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8 The Mass-produced Interior The lack of standards in the design of apartments is also a hindrance for

the rationalizing of the building trade . . . For rationalization must be

based on standardization – as in other spheres of production, the motor-

car industry for example.

Stig Lindegren1

Together the processes of industrialization, rationalization and standard- ization, all of which had their origins in the world of work and produc- tion, defined modernization.2 As we have seen their impact was felt not only in the spaces within factories and offices but also in those in the modern home. While industrialization increased the availability of fash- ionable goods destined for the domestic arena, rationalization radically changed the nature of spaces in the home, firstly in those areas dedicated to work but quickly afterwards in others as well. Standardization also found its way into the domestic arena, both through the mass-produced objects that filled its interiors and through the idea of the standardized, minimal interior.

For Modernist architects, whose thoughts and actions were driven by a desire to democratize design, standardization was hugely important. The idea that objects could, and should, be cheaply mass produced as exact replicas of each other, with interchangeable components, had its origins in American arms manufacturing where the development of standardized parts had ensured that guns could be repaired easily. The principle was subsequently transferred by Henry Ford into automobile manufacture. The 1925 image overleaf of the production line in Ford’s Louisville factory depicts the end of the assembly process when the body and chassis come together. The factory workers are checking the last details of the fully assembled, standardized automobiles. Standardization required the existence of a ‘model’ or ‘prototype’ that was subsequently replicated. For ease of assembly, distribution and repair all the constituent elements of mass-produced objects had to be exact replicas of each other. The same principles also influenced the development of the modern inter - ior. The effect was a further erosion of the separation between the spheres and a confirmation of the Modernists’ desire to minimize the presence of 147

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Sparke, Penny. The Modern Interior, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=480991. Created from asulib-ebooks on 2018-10-11 14:10:42.

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nineteenth-century domesticity, and of feminine domestic consump- tion, within the interior of the modern home. Early ideas relating to the application of standardization to the home were visible in early twentieth-century Germany. In his furniture and interior designs for the new garden city of Hellerau Richard Riemerschmid developed a number of machine-made furniture programmes – his Maschinen - möbel progrämme sets of series, that is, of simple, wooden furniture pieces that could be used, in combination, to create basic interior settings. All his pieces were given numbers – a 1905 kitchen chair was described as ‘number 825’, for example. They were made simply and their means of manufacture was not concealed. Screw-heads were often left visible, for instance. A model combination living and dining room of 1906, created by Riemerschmid for Hellerau, contained a small table and chairs, a sofa and a storage cupboard. Simple textiles – an embroidered runner for the table and some patterned cushions for the sofa – were included to soften the space as were some reproduced images on the wall, one depicting148

Workers assembling Model ‘t’ cars at the new Ford Motors’s Plant on South Western Parkway, Louisville, Kentucky, 1925.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and another a mountain scene. Bruno Paul worked in a similar way at that time, developing what he called his Typenmöbelprogrämme and, like Riemerschmid, numbering his series of replicated furniture pieces. One of his model interiors from 1908/9 was illustrated in Die Kunst magazine (see below). The utilitarian appear- ance of the items of mass-produced furniture it contained was offset, as in Riemerschmid’s earlier interior, by a patterned wallpaper, cushions, flowers and paintings hung on the wall.

As we have already seen 1914 saw the eruption of a heated debate about the merits or otherwise of standardization in design between the Belgian architect designer, Henry Van de Velde, and the German cham - p ion of modern industrial design, Hermann Muthesius. While the former defended the nineteenth-century ideal of individualism in designed environments, the latter supported an approach towards the manufac- ture of objects that aligned itself with factory production systems. Within the Modernist architectural model, which dominated progressive ideas

149 A living room with ‘standardized furniture’ designed by Bruno Paul, 1908–9, illustrated in Die Kunst, 1909.

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about the interior through the inter-war years and beyond, Muthesius’s view proved to be the more influential. The issue of standardization in, and of, the modern interior was not a straightforward matter, however, and it was interpreted in a variety of ways. While the European Modernists of the middle years of the twentieth century used it to underpin their democratic, egalitarian ideals, and to emphasize the social, the spatial and the functional roles of objects, the American commercial industrial design- ers of the 1930s utilized standardized machine manufacture to align the interior with the market-led values of industrial modernity.

The architectural Modernists set out to standardize both individ- ual furniture items and the interior as a whole, as far as that was feasible. The latter was most easily achieved in new, large-scale, utilitarian spaces – open plan offices, hotel kitchens, work canteens and student halls among them. Spaces like these were frequently dominated by the presence of mass-produced artefacts, from office chairs to kitchen equipment, to knives and forks. In the canteen of the Bijenkorf Department Store in The Hague (p. 151) the architect P. L. Kramer arranged long trestle tables in straight rows, and included plain white items of standardized crockery to encourage a sense of communal dining. The use of standardized compo- nents was also possible inside objects of mass transportation (themselves mass produced), particularly in the more utilitarian spaces destined for lower-class travellers. The interior of one third class railway carriage, or of a third class cabin in an ocean liner, for example, looked very much like the ones either side of them. Both contained minimal levels of com- fort. Even in the home – the site, more usually, of individualism and social aspiration – the same issue was enthusiastically addressed by the Modern - ists. ‘Of course a home is a much more complex organism than a car, and is conditioned by many more human functions’, the Swedish architect Stig Lindegren admitted in 1949. ‘But’, he added, ‘that only increases the demand for a technical solution of the problem.’3 Two decades later the French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard devoted a section of his book The System of Objects (1968) – a study of the neo-Platonic relationship between the ideas of the ‘model’ and the ‘series’ in mass production – to the concept of the ‘model interior’ in which he emphasized its class impli- cations. He made a distinction between the unattainable, aristocratic interiors depicted in contemporary French magazines such as Maison Française and Mobilier et Decoration, those ‘old eighteenth-century man- sions, miraculously well-equipped villas, Italian gardens heated by infra-red rays and populated by Etruscan statuettes, in short the world of150

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the unique’, and what he called ‘models in the proper sense of the word’, interiors, that is, which contained items that were, through mass produc- tion, accessible to a large sector of society.4

Although Christine Frederick’s rational kitchens, discussed in the previous chapter, were based on the principles of efficiency and produc- tivity, and similar objects appeared in all of them, she had stopped short of advocating the principle of industrialized standardization. Instead she had remained committed to the craft process. By the 1920s, in Germany, the question of ‘standards’ had emerged as an important issue however, manifested, for example, in the formulation of the din (Deutsches Institut für Normung) standards. It was within that climate that Grete Schütte- Lihotzky developed her famous kitchen design, the standardized compon - ents of which were manufactured in huge numbers. ‘The Frankfurt Kitchen was a factory-assembled module delivered to a building site and lifted into place by crane. Ten thousand were installed in the Frankfurt 151

The staff canteen at the Bijenkorf department store, The Hague, designed by P. L. Kramer, 1924, illustrated in Wendingen in 1925.

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settlements alone’, one writer has explained. As we have seen Lihotsky took her inspiration from ship’s galleys and railroad dining-car kitchens so the principle of standardization, inherent in those spaces, moved nat- urally into the domestic context.5 Indeed, the role of standardized interi- or components in determining the appearance of interior spaces became increasingly apparent within the implementation of archi tectural Modernism in Europe, and in the us through the middle years of the twentieth century. The concept of the idealized ‘model interior’, which could be replicated through the mass availability of standardized goods, had by that time captured the popular imagination through the media of exhibitions, magazines and other forms of mass dissemination. At the Weissenhof Siedlung of 1927, for example, the house designed by J.J.P. Oud, which contained Erna Meyer’s rational kitchen, also featured standardized furniture pieces in its combination living and dining room, designed by Ferdinand Kramer.

The need to put any objects into interiors went against the grain of the architectural Modernists and was often undertaken extremely reluc- tantly. Indeed the Modernist interior was often conceived, at least in ideal terms, as a near empty, uncluttered, dematerialized space. Many archi- tects, as we have already seen, found a solution in the idea of built-in fur- niture, extensions of the architectural frame, which helped to diminish the impact of the materiality of interior furnishings and to emphasize the dominance of architectural space. ‘We would prefer’, wrote Le Corbusier, ‘that our fittings and our furniture be built into walls, stay there, invis- ible and practical, leaving the home spacious and aerated’.6 Given the practical demands of occupying space, however, the total exclusion of material objects was never a realistic option and, inevitably, the modern interior became a container for a variety of material artefacts, both mass-produced and otherwise. Indeed, a tension between abstraction and materiality characterized the Modernist interior. Recognizing the inevitability of the need for material objects in their otherwise abstract, spatial settings, a number of Modernist architects, Le Corbusier among them, chose to complement their built-in furniture with ‘free-standing’ furnishings, sometimes, as we have seen, mass-produced items bought ‘off the shelf ’ and sometimes objects made to their own designs over which they could maintain a higher level of control. The contemporary materials utilized in many of their designs – tubular steel, glass and ply- wood among them – determined a particular furniture aesthetic which quickly came to characterize the Modernist interior. They offered a level152

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of materiality to otherwise abstract Modernist settings but the skeletal forms of the furniture items that were included prevented them from disturbing spatial continuity. A subtle balancing act was needed in the design of the material and the spatial aspects of those interiors. Import - antly, also, the materials in question were industrially manufactured rather than crafted. Like Adam Smith’s identical pins, produced in early pin factories, one industrially produced tubular steel chair looked, there- fore, exactly like another.

Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, designed for the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, combined fitted furniture with a number of anonymous ‘object-types’. The pavilion itself was a rare instance of a prototype interior designed as a ‘model’ unit that theoretically, at least, could be replicated many times over in a large apartment block. Le Corbusier chose each item to show his com- mitment to new materials, industrial production, and standardization.7 He 153

The interior of Le Corbusier’s ‘Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau’ for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, Paris, 1925.

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saw the furniture items he included as aesthetically neutral tools, passive pieces of ‘equipment’ rather than as elements within a decorative scheme. He selected metal doors, produced by the Roneo company, a manufac- turer of steel office equipment; prefabricated metal windows; a tubular metal staircase (inspired by ones used on ships); bentwood armchairs (recalling the communal café rather than the private living room); a metal table made by L. Schmittheisler, a producer of hospital equipment; and some standardized modular storage units, described as ‘class-less furni- ture’.8 The leather ‘club’ armchair he included, discussed in the previous chapter, was suggestive of a masculinity that had been created within a semi-public sphere. The overall aim was to eliminate any traces of individualized domesticity and to provide the occupant with the basic utilitarian requirements for everyday life. The architect immodestly described his little pavilion as ‘a turning point in the design of modern interiors’.9 Ironically, though, as was often the case with Modernist pro- posals, in reality many of its supposedly standardized items had to be custom-made. Special small versions of Maples’ leather armchairs, for example, usually produced to standardized measurements, had to be produced to fit Le Corbusier’s space.10

Although Le Corbusier included a tubular steel stair handrail in his pavilion, he did not at that time realize the potential of that material for the design of furniture pieces that would bring the world of industry into the home.11 In fact it wasn’t until 1927 that, with Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier began to design chairs in tubular steel. From as early as 1925, however, the Bauhaus-trained architect and designer Marcel Breuer had understood the potential of that material – encountered through his bicycle – to transform the bulky club arm- chair, of which Le Corbusier was so fond, into a skeletal version of the same design. With its open tubular steel frame Breuer’s Wassily chair of 1925 could provide the same utilitarian function as a traditional armchair but without blocking the spatial continuity of the room that contained it. He was dissatisfied with his first version, writing: ‘It is my most extreme work, both in its outward appearance and in the use of materials; it is the least artistic, the most logical, the least “cosy” and the most mechanical.’ He went on to develop it through several stages until it was finally resolved to his satisfaction.12 In contrast to Le Corbusier’s idea of using ‘off the shelf ’ items, Breuer’s approach was to design his own mass- produced furniture pieces to enhance and reinforce the spatiality of his interiors and their standardized nature. It was a strategy that was154

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subsequently emulated by many other Modernist architects, from Mies van der Rohe to Charles Eames.

Over the next few years Breuer designed many other tubular steel furniture items for the numerous interior spaces he created. His tubular steel club armchair appeared in the living area of Walter Gropius’s house in Dessau of 1925–6, for example, while a dressing niche in a guest room in the same house featured a little tubular steel stool and a multi-shelf dressing table. The living room in Moholy-Nagy’s house of the same years contained a number of Breuer’s tubular steel pieces, as did an interior he created in Berlin in 1926 for Erwin Piscator, and the Harnischmacher house of three years later (both pictured overleaf ).

Breuer’s interest in tubular steel was soon emulated by many other architects and designers. At the Weissenhof Siedlung Mies van der Rohe, Mart Stam, J.J.P. Oud, S. van Ravesteyn, Heinz and Bodo Rasch and Arthur Korn were among the architects who displayed tubular steel fur- niture pieces in the interiors of the buildings they created for that event. A little later the Italian Rationalist architects, Giuseppe Terragni and Gabrielle Mucchi, among others, created furniture pieces in the same material. In the 1930s the British company pel devoted itself to the mass manufacture of tubular steel furniture, while at the same time in the us Wolfgang Hoffmann, Josef Hoffmann’s son, designed a range of items for the Howell Company that were produced in considerable numbers. Only in the us did tubular steel find a place in the popular modern residential interior in the years before 1939, however. In Europe, with the exception of the handful of patrons of Modernist architecture, it was more usually found in church halls, canteens and school classrooms.

By the mid 1930s, as several publications of the time demonstrated, few Modernist interiors were complete without their items of tubular steel furniture. Paul Frankl’s New Dimensions: The Decorative Arts of Today in Words and Pictures (1928); Dorothy Todd and Raymond Mortimer’s The New Interior Decoration (1929); Hans Hoffmann’s Modern Interiors in Europe and America (1930); and Hans Eckstein’s Die Schöne Wohnung (1931), among others, all depicted numerous examples of interior spaces containing items made of tubular steel.13 Retail spaces were especially well represented, as were cafés and bars, all of them purveyors of the modern lifestyle. Examples included a Parisian bar designed by Robert Block of Studio Athelia; bars in Helsingfors and Kyoto by Birger Jarl Carlstadt and Isaburo Ueno respectively; a seaside restaurant in San Sebastian by the Spanish architect, Labayen-Aizpurúa; a music shop in Vienna by Ernst 155

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The dining room in an apartment, designed by Marcel Breuer for Erwin Piscator, Berlin, photographed by Cami Stone, 1926.

Marianne Harnischmacher in the living room of the Harnischmacher House, Wiesbaden, photographed by Wolf and Lotte Schede-Foto, 1932.

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Lichtblau; a baker’s shop in Stockholm by Eskil Sundahl; and a shoe shop by Jock D. Peters in Los Angeles. In private residences, however, tubular steel was for the most part reserved for private bars, smoking rooms and studies, a reinforcement of the material’s inherent masculinity. Only a very small number of living rooms were graced by its presence.

As well as playing a strongly visual, material and spatial role with- in Modernist interiors the emphasis of mass-produced artefacts in inter - iors also reflected the ideological face of that movement. The Modernist interior was proposed as a solution to the problem of the ‘minimum dwelling’, that is to the possibility of low income families being able to live their lives in a basic, utilitarian environment.14 In that context the inclusion of low-priced, standardized, mass-produced artefacts formed part of many Modernist architects’ social agendas. A narrow line sepa- rated object standardization in the interior from the standardization of the interior itself. Indeed, in the context of the minimum dwelling, the entire interior could itself be seen as a ‘model’ or a ‘prototype’ that could be replicated. The British architect Wells Coates’s version of the ‘minimal flat’ was not directed at the less well-off, however, but rather at people with modern, mobile lifestyles who didn’t want to be tied down by an excess of material possessions. The interior of the Isokon Minimum Flat

157 The Isokon Minimum Flat, designed by Wells Coates and exhibited at London’s Exhibition of British Art in Relation to the Home, 1933.

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created for the apartment building he designed in Lawn Road, London consisted of a bed-sitting room and a small kitchenette, and featured Isokon plywood items and pel tubular steel chairs.15 It was shown at the Exhibition of British Industrial Art in Relation to the Home held in London’s Dorland Hall in 1933.

Unless they were created especially by Modernist architects for their own spaces, or for the handful of private residential clients for whom they worked, standardized mass-produced furniture items, such as pel’s simple tubular steel side chairs, could only be produced if there was mass demand for them. From the late nineteenth century onwards the serial production of wooden and metal furniture pieces had developed in the us, focused for the most part in Grand Rapids, near Lake Michigan, in response to the demand from new offices, hospitals, restaurants and other large-scale public sphere buildings which were being constructed at that time. In addition to the growing presence of machine-made furni- ture and furnishings in inside spaces, inter-war interiors in both the public and the private spheres were also becoming more and more heav- ily populated by mass-produced, standardized machines. Offices saw the arrival of typewriters and duplicating machines; shops that of cash regis- ters and adding machines; while homes witnessed the influx of a wide range of domestic machines, from irons to kettles, toasters and electric fires. As the spaces designed for work and commerce were gradually modernized and, with domestic spaces absorbing the products of the new technologies, the need for the new machines to reflect that change aesthetically became a priority. Also as the economic depression hit harder in the us, putting increased pressure on manufacturers to differentiate their products, those objects needed to be given modern visual identities that would enhance their suitability for the spaces they were destined to facilitate the introduction of modernity into.

In the late 1920s the members of the newly established American industrial design profession focused on the creation of unified, modern- looking identities for the new machines destined for the newly modernized interiors of both the public and the private spheres. Like their European Modernist architectural contemporaries, they looked to the public sphere for an appropriate aesthetic. Like Le Corbusier, for example, they were inspired by the new, modern machine par excellence, the automobile. While the French architect was more interested in the manufacturing principles underpinning it than the automobile itself (although he did design a ‘Minimum Car’ with Pierre Jeanneret) his American counter-158

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parts went one step further by designing cars and subsequently emulat- ing the streamlined aesthetic they developed for them in the interior. Their objects of transportation were styled to eliminate ‘drag’ and maxi- mize speed. The symbolic implications of that new, dynamic aesthetic were immediate and compelling and were quickly transferred to inani- mate objects such as pencil sharpeners and refrigerators. Inevitably those objects found their way into interiors, both public and private, enabling the interior itself to be ‘streamlined’.

The American industrial designers who took upon themselves the ambitious task of streamlining the entire environment, both interior and exterior, came from a variety of commercial backgrounds.16 Very few were architects by training, the majority having worked in advertising and, in some cases, in theatre and retail design.17 They were extremely adept, therefore, at creating high levels of visual rhetoric and spectacle in interior spaces. Their work crossed a spectrum from experimental to live projects. While they dreamed of redesigning the city and imagined extraordinary futuristic objects of transport for the ‘world of tomorrow’, for the most part their everyday work consisted of product redesigns and the commercial interior projects that were associated with them. The link between product and interior design initiated by the American industrial designers offered an alternative approach to the creation of the modern interior to that which had been formulated by the European Modernist architects. While the forms and materials both groups used were often superficially similar – tubular steel and simple geometry featured widely, for example – the contexts in which they worked and their working methods were utterly different. Mass-produced artefacts provided the starting point for the industrial designers and they worked outwards from them into the spaces that contained them. Given that they worked predominantly in the commercial arena their primary aim was to ensure that the objects they designed looked modern, attractive and desirable. The work that Norman Bel Geddes undertook for the Simmons Company, for instance, had that end in sight. In his deliberations about the design of a bed, which in his view had to ‘consist of the simplest possible horizontal and perpendicular sections, perhaps molded out of one sheet of metal’, he demonstrated the industrial designer’s characteristic concern for economical manufacture. He was also interested in ensuring that the bed could be dusted and dismantled easily and, above all, that it ‘possess[ed] sheer, graceful lines’.18 When he moved his focus on to the showroom in which the bed was to be displayed his main preoccupation 159

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remained the enhancement of the bed’s desirability. Drawing on his earlier experiences in theatre design and shop window dressing he creat- ed a complete and enclosed bedroom ‘set’ featuring streamlined, curved panelled walls, subtle concealed lighting and sufficient simple props to give a sense of realism to the ensemble, but not to outshine the bed, which had to remain the focus of attention.

The interior that Bel Geddes created for the Simmons Company was both an extension and a dramatization of the bed, as well as a form of brand reinforcement. Interestingly, for the design of his private residence Zalmon G. Simmons and his wife Frances adopted a quite different approach, asking the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe to provide them with a reproduction eighteenth-century French ‘Chinoiserie’ setting. While the redecoration of their home was probably led by Frances Simmons, her husband’s commercial interior was targeted at a mass audience that sought to embrace signs of modernity in their homes. The Simmons’s home interior, which subtly combined modernity with tradition, was an appropriate expression of the couple’s significant financial and social achievements and their (acquired) position in society. Bel Geddes also worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, which commis- sioned him to create a combined conference room and auditorium. He approached that project in two ways, firstly as the creation of an efficient machine, ensuring the inclusion of a screen for projection and an advanced ventilation system, and secondly as a space in which ambiance was all important. To that latter end he included concealed lighting operated by twenty-two dimmer switches.19 The room was described as being made up of ‘impressive plain surfaces, restfully colored, supremely comfort- able and completely modern’.20

The American industrial designers created a wide range of inter - iors for offices, showrooms, shops and exhibitions, as well as for objects of transportation. They understood offices, first and foremost, as appro- priate spaces for their modern machines. In his book Horizons (1934) Bel Geddes described the office as the sum of the artefacts and machines it contained – from the telephone, to the fountain pen, to the calendar pad, to the lamps, to the clock, to the receptacles for cigarettes, to the adding machine, to the calculating machine, to the dictating machine, to the filing cabinet. His was a strongly ‘object-centric’ view of interiors which were defined by their material contents. In the mock-up corner of An Industrial Designer’s Office (already described in chapter Five), created by Raymond Loewy and Lee Simonson for the 1934 exhibition at New York’s160

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The interior of the Eastman Kodak Shop designed by Walter Dorwin Teague, New York, 1931.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art, the aesthetic of streamlining was applied both to the contents of the interior and to its frame. The walls were cov- ered with curved, horizontal metal bands. The same metal was also used as edging on the curved cantilevered desks, for the frame of an uphol- stered chair, and for the support for a display stand. Repetition was used to accentuate the unity of that streamlined environment as it had been by the Gesamtkunstwerk architect-decorators, Henry Van de Velde and Peter Behrens, earlier in the century. The space was dominated by the objects within it, however, from Loewy’s model for his Hupmobile automobile, which was positioned on a plinth centre stage, to his drawing for the Princess Anne ferryboat, to his dramatically modern-looking glass and metal furnishings.

The same designers also worked on numerous shop interiors. Loewy created the W. T. Grant store in Buffalo, among others, while Walter Dorwin Teague designed Eastman Kodak’s New York store in 1931. The scheme for the latter shop interior exhibited the same horizontal metal strips, albeit on a different scale, that the designer had used in his redesign of one of the company’s cameras. The design for the camera shop was a low-key affair, however, in which the visibility of the goods on sale was paramount. Lighting was concealed behind wall cases fitted flush with the walls. Commenting on that interior, a contemporary critic explained that, ‘The entire design was conceived as providing a neutral setting for the display of the photographic enlargements and the various colourful objects of Eastman Kodak manufacture. It was executed, there- fore, in varying tones of silver, gray and black. The finish of the various materials was chosen with the same object in view. The display space draws the eye because it is of a light, dull finish in contrast to the dark, polished enframement’, adding that: ‘The display counters have been kept low, better to attract attention, and the objects are displayed on plain standards of a similar finish to that of the walls.’21

Some of the American industrial designers’ most overtly modern ideas were reserved for their designs for the interiors of objects of trans- portation. Transport was their first love and they developed exciting visions of, and wrote extensively and rhetorically about, their streamlined planes, trains, boats, automobiles and even their space rockets, of the future. Only a few of their designs were realized, however. Bel Geddes was responsible for the interior of the Chrysler Airflow of 1933, while the auto- mobile’s exterior was the creation of the engineer, Carl Breer. Loewy’s powerful locomotive designs for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and162

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Dreyfuss’s 20th Century Limited model for New York Central both went into production also. The designers in question were equally at home working inside trains, planes and ships. The specific constraints pre- sented by those projects, including the need to appeal to paying passen- gers and to build on the important symbolic relationship of transport objects with modern life, made those interiors especially challenging. Passenger plane interiors were perhaps the most demanding of all. Bel Geddes’s office designed a mock-up for Pan American’s China Clippers which began flying in 1935. He made a number of innovative proposals including the provision of sleeping facilities, a galley with a refrigerator and sound insulation. Ship interiors also received the attention of the industrial designers. In 1936 Raymond Loewy created a number of rooms, 163

The main lounge and observation end of the 20th Century Limited train, designed by Henry Dreyfuss, 1938.

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including the main hall and the state room, for the Panama Railways Steamship Company’s liner, the ss Panama. His spaces exuded an air of modern luxury and recalled the interiors shown in contemporary Hollywood films and glamorous hotels more closely than they did the usual standardized spaces of mass travel. A range of modern materials was employed including stainless steel, aluminium and glass, and Loewy rounded off the corners of the objects in the interior both for safety reasons and as a strategy for making those compact spaces look as large as possible.

Many of the same requirements underpinned the industrial designers’ work for train interiors. Henry Dreyfuss’s settings for the 20th Century Limited were strikingly controlled, modern-looking, and decep- tively spacious. His use of concealed lighting enhanced the luxurious ambiance that he had set out to create. Muted colours – blue, grey and brown – were combined with new materials, including cork and Formica. ‘Fully enclosed by glass and rounded surfaces, protected from weather and engine-soot by air-conditioning, and lulled by radio music, they [the passengers] could forget they were travelling as they experienced a rubber-cushioned ride.’22 In the train’s main lounge and observation car, the designer’s use of top lighting and the addition of metal strips to the columns combined with a number of other features to create an extremely elegant travelling environment. Loewy’s interior designs for the Broadway Limited provided a similarly comfortable experience for its passengers. The train’s luxurious interior was enhanced by the presence of a circular bar as glamorous as anything that could have been found in a New York or a Parisian nightclub.

In spite of their significant impact on interior spaces in the com- mercial sphere the industrial designers made very little difference to the design of the modern home. Exceptionally Bel Geddes was involved in a project to visualize ‘The House of Tomorrow’. The result was spatially unadventurous however, most of its rooms being conventional rectan- gles, and its design details echoed those of the European Modernists for the most part. The design was published in the Ladies’ Home Journal, thereby reaching a much wider audience than its European equivalents, however. Another group of American designers, several of who had European roots and architectural backgrounds, focused exclusively upon furniture and interior design. They were more successful than the indus- trial designers in modernizing the American home at that time. Gilbert Rhode, Paul Frankl, Kem Weber, Russel Wright and a few others worked164

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with some of the progressive American furniture mass manufacturers of the day – the Kroehler Company, Herman Miller, and Conant Ball, among them – to create mass-produced sets of simple, light, wooden furniture items, inspired by Swedish models, that were ideally suited to the spatial constraints of modern, urban apartment living. A 1928 living room designed by Kem Weber was illustrated in Innen-Dekoration. It brought together modern and traditional items in a single setting. In Mary McCarthy’s 1936 novel, The Group, a story about the lives of a group

165A room designed by Kem Weber, Los Angeles, 1928, illustrated in Innen-Dekoration, 1928.

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of Vassar graduates living in inter-war New York, Kay, one of the main characters, was among those for whom the new, compact furnishing style was enormously appealing. Her apartment consisted of

Two rooms, plus dinette and kitchen, plus a foyer, plus, Kay’s pride and joy, a darling little dressing room. Every stick of furniture was the latest thing; blond Swedish chairs and folding table . . . in the dinette . . . in the living room a bright-red modern couch and arm- chairs to match, a love-seat covered in striped grey-and-white mattress ticking, steel standing lamps, and a coffee table that was just a sheet of glass that Harald had had cut at the glazier’s and mounted on steel legs, built-in bookcases that Harald had painted canary yellow. There were no rugs yet and, instead of curtains, only white Venetian blinds at the windows. Instead of flowers, they had ivy growing in white pots.23

Those designers positioned themselves somewhere between European Modernism on the one hand and American commercial product design on the other. Above all they sought to exploit the possibility of modu- larity and standardization in furniture manufacture. Their contribution was defined by their ‘willingness to make use of the language of the marketplace to reach potential users’.24

With the exception of their emphasis on the curved forms of streamlining, the interior designs developed by the American designers of the inter-war years were not especially visually innovative as they tended to combine the strategies of the European Modernists with those of the exponents of the Art Deco style in a fairly straightforward way. The impact of their strongly commercial approach to interior design was more significant, however, especially in the years after the Second World War when their influence provided a counterbalance to that of the Modernists. The approach to the modern interior adopted by the American industrial designers was much more pragmatic and less ideal- istic than that of their European counterparts and they anticipated a world in which, increasingly, objects were to take centre stage and define the interiors that contained them.

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