168 Richard Rogers: central atrium, Lloyd’s Building, London, 1978–86. Essential services such as escalators are accentuated with colour.
By the early 1970s the achievements of the modern movement had largely been discredited. In interior design as in architecture, a new pluralism was emerging. It was recognized that good design could no longer be measured by one mutually agreed yardstick. Interior design had come to the forefront of public design consciousness through its leadership of the retail revolution and the growth of interest in the domestic interior. A marked increase in the prosperity of certain social sectors, particularly of the young professional middle classes, led to a return to traditionalism and the revival of past styles in Britain and America. The bold experimentation of the 1960s was superseded by a period of retrenchment and revivalism.
Not all interior design of the 1970s was a reaction against modernism. The ‘hi-tech’ movement celebrated the aesthetic of industrial production, just as had Le Corbusier at the 1925 Paris Exposition, by introducing steel scaffolding, office furniture and factory flooring into the domestic interior. The work of architects has been crucial in the formulation of the style. Richard Rogers (b. 1933) in partnership with Renzo Piano designed one of the first hi-tech buildings, the Pompidou Centre, Paris, in 1977. Here all the apparatus for servicing the building is boldly displayed on the exterior of the cultural centre. The interior is less inventive, consisting of a shed with moveable walls. Rogers’s design for the Lloyd’s Building in London (1978–86) has the same flexibility as the Pompidou Centre, and is intended to be expanded in the future.[168] The interior is centred around a twelve-storey-high, barrel-vaulted atrium that has been widely emulated in office buildings. Rogers successfully incorporates the old with the new by using the Lutine Bell as the focal point of the ground-floor area.
168 Richard Rogers: central atrium, Lloyd’s Building, London, 1978–86. Essential services such as escalators are accentuated with colour.
169 Michael Hopkins: dining area of the architect’s own house in Hampstead, London. Venetian blinds filter views and light between living areas.
In architect Michael Hopkins’s own house, built in Hampstead, London, in 1975, the interior spaces of the steel-framed structure are delimited only by venetian blinds.[169] Hi-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book For The Home (1978/9) by Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin described how the domestic interior could now be assembled completely with mass-produced items ordered from trade catalogues. One of many interiors featured in the book was the New York apartment of the designer Joseph Paul D’Urso, who had furnished it with a stainless-steel surgeon’s sink, hospital doors, and metal fencing to subdivide the interior.[170]
Although Le Corbusier used similar items in his Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, there is a marked difference in aim between the two approaches. Le Corbusier was challenging the individualist, elitist world of the decorative arts by suggesting that well-made, functional but unfashionable mass-produced objects should be used in the interior, whereas the aim of hi-tech is to create surprising and chic interiors from obscure sources. There is no element of social reform in this approach. However, it could be regarded as an expression of changes in attitude towards work and the home.
170 Joseph Paul D’Urso: steel-mesh fencing for clothes storage in the designer’s own apartment, New York, mid-1970s.
From the nineteenth century the two areas had been distinctly separated, with the feminine sphere of the home regarded as a temple of comfort and moral respectability, a refuge from the workplace. With hi-tech the home becomes like the workplace, with factory shelving in the kitchen, filing cabinets and metal staircases and floors. In Victorian times the bourgeoisie emulated their social superiors, proud to display their leisured lifestyle. Work stopped at the front door. In a period of unemployment the situation is reversed, and the paraphernalia of work becomes a mark of status. For women pursuing a career, the hi-tech style suggests a functionally efficient home to be managed partly from the distance of the workplace.
The trend was mass marketed in the 1970s when Habitat launched its ‘hi-tech’ range of all-black minimal furniture. By the 1980s the style had become more refined, feeding into the vogue for upmarket minimalist interiors, and was joined by the recycling of industrial products. Ron Arad (b. 1951) salvaged seats from scrapped cars to convert into domestic seating which he sold at his shop, One-Off, in London. He has also used industrial materials in his designs for interiors, including cast-concrete for the shop Bazaar, South Molton Street, London (1984–6), which marked a return to the New Brutalist use of deliberately rough, coarse materials for the interior.[171] Huge broken slabs of concrete hung from rusty hawsers, and each clothing-rail was supported by a cast-concrete figure. This type of interior has been termed ‘post-holocaust’ because of its atmosphere of destruction and decay.
Other British designers to work within this industrial aesthetic in the 1980s include Ben Kelly (b. 1949) with his design for the Hacienda nightclub in Manchester (1984) and the headquarters of Pickwick Clothing (1989), and a group of designers brought together for an exhibition at the Crafts Council Gallery in London in 1987. ‘The New Spirit’ included furniture assembled from waste-wiring, bricks and rusty metal, to challenge accepted notions of comfort and taste by designers like André Dubreuil and Tom Dixon.
The ‘hi-tech’ movement also developed into a cool, super-minimal style during the 1980s. Rogers’s contemporary, Norman Robert Foster (b. 1935), worked within the hi-tech aesthetic when designing the HSBC Building, Hong Kong, and the interior of Katharine Hamnett’s shop in Brompton Road, London (1986).[173] Hamnett’s shop, a nineteenth-century warehouse two storeys high, was left bare and almost empty apart from a few free-standing metal clothing rails and floor-to-ceiling mirrors on two sides to give an illusion of spatial infinity. As Adrian Dannatt observed in 1989, ‘the late ’80s has seen the development and consolidation of a revived, modified form of International Modernism as Interior Decoration, which manages the pressures of city life by ascetic exclusion rather than celebration. This purity in itself is in danger of becoming a cliché, a “timeless” look that will be easily classified ever after as 1980s Timeless style.’ Interior designers such as the Czech-born Eva Jiřičná (b. 1939), in her sparse designs for Joe’s Cafe in London (1986) and the Joseph Shops, incorporated industrial materials like aluminium, matt-black cladding and tensioned-steel cables to produce a mood of control and understatement that has now been widely emulated.[174] The New York studio that Vignelli Associates designed for themselves also emphasizes simplicity, with interest provided by unusual materials like the lead which covers the walls and corrugated, galvanized-metal screen which divides the service area from the design studio.[175] The work of David Davies for the retail chain Next incorporated light woods, pale colours and mirrors to create a spacious, ‘tasteful’, uncluttered shopping environment, and revolutionized the appearance of retail outlets, building societies and banks. The minimalist style which still owes a debt to modernism is in total contrast with the fussiness of the major movement of the period: post-modernism.
171 Ron Arad: clothes shop Bazaar, London, 1984. Concrete was cast on site for the figures (of workers on the project) and the curtain, using imprints made by means of a vacuum and granule-filled plastic cushions. The figures doubled as window display and rail supports.
172 Ron Arad: recycled seat of a Rover car, 1982, the first such piece to be marketed, and the start of a ‘recycled furniture’ movement in Britain.
173 Norman Foster Associates: Katharine Hamnett’s shop, South Kensington, London, 1986. A glass bridge, underlit, passed through a tunnel to emerge into the vast, pure-white space, with mirror-walls to reflect the customer.
174 Eva Jiřičná, Jiřičná Kerr Associates: Joseph flagship store, London, 1980s.
175 Vignelli Associates: the architects’ own studios, New York City, 1985. The interest lies in the use of unusual materials such as waxed lead and galvanized steel. Formal inspiration comes from the sculpture of Donald Judd and Richard Serra. Moulded-plastic and steel furniture was specially developed for the project, and manufactured by Knoll.
Like hi-tech, post-modernism was rooted in architectural practice. The American architect Robert Venturi (1925–2018), whose first book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), was an early polemic on the subject, expressed a growing dissatisfaction with the narrowness of the modern movement and argued that historic styles and the visual immediacy of mass culture had something to teach the architect. This was further elaborated in Learning From Las Vegas (1972). Venturi offered visual arguments with the ‘Architectural Chairs’, which are all alike in profile but refer to different styles when seen from the front. There is a brightly coloured example of an art deco chair, complete with sunrise motif, and a ‘Sheraton’ chair with swags and other stylized classical details. The architect-designer Michael Graves (1934–2015) also contributed to the post-modern debate in America with his Public Services Building, Portland, Oregon (1982), and furniture for the Italian-based Memphis Group.[176]
The architectural theorist Charles Jencks was responsible for bringing post-modernism into a wider cultural context in his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977). He used the structural analysis of language, which had been developed in Switzerland by Saussure and later in France by linguists such as Althusser, to analyse and create his own designs. He designed houses in Britain and America, including the interior of his own ‘Thematic House’ in Holland Park, London, in which he clustered reception room and bedrooms around an enclosed spiral staircase.[177] Jencks self-consciously manipulated the symbolism of past architectural styles in his furniture designs, marketed by Aram Designs as ‘Symbolic Furniture’. In the various rooms he has drawn upon past styles as diverse as the Egyptian and gothic to represent the different seasons. In the library the furniture is based on Biedermeier models, while the tops of the bookcases refer to different architectural styles.
176 Michael Graves: sitting area, Crown American Building, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1989. Graves uses revival Josef Hoffmann armchairs with his own designs for cabinet, tables and carpet.
Italian design played a prominent role in the creation of post-modern interior design. By the late 1960s small groups of avant-garde designers had grown frustrated with the slickness of the Italian design image. In 1972 the influential exhibition ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, showed specially commissioned micro-environments by the leading radical designers Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007), Mario Bellini (b. 1935) and Joe Colombo (1930–1971) that challenged accepted ideas about the home environment and about modernism.[178] Bellini’s ‘Kar-a-Sutra’ consisted of a large bright-green car with transparent roof and sides. Sottsass and Colombo, inspired by space travel, designed modules for various functions which could be rearranged, allowing the inhabitant more flexibility.[179] In 1979 the Studio Alchymia was formed in Milan by Alessandro Mendini, who had succeeded Gio Ponti as the Editor of Domus. Sottsass joined the group, but in 1981 formed his own Memphis Group of designers.[180]
From the time of their first public exhibition at the Milan Furniture Fair in the same year, the Group had an enormous impact on interior design. They flouted the notions of good taste that had become so closely bound up with modernism in Italy, and designed within a post-modern aesthetic. Furniture was faced with brightly patterned plastic laminate. Inspiration came from mass culture. Design was intended to be part of the mass-consumer experience. Sottsass’s furniture designs were witty, bold, and intended to be fun.[181] The ‘Carlton’ room divider, designed by Sottsass for the Milan Fair of 1981, is covered with brightly coloured plastic laminate that imitates marble, and takes on unconventional shapes which challenge accepted notions of storage. Pieces are often out-of-scale and use forms seemingly inappropriate to furniture, for example a seating unit by Umeda based on a boxing ring, one of which was bought by fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld for his house in Monte Carlo. The French decorator Andrée Putman (1925–2013) advised Lagerfeld on buying furniture from the first two Memphis collections. His high-rise apartment, decorated in 1985, had grey-painted walls in order to allow the furniture to dominate.
177 Charles Jencks: library, Thematic House, London, 1979–84. Symbolic elements include post-modern bookcases (for books on post-modern architecture), and the frame of the interior window that resembles a face and is also layered to allude to the wall’s construction. The honey-and-black of the furniture echoes the Biedermeier chair, but in the case of the slide-container tower (left) is painted onto a steel cabinet.
178 Mario Bellini: ‘Kar-a-Sutra’, a hybrid car-seating unit, shown at the exhibition ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’, New York, 1972.
179 Joe Colombo: ‘Total Furnishing Unit’, shown at the 1972 exhibition. The block comprises four units to cater for all basic human needs: kitchen, bathroom, cupboard, and ‘bed-and-privacy’ unit (left) fitted with a step-in cabin for seclusion and pull-out day-and-night furniture.
180 Memphis Group and Abraxas: sitting room, Singapore, 1986. The furniture includes ‘Astoria’ chairs by Matteo Thun, ‘Atlas’ table (centre) by Aldo Cibic, and lights by James Evanson and Martine Bedin. The colours of the specially woven carpet and column were chosen to tie all the pieces together. The paintings are by graphic artists working for Sottsass Associates.
181 Ettore Sottsass: ‘Carlton’ room divider, 1981.
The Memphis style had instant appeal, and although it originated as furniture design, was widely influential on interior design in America, Japan, and throughout Europe. The surface patterns of George Sowden (b. 1942), an English member of the group, were widely emulated in, for example, the interiors of mainstream shops and fast food outlets during the 1980s. Post-modernism in Italy denoted challenging design based on the images of 1950s mass culture.
182 Andrée Putman: office commissioned by Jack Lang, Minister of Culture, Paris, 1985. Smooth golden-blonde furniture contrasts with gilt panelling.
183 Ronald Cécil Sportes: sitting room, private apartments for President Mitterrand, Elysée Palace, Paris, 1983. Note Sportes’ wire mesh chair (centre).
In France there has been a Renaissance in interior design since the 1960s. As well as her work for Karl Lagerfeld, Andrée Putman’s commissions include the office of the Minister of Culture in Paris (1985).[182] In this prestigious setting the classic French boiserie (wall-panelling), chandelier and window treatment are deliberately and dramatically contrasted with drum-shaped post-modern chair, semi-circular desk and hi-tech lamp. French official encouragement of post-modern design contributed to the vivacity and success of French interior design in the 1980s. The President of the Republic, Mitterrand, commissioned several leading young designers to decorate the private apartments of the Elysée Palace in 1983, among them Jean-Michel Wilmotte (b. 1948), Philippe Starck (b. 1949) and Ronald Cécil Sportes (b. 1943).[183] Again, in this traditional palace, post-modern decoration inspired by, for example, Viennese design of the 1900s, art deco and hi-tech is used to create a striking mix of the antique and the contemporary. French interior designers have also enjoyed success in Japan. Marie-Christine Dorner (b. 1960) worked with Wilmotte from 1984. In 1985 she designed a range of sixteen pieces of post-modern furniture for the Japanese Idée furniture company, two boutiques for Komatsu and a cafe in Tokyo.
In Britain designers like Dinah Casson (b. 1946) used the motifs of post-modern design successfully. For example, the Gran Gelato shop in King's Road, London (1984), shared the wit, combination of disparate motifs and strong colours of Italian post-modernism. The architect Terry Farrell (b. 1938) designed the TV-AM building in the post-modern aesthetic, and was particularly careful to design a complementary interior and furniture.[184]
A striking effect of post-modernism in America and Britain has been to open the floodgates for traditional design. The message of Venturi, Jencks and Memphis was to broaden design beyond the limits of the modern movement. Under its impetus, architects like Quinlan Terry (b. 1937) and Robert Adam in Britain have been able to create whole Georgian-style buildings for offices and homes. For architects like these, modernism was a brief and unfortunate interlude in the everlasting narrative of classical architecture.
The return to traditional values has generated a whole movement back to the revivalist interior on both sides of the Atlantic. The rules of classical architecture that inspired Edith Wharton and the work of traditional decorators like the American Mrs Henry Parish II have never been more popular. Nineteenth-century decorative painting techniques like marbling, ragging and stencilling became a vogue. For those unable to afford the luxury of an interior decorator, a whole market has evolved in educational courses, books, television programmes and magazines for the amateur. Jocasta Innes introduced the subject of decorative paint finishes to a wider public with her book, Paint Magic (1981). Retailers specializing in ready-to-wear clothing such as Marks & Spencer entered the market for home furnishings, and like Innes brought the English country house look, first popularized by Colefax & Fowler, to a wider market. The appearance of the home has become a major preoccupation, partly as a result of a property boom and partly as a result of more women working outside the home. More money is available for home furnishings as the standard of living rises, and many women regard spending on the home as a top priority.
The interior design heritage also influenced designers in a more imaginative way. Nigel Coates (b. 1949) has taken the example of nineteenth-century eclecticism to create interiors that celebrate the splendid decay of Europe. As the leader of a group of Architectural Association students known as NATO (Narrative Architecture Today), in 1983 he exhibited an eccentric collection of found objects and free-form drawings that suggested structures for architecture rather than delineating them in a clear-cut plan and model.[185] His flat in London (1981) was an essay in architectural metaphor, juxtaposing different period styles and artful decay like a self-conscious and deliberate stage set.
184 Terry Farrell: reception area, TV-AM, London, 1983. Exaggerated classical details are contrasted with witty post-modern chairs.
185 Nigel Coates with Shi Yu Chen: interior of Caffè Bongo, Tokyo, 1986. Termed by the designers the ‘theatrical image cafe’, the interior incorporates narrative signs from Pompeii, Rome, the Italian 1950s and modern Tokyo. The aircraft-wing balcony with raked columns supports classical-style statuary. Paintings and objects by a number of European artists and designers include a pendant light by André Dubreuil.
Illustrations of the flat were shown in the Japanese magazine Brutus, and as a result he was commissioned to design the Metropole restaurant in Tokyo in 1986. Here classical columns, swags and trompe l’œil painting evoke the atmosphere of the London gentlemen’s club brought completely out of context and exaggerated. Similarly the work of Powell-Tuck, Connor and Orefelt relies on the inspiration of expressive drawings and the perverse use of historical motifs. The entrance hall of pop entrepreneur Marco Pirroni’s London flat of 1985 by David Connor is almost a piece of three-dimensional art in itself, in the spirit of the expressionist film sets of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. As part of a reaction against mainstream modernism, some interior designers, whether architecturally trained or not, have moved towards fine art and literature as their sources of inspiration. The deconstruction movement, whose early manifestations include the ‘Deconstructivist Architecture’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988, and the deconstructivist seminar at the Tate Gallery, London, in the same year, was based on the literary theory of the French writer Jacques Derrida. The applications of the theory to interior design involve the taking apart of the elements that make up the interior. The work of the American SITE Projects, Inc. could be considered within this context. Their design for a door (1983) had an area of laminate stripped layer by layer to make a through hole. Their architectural work for Best Products Company, Inc. during the 1970s resulted in buildings which appeared to be disintegrating, with gaps in the wall and piles of bricks incorporated into the design. More recent Deconstructivist architect-designers include the American Frank Gehry with his Winton Guest House, Minnesota, and Behnisch and Partners of Germany with their Hysolar Institute Building, University of Stuttgart.[186] The interior of this small building on the edge of the university campus is tremendously exciting and energetic. As in the Schröder House (p. 70), there is a central axis from which the interior spaces almost explode. The staircase linking the two floors and a connecting ramp meet in a chaotic angular mix of window frames, roofing, steel supports and cladding. The architects have deliberately composed an interior that looks as if it may fall apart, a loose collection of different technological and structural elements.
As Japan has established herself as a world leader in terms of trade, so she has become more confident in the language of traditional design. Just after the war national architecture had connotations of reaction and the right wing, and the new building programme was dominated by the American brand of mainstream modernism. Now the Japanese have rediscovered their rich architectural heritage, and interiors like those of Fumihiko Maki (b. 1928), Kisho Kurokawa (1934–2007) and Takefumi Aida (b. 1937) have the clarity and asymmetry of traditional Japanese design.[187] Other Japanese architects responded to the late-1980s romantic eclecticism of figures such as Coates, which led to something of a stylistic free-for-all.
186 Behnisch and Partners: stair head and ramp, Hysolar Institute, University of Stuttgart, 1987.
This plurality of style continued throughout the 1990s. The accent was placed on process rather than form. Green design is one example of this trend, with designers under a legal as well as a moral imperative to take environmental concerns into account. Paradoxically, with the rapid developments in technology, the need to incorporate new materials and communication systems into the commercial and domestic interior also became prevalent. The design of office space in the 1990s was hugely affected by the use of electronic communication. The trend was to ‘hot desk’, whereby no individual worker has their own permanent desk, but uses one of a series of bookable spaces. For example, the British Telecom (BT) Westside building at Hemel Hempstead (1996), designed by architects Aukett Associates with the interiors by Interior PLC, was the workplace of 1,250 sales, marketing and customer centre personnel.[188] Flexible working practices were supported by the provision of open-plan workstations for team members to share, plus ‘touch down’ desks for more casual use. There were also meeting, conference and video rooms. Work today is often carried out beyond the office, at home, in transit, with customers, or in hotels. New technology enabled the BT workers to communicate via portable computers and mobile phones, accessing the internet. The interior design of an office space such as Westside encourages informal interaction with strategically placed coffee areas and atria.
187 Kisho Kurokawa: restaurant for Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988.
The rigid office spaces of the earlier part of the twentieth century, which represented and reinforced tight, bureaucratic structures, have been superseded by a more flexible layout to enable informal teamwork. The interior design of the meeting room must also change to take new technology into account, but whatever the actual style of the meeting room, the plasma screen, installed for the display of electronic information, must be designed so it can be concealed when not in use. The possibilities of new technology were not only exploited in the office, as leisure centres such as the Pacha Leisure Centre near Tarragona, Spain (1992), by Juli Capella (b. 1960), Quim Larrea (b. 1957) and Jaume Castellvi show. This huge nightclub covers an area of 5,677 square metres (61,000 square feet).[189] The main dancefloor is illuminated and also transparent, suspended over a swimming pool. Lasers, video-walls and shimmering fibre-optic lights add to the headiness of this late twentieth-century dance space.
188 Aukett Associates/Interior PLC: British Telecom Westside building, Hemel Hempstead, UK, 1996. The impact of technology means that office interiors are now more flexible, with multi-purpose spaces shared by a mobile workforce.
189 Capella, Larrea and Castellvi: dancefloor at Pacha Leisure Centre, near Tarragona, Spain, 1992. Technology, in the form of video, lasers and fibre-optic lights, enhances the dancefloor experience.
The domestic interior has also been affected by new technology. By the late 1950s the television replaced the open fire as the focal point of the main living space. However, now that television screens are flat and can be placed on any wall, the possibilities for room layouts have opened up. Stylistic heterogeneity continued to be the prevalent trend in the late twentieth century, with an inexhaustible range of styles available to reflect individual identities. Individual identities can also be reinforced or explored through the recent phenomenon of boutique hotels.[190] Originating in New York, these interiors are themed to reflect different tastes. It is the function and use of domestic and commercial spaces that have changed, due to the impact of new technology, and look set to change in the future.
190 André Balazs and Christian Liaigre: Mercer Hotel, New York, opened 1997. An elegant warehouse conversion, this boutique hotel offers the New York experience of loft-conversion living.