Geoffrey Bawa are then considered as figures critical of modernist tropical modernism. More recent buildings are then covered, including high-rise luxury flats and hotels in India and Dubai as examples of transnational interior design. The chapter also considers contemporary design in Africa as an important vehicle for establishing new national identities. The chapter also includes a consideration of the changing relationship between nature and the interior.
In modernist interiors the picture window indicated a controlling and superior view of the natural world, visible but separate. Recent developments in interior design display a more biophilic attitude. With the fashion for folding glazed doors in place of the picture window, the outside space of the private, usually rear, garden connects seamlessly with the interior. So popular is the theme of bringing the exterior into the interior that a British television series, Inside Out Homes, is devoted to blending the two. The contemporary interior can now mimic natural light at all times of the day with LED lights, whilst office atria are frequently decorated with a living wall of green vegetation.
This book charts the course of the new discipline of interior design through the twentieth century, into the twenty-first and right up until the present day. The themes of style, authorship, consumption and post-colonialism are all covered to tell this fascinating story of the designed, interior space.