The study of the political is, by its very nature, a study of power relationships. This is certainly true of electoral politics, with its partisan allegiances and inherent hierarchies. It is also true, however, of the everyday politics that frame most encounters in the workplace, the academy, and all types of social interactions, including familial relationships. An exploration of the political interior should therefore include an interrogation of the meaning of “everyday” interior spaces and their ability to communicate cultural and design values on many levels.
I believe that it is the ubiquitous interiors of the everyday environment that are best positioned to illustrate the political potential of space to express and influence these power relationships. Using the example of an often overlooked model for promoting design to the “masses” in what I will argue are early modern interior design practices, I will attempt to articulate here that designed interior spaces that take a stand can be found in the most surprising places, and that when designers of interior spaces act aggressively to make a difference in the quality of the built environment for all people, there is much to be gained on both sides of the equation.
The term “political” is broad and can be applied to many concepts related to the built environment. For the purposes of this essay, it is intended to describe the process of advocating for an identifiable point of view; of rejecting neutrality; and of acknowledging the role of a larger external system or context in determining the meaning of something – in this case, a designed space and its influence on the experience of its occupants. For the purposes of this essay, I will also rely on another political concept – that of “grass roots” or local actions – to empower the participants in the design process through the sharing of knowledge.
The interior – and the domestic interior in particular – is the dwelling place for our bodies, and as such, it is also the aspect of the built environment with which people have the most intimate psychological relationship. It is therefore the most logical site for strategic political interventions that can really make a difference in people's lives. Gaston Bachelard described our connection to our domestic interiors as well as their ability to represent what matters most to us when he noted that “our house is our corner of the world” (Bachelard 1964). It is because of its ability to serve as a microcosm of all that our life experience is, that the house and its rooms become an ideal site for examining design's political potential.
The association of interior design with the domestic realm has historical roots in North America because of the fact that the earliest acknowledged professional interior designers most often dealt with the production of residential space. These earliest practitioners focused on creating atmospheres that supported the personal, functional, and aesthetic requirements of their clients (Sparke 2008).
While architecture, graphic design, and industrial design in the modern era often enjoyed the privileged position of addressing an anonymous and all-encompassing “public” through their practice, the work of interior designers seems (rightly or wrongly) understood as a more intimate, more particular, and ultimately more personal pursuit. Perhaps this is because, even as the profession makes efforts to promote a more technical identity for itself today, it also continues to emphasize its responsiveness to clients' needs and desires through the educational and practice-based principles it promotes. The educational objectives required for professional accreditation in North America, for instance, reinforce interior design's people- or client-centered perspective by requiring that students develop an understanding of “human factors,” and suggesting that they generate “creative solutions that support human behavior” (CIDA 2011). Likewise, professional organizations such as ASID (the American Society of Interior Designers) reinforce these values by describing the process used by professionals to produce designs as “a systematic and coordinated methodology” that integrates research and knowledge into the creative process, “whereby the needs and resources of the client are satisfied to produce an interior space that fulfills the project goals” (ASID 2011).
Guidelines such as these result in the public's ongoing perception that interior design is a service-based practice. Interior designers, by implication, may therefore feel that there is a lack of any sense of agency with regard to their ability to shape the built environment in particular, intentional ways. The political potential of interior design is located, at least in part, in these intentions that surpass the framework of identified project requirements, no matter how elaborate or mundane the project.
What I hope to suggest in this essay is that by consciously acknowledging the political nature of even the most common designed interior spaces, we can appreciate the potential significance of the complex relationships that impact their production and use, thereby advancing interior designers' ability to make a difference in the physical environment and in the lives of the people who experience it.
The theoretical perspective used to frame this discussion merges feminist theory and material culture theory. Feminist theory celebrates the articulation of the significance of everyday engagements. Its literature has long-proclaimed the perspective that “the personal is political” (Hanisch [1970] 2000). Writers like radical feminist Carol Hanisch fought to bring an awareness of the detrimental impact that accepting specific hierarchical social structures such as patriarchy has on a society to new audiences, beginning in the 1960s. First published in 1970, Hanisch's specific argument that the personal experiences of individuals within a group are valid sources of information from which to draw culturally based conclusions and upon which to base connections within and beyond the group continues to resonate with persons who find themselves lacking an equal voice in society today.
I find that much of what is written about the nature of interior space and the state of the interior design profession resonates with the themes of historic feminist literature – especially those works that pertain to issues of power, inequity, and the value of work traditionally done by women. Cheryl Buckley's early work on the history of women in design encouraged the re-evaluation of how the constant presence of a patriarchal system has shaped cultural perceptions of the value of designs of all kinds, based, in part, on the gender of who created it, who desired it, who consumed it, and who defined it as significant (Buckley 1986). Designers who criticize the ways in which contemporary interior design is perceived similarly invoke the influence of oppressive paradigms such as having to work within a culture that routinely assigns credit for all architectural production to architects and that fails to comprehend the level of technical expertise that interior designers contribute to the integrated design process (Ankerson and Gabb 2010).
Readings of interiors and their contents as material evidence of cultural values also provide a link between feminist criticism and the built environment. The association of interior space itself with a female identity and the subsequent secondary status assigned it within the built environment because of this connection also echo cries for the recognition of the inequities with which women have been forced to operate historically. Historian Beverly Gordon established the historic conceptualization of interior spaces as analogous with the female gendered body with its inherent container – the womb – and she further posited that a cultural understanding of interior space as “lesser” than exterior space can be attributed to the inevitability of its association with the feminine. It is, perhaps, the femaleness of interiors that provides an explanation for why interior spaces are nearly always the first part of a building to be simplified or eliminated when budgets for new buildings get tightened (Gordon 1996).
In terms of interpreting practice and addressing the dominance of the interior design profession by women, authors such as Lucinda Havenhand have presented compelling arguments for rethinking the typically accepted hierarchy of the design disciplines that subjugates works by women and design that is private or domestic in terms of setting to a lesser tier of significance (Havenhand 2004). In addition to Cheryl Buckley, Pat Kirkham and John Turpin have both argued for the credibility and value of women's contributions to the production of designed interior space. Both have provided detailed biographical documentation as evidence to support their position (Buckley 1986; Kirkham [1939] 2000; Turpin 2007). The need for equal participation and respect for each design discipline's contributions to the design process resounds in works that critique the relegation of interior design to decisions made “after the fact” in the production of designs for new buildings (Havenhand 2004).
Although it is important to credit the contribution of feminist theory to the construction of a political role for interior space within modern culture, this is not an essay about gender issues in relation to interior design per se. Instead, it is a discussion of the ways in which a historical effort to democratize the design of the interior might serve as a model for advocating for the importance of the interior's influence on human experience today and therefore, how the political interior can become a site for arguing the necessity of bringing good design to the everyday built environment. This investigation into how a specific segment of the American public was made aware of modern approaches to the design of interiors in North America illustrates the ability of interior space to express layers of political perspectives. This study also has implications for contemporary practice as it provides a model for a democratic approach to design that engenders a sense of agency on the part of all persons who are responsible for the creation of improved spaces.
It is generally agreed that interior design as the professional endeavor we recognize today did not exist prior to the 20th century. Early efforts to design interior spaces were typically linked to architectural and structural practices or were exercises in the decoration of surfaces with little consideration given to the relationship between aesthetics and spatial arrangement or quality. With the dawn of the 20th century, however, the idea that the size and shape of spaces and their configuration within a building could have a significant impact on the quality of the lives of their occupants began to emerge, and an audience hungry for modernity began to seek information about how better spaces could be attained.
Instruction for how to design interiors took several forms in the early 20th century, and each subscribed to a different philosophical perspective on design practice. These divergent roots of contemporary interior design practice each yielded its own set of politically potent ways of impacting the nature of modern interior spaces. Because clients most often desired artistic input into the decoration of their homes, early interior design professionals primarily concerned themselves with the treatment of surfaces and the provision of furniture. These early practitioners usually had little or no formal training and relied on their inherent “good taste,” both of which identities were evidenced by their knowledge of the principles of design and their access to expensive goods and wealthy clients. Treated as artistic expressions, the interiors produced within the context of modern art movements enjoyed a position of avant-gardism by challenging norms of how space could be defined and occupied. The interiors created as a result of these efforts also served as forceful symbols of one's awareness of culture and the arts and participation in inevitable power hierarchies.
The specialized study of art also became part of early formal design education, but more in terms of the execution of “principles.” Frank Alvah Parsons established a leading program at the New York School of Art in 1904 that first formalized an educational approach to the principles of interior design that were directly derived from previously established principles of art, but extended beyond visual considerations. Parsons also penned Interior Decoration, Its Principles and Practice, a text that became a primer on the fundamentals of interior design practice and the body of knowledge that provided a foundation for interior design in the first half of the 20th century (Parsons 1920).
The study of applied art merged with domestic science within the context of home economics and served as the primary mode of education for the majority of American women interested in studying the design and use of interior space until the mid-20th century in America. As early as the 1920s, most large land-grant colleges and universities in the US provided a version of “applied art” study that promoted facilitating more efficient domestic processes while creating aesthetically improved domestic environments in most types of American homes. In this same era, parallel efforts to broaden home economics study to include design education emerged in Canada.
These programs created design-oriented graduates with the skills to make informed choices about the layout of their houses, the interior finish materials used to create the backdrop for their modern families, and an ability to select well-constructed and high-quality furnishings. They also generated a population of informed potential design consumers who were savvy about soliciting the services of professional designers to meet their interior design needs. When the interior design of non-residential spaces emerged as a viable career option, these programs expanded their study beyond the domestic environment to address the design properties of other types of spaces.
What is often unacknowledged is that in addition to educating university students to become both designers and consumers of design, American land-grant universities promoted the principles of interior design practice to members of the middle and working classes through publicly accessible information provided by “extension programs.” First established in 1914 with the passage of the Smith–Lever Act, extension programs provided a mechanism for bringing the expertise of researchers to the masses. Experts who taught or conducted research about design-related issues and their impact on domestic spaces across the US provided content for publications and public presentations that were made to women who craved knowledge about how to plan the interior spaces of their homes. Universities such as Cornell in New York State, Wisconsin, and Iowa State pioneered strategies for teaching interior design principles “in the field” to the general public so that improvements to layouts, to the quality of work and storage areas, and to the appearance of domestic spaces could be accomplished in everyday houses – often at minimal expense. They also spearheaded product and equipment studies that encouraged the critical consideration of the design of domestic products and their performance criteria (Bix 2002).
The interior spaces that emerged as a result of the types of educational efforts embraced by early design educators portray the ways in which modern design principles could be employed in unexpected ways to affect improvements in a range of public and private environments. As a case to demonstrate the embedded political nature of designed interior space, I will describe and interpret one unassuming Depression era kitchen from the State of New York, where work done by home economics faculty at Cornell University pioneered the promotion of modern design principles to the general public in the early 20th century.
Prior to its improvement in 1934, the Epps' kitchen in Ulster County, New York lacked light and order, and its occupants could not take full advantage of the space it occupied. Missing built-in cabinetry (which was not unusual at that time), its furnishings were mismatched and crowded into one corner of a large room. Documentary snapshots of the kitchen's original condition show a tall, portable, manufactured cabinet looming darkly to one side of the sink while a shelf-like counter on the other side tilted precariously to aid its drainage. The ability of this counter to serve as a work surface for many kitchen activities appears to be undermined by the angle at which it rests. The door to a closet, visible on the right-hand side of the photograph, would inevitably bump into an adjacent oil stove each time it was opened, and a table cut through the middle of the space, closing off the work zone from the rest of the kitchen area.
Mrs. Epps, the primary occupant of the kitchen, may have recognized the less than perfect conditions of her work space because she participated in the “Reading Course for Farmer's Wives,” originating at Cornell. This program was begun in 1900 by Martha Van Rensselaer as a precursor to the distribution of knowledge about design and home management through the extension services of many universities. Between 1900 and 1913, Van Rensselaer produced publications for Cornell that circulated at a rate of approximately five per year. She personally researched the initial topics, wrote copy, produced drawings and diagrams for process-oriented topics, and mailed the bulletins. Between 1901 and 1917, the circulation of Cornell's published bulletins grew from 2,000 to more than 75,000 per year (Percival 1957).
Van Rensselaer also responded personally to many of her readers. It is in acts such as this that the potency of grassroots design is most obviously revealed. Both the bulletins and the personal letters Van Rensselaer penned touched recipients such as May Abbuhl of Greene, New York, who described her appreciation for the expert's personal attention in a letter dated September 22, 1907. Abbuhl wrote that she found the bulletins “suggestive, inspiring and helpful,” and that she received and treasured them among her “choicest literature” (Abbuhl 1907). Her description of her feelings about the publications conveyed her belief that they provided a kind of personal conduit between her and the domestic experts at Cornell (and Van Rensselaer in particular) as well as her recognition of the presence of a kind of implied social code. “When I think of all the important things you [Van Rensselaer] have on your hands,” she wrote, “and of all the interesting, attractive, and worthy friends you have, I am astonished and worried, too, to have you send me your papers. Wouldn't it be wiser,” she added, “to cut out the unessential and unimportant folk and things?” (Abbuhl 1907).
One of the purposes of the extension service was, of course, to eliminate such perceived boundaries and to increase access to knowledge and improved living circumstances for persons not formally affiliated with advanced education. It became important for programs like the one at Cornell, therefore, to reduce the perception of experts “telling” people what they should do and to encourage its participants to learn to help each other.
As interest in the reading course grew, Van Rensselaer encouraged the formation of study clubs to spark group discussion of the issues raised in the bulletins. She traveled frequently around the state to facilitate club meetings in grange halls, farmers' institutes, and private farmhouses. With such efforts, Van Rensselaer, and eventually her staff, worked to establish a culture of participatory design reform among the rural women of New York, who gradually began to see themselves as authorities on the topic.
As a probable participant in a group that shared design and home management advice provided by the experts at Cornell, Mrs. Epps contacted a local home demonstration agent in the early 1930s to request a “kitchen conference” to help rectify the design challenges of her workplace. Meeting directly in the Rare and Manuscript Collection, Cornell University itself, a gathering of neighbors and a home demonstration leader assessed the current conditions of her kitchen, took photographs and made drawings, and ultimately proposed strategies for making improvements using design advice provided by the extension program at Cornell.
Encouraged to undertake several steps to make her kitchen more modern and efficient, Mrs. Epps painted the manufactured cabinet white and moved it away from the sink. She placed matching open shelves hung on the wall on either side of the sink and had level counters constructed to its right and left to be used as work surfaces. The area below these counters became storage for a range of larger items, and compartments were built that were tailored to each item. The storage areas on the wall could be completely open or closed off from view with inexpensive covers such as tightly fitting roller shades and simple home-sewn curtains. Because Mrs. Epps was tall, she was able to incorporate shelves all the way up the kitchen walls to the ceiling.
By removing the door to the closet and replacing it with a curtain, Mrs. Epps resolved the conflict with the oil stove and the supplies and equipment stored there could be more easily seen and used. Photographs of the improved Epps kitchen prominently feature her electric lighting and plumbed sink, patterned linoleum flooring, and the smooth white painted surfaces of the plaster walls and wood-paneled ceiling. The use of these modern materials and systems gave her a brightly lit workplace that could be easily washed, while still avoiding an unpleasant feeling of sterility. The photographs also show the inclusion of a metal cart to be used to easily transport supplies across the large room and a well-lit “planning center” (in the form of a “remodeled” older desk) where Mrs. Epps could conduct her domestic business like a modern manager.
The cost of transforming this kitchen would have been insignificant because of the continued use of some of the modified furniture and cabinetry and the reuse of lumber for shelving and counter tops. The reliance on minimalism in the form of narrow, open shelves that discouraged clutter and over-stacking also contributed to the cost-effectiveness and the room's modernity.
The home demonstration agent who reviewed Mrs. Epps' kitchen improvements in a follow-up to the original conference praised her flexibility, her ingenuity, and her ability to serve as an expert, adding in her report that “Mrs. Epps will always think of better ways to do things and will change the situation to make these improvements possible” (New York State Federation of Home Bureaus Records 1939). This point is critical to our understanding of the kitchen as a political space, as it demonstrates the influence of the interactive design process on both the spaces and the people who used them. By giving the participants concrete situations to consider, the “kitchen conferences” transformed the ways that women viewed their environments, helping them to see the spaces as malleable. It also provided them with a sense of agency to literally affect architectural space, sometimes taking up tools to create new shelves or to raise work surfaces themselves. By encouraging women to gather in each other's homes to evaluate the deficits of their own workplaces and to understand general strategies for making the needed improvements to the spaces, future designers and design consumers learned to constructively evaluate each other's circumstances and to effect change and improvement.
These customized corrections took many forms. Ergonomic adjustments could be accomplished by propping up cabinets and tables or shortening their legs so that healthy standing and seated work positions could be established. Additions could be made to storage spaces easily and at little or no cost by using scrap and surplus materials to subdivide existing cabinetry. The use of older portable kitchen cabinets in new configurations also proved to be one of the least costly and most popular modifications made to at least one-quarter of the hundreds of rural kitchens documented by the faculty at Cornell.
If the political interior is the interior that asserts its ability to make a difference, then the designed, yet humble, kitchen interiors of Depression era New York farmhouses serve well to illustrate the unexpected potential of interiors to assert their significance within the built environment and in the lives of the numerous persons who were affiliated with them. This focus on the everyday environment remains a useful reminder that, like the underestimated profession that is interior design, our expectations of where meaningful design resides deserve to be challenged.
My research on the history of the interior design profession reveals that while a portion of its foundation rests in modern architectural production, it is also grounded on the rise of the applied arts, informed consumerism, and the study of efficiency and product development within the arena of home economics. The proliferation of 20th-century advice literature and shelter magazines correlates with this influence of design on the modern everyday environment.
The obvious constituent groups to have been directly affected by the act of designing everyday modern interiors such as the kitchen spaces described here are the extension experts and home demonstration agents who led the design instruction efforts and cultivated interest in the program(s) that promoted improving the interior environments and the knowledge base of the farm women who served as their “students.” Yet an analysis of the circumstances that surrounded their production demonstrates that the influence of these humble spaces reaches well beyond the persons who were directly connected to them.
Because extension experts employed by universities stood with their feet in both public and private arenas, they found themselves in a position to exert their influence in more than one direction. As educators, they brought their promotion of the importance of modernization to an audience that lacked the information, confidence, and financial resources to make radical changes to their physical surroundings. By guiding women through critical and analytical processes, experts encouraged the development of design expertise in the general populace. By encouraging women to have conversations about how to see opportunities to make improvements, they helped cultivate networks of trust and community that countered the sense of isolation so often associated with rural living in the early 20th century.
At the same time, as participants in a system of higher education, extension experts utilized their so-called “free” system of support and education for the public at large to solidify a demand for their research and service activities, thereby demonstrating a need for their work to the administrators of land-grant institutions. Often looked down upon as an applied science by academic colleagues in more traditional fields of science and the humanities, the beneficial practical knowledge produced by home economists focused on the so-called household arts (whose proponents, like interior designers, were nearly always female) and helped the research produced in what historian Laura Shapiro once described as a “shamelessly irrelevant academic ghetto” seem relevant to taxpayers and voters (Shapiro 1986).
Steady increases in student enrolment and an infusion of research findings into popular literature can both be interpreted, at least in part, as evidence of a growing interest in and appreciation of the benefits of good design. At the same time, many historians of the home economics movement have criticized the early participants for working within the patriarchal academy, making it possible for university administrators to avoid having to deal with challenging the status quo of resource allocation and traditionally gendered fields of study.
The female “students” on farms and in small towns who benefited from the dissemination of design knowledge can be understood as having felt a different kind of politicized influence. These women often entered into dynamic relationships with the home economists and demonstration agents who touched their lives and reduced their self-perceptions of feeling uneducated and, as May Abbuhl described herself, unimportant. After learning about the potential for employing modern design principles to improve the living conditions of their families, however, many expressed a satisfying sense of resourcefulness, empowerment, and a healthy connection to their neighbors and community. The collegial process used to generate ideas for improving the designs of kitchens in New York State, for instance, created a shared sense of investment in the improvements made to the houses of individuals. At the same time, the frugality employed by their extension teachers helped these thrifty and conservation-minded women celebrate the value of reusing materials and furnishings to create more efficient and aesthetically pleasing environments at minimal cost. That the end result did not exactly match the pictures of modern kitchens portrayed in magazines of the same period did not matter as much as the pride amateur designers took in doing more with less.
Young women who literally became students by pursuing higher education in this time period also stood to benefit from the cultivation of a study area that merged domestic topics with scientific methods. The hands-on learning methods employed in applied art programs that eventually became the study of interior design as we know it today gained valuable critical thinking and problem-solving skills that served them well in a range of private and professional pursuits. Many who studied the “household arts” in the first half of the 20th century applied what they learned as informed consumers and successful homemakers. For those with professional aspirations, however, growth in the graduate programs that expanded the knowledge base of the disciplines contained within home economics provided increased opportunities to assist in research projects, to generate publications, and ultimately, to teach subsequent generations.
Professional designers who emerged into practice via other conduits such as the study of the fine arts or architecture also stood to gain from the creation of more informed design consumers. An expanding middle class that increasingly understood the difference between good and bad design and expressed a growing demand for a modern designed environment created a platform for the acknowledgment, and ultimately the acceptance, of an interior design profession that provided services as well as goods in both the residential and the commercial realms (and ultimately others).
Manufacturers were not neutral players in the generation of the public's interest in modern design either. By working with researchers who tested new devices and materials, manufacturers could incorporate the latest ergonomic and consumer behavior research when developing and promoting their products. By making their products available for testing or incorporation into classroom and lab spaces, manufacturers also raised the brand awareness of potential future buyers of their goods.
The collective professional effort to improve the Epps kitchen and perhaps thousands of other everyday interior spaces like it in the 1930s may seem quite distant from today's interior design practice in both time and the literal nature of the work. I believe, however, that contemporary interior design practices can derive lessons from this case. By interpreting the layers of the potentially political interactions that operated simultaneously to produce an improved and designed interior environment where one did not previously exist, the possibility of the interior itself to reshape the lives of its occupants, to impact the allocation of resources – both natural and synthetic – becomes apparent. Ultimately, it suggests the ways in which the invocation of power impacts the nature of the built environment today and in the future.
First, if the principles that drive interior design as a method of creating architectural space are ever to reach a broad-based audience, professional interior designers need to eliminate the lingering perception that interior design is an exclusive service for the rich. This requires interior designers to continually and publicly prioritize the relationship between the nature of space and the activities it supports rather than its physical appearance. Like the efficiency experts whose research informed the layout of kitchens to support the type of work that actually needed to be done there, today's designers need to clearly articulate their ability to affect the quality of the actions that take place in the spaces they design.
Secondly, interior designers should consider how to focus on the development of models of practice that reach built environments that need the kind of improvement that interior designers are most able to provide. By taking their expertise into the field rather than waiting for “clients” to come to them, design experts such as the women who helped Mrs. Epps can empower their constituents to make their own decisions and to help each other. It is collaborative efforts such as this that hold the possibility of reaching out to the broadest range of environments on a global scale.
Thirdly, interior designers are very good at understanding people and the design approach that will most benefit them. Mrs. Epps did not have the means to eliminate her old kitchen and invest in a manufactured replacement. Her ability to construct vernacular solutions that evoked modernity through their smooth surfaces and clean white paint met the criteria for improvement held by the experts and they valued and promoted results such as hers to others in need of help. By letting go of the often unreachable standards of perfection touted in magazines and the works of “high-style” designers, occupants of these “real” interior spaces could feel pride in and satisfaction with the results of their remodeling efforts.
Finally, in order to maximize the political potential of designed interiors, practicing professionals and educators need to increase the accessibility of their knowledge so that a more informed base of design consumers can be created, putting the focus back on the quality of the user's experiences instead of on aesthetics. The grassroots-level interventions described here are just one model for how the media, design researchers, and practicing professionals can coordinate their efforts to encourage the development of interior spaces that take a stand.