“The New Dwelling sets for its occupants the task of rethinking everything afresh, organizing a new lifestyle, and of winning freedom from the irrelevant clutter of outmoded habits of thought and old-fashioned equipment.”
 — Franz Schuster, Das neue Frankfurt magazine, 1927

In 1927, a red X struck through the image of a fusty bourgeois drawing room reproduced on a poster signaled a crossroads in conceptions of the modern interior. The occasion being advertised was the international exhibition Die Wohnung (The Dwelling), held in Stuttgart, Germany, where forward-looking architects, designers, and manufacturers converged to address the burning question: How should we live? In the three decades that followed—a time of tremendous political volatility and economic uncertainty—there was a collective drive to forge new styles and types of domestic space that would shape the everyday lives of ordinary people. Groups of like-minded professionals in Europe and the United States experimented with modern technologies and materials—electricity, tubular steel, glass, plywood, synthetic textiles, plastics—to create simplified, functional, and aesthetically compelling interiors. New kinds of retail and exhibition environments and burgeoning mass-media networks helped spread such ideas and products to audiences previously untouched by modern design.

Architecture and design are by their very nature collaborative art forms, and the modern interior was shaped by input from a variety of professionals. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, many women broke into professions previously closed to them, forged international networks, and emerged at the forefront of design for the modern interior. Yet their contributions to new ways of thinking and designing have often been hidden from view or marginalized.

How Should We Live? Propositions for the Modern Interior, at the Museum of Modern Art, charts these developments through a series of environments and related materials drawn from the museum’s collection. Each of the propositions—evoking period exhibition installations, domestic interiors, and retail spaces—presents a coherent vision that responds to various external factors such as climate, legislation, or socioeconomic, political, and technological conditions. The exhibition aims to illuminate the complex collaborative processes and material components that fed into the modern interior and to highlight the key contributions of pioneering women architects and designers who achieved international visibility during this time.

The images that follow present highlights from the exhibition, on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, until April 23, 2017.
For further information, visit https://www.moma.org.

The Frankfurt Kitchen from the Ginnheim-Höhenblick Housing Estate, Frankfurt, Germany, 1926–27, by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky. © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art. Photography by Martin Seck.

The Frankfurt Kitchen was designed like a laboratory or factory and based on contemporary theories about efficiency, hygiene, and workflow. In planning the design, Schütte-Lihotzky conducted detailed time-motion studies and interviews with housewives and women’s groups. Each kitchen came complete with a swivel stool, a gas stove, built-in storage, a fold-down ironing board, an adjustable ceiling light, and a removable garbage drawer. Labeled aluminum storage bins provided tidy organization for staples like sugar and rice, as well as easy pouring. Careful thought was given to materials for specific functions, such as oak flour containers (to repel mealworms) and beech cutting surfaces (to resist staining and knife marks).

Lilly Reich. Women’s Fashion Exhibition, Berlin, Germany. View of the Velvet and Silk Café, 1927. Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mies van der Rohe Archive; Gift of the architect.

In a café environment defined by waving walls of fabric, the general public had their first chance to try out cantilevered tubular steel chairs with no back legs, literally consuming modern culture with their coffee. The immersive experience opened the imagination to new conceptions of free-flowing space as well as to the sensuous appeal of the materials. Highlights of glinting metal, black leather, and smoky glass added to the interior’s rich textural palette. Reich’s fabric walls dissolved conventional distinctions between structure and decoration, inside and out, masculine and feminine, fashion and architecture.

Bedroom setting from the Philip Johnson apartment, New York, 1930. Original design by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art. Photography by Martin Seck.

While still a student at Harvard University, Johnson joined the throng of international visitors to the 1927 Die Wohnung (The Dwelling) exhibition in Stuttgart. Inspired by this event and other work of Mies van der Rohe and Reich in Germany, Johnson commissioned the couple to design his first New York apartment in 1930. Writing to his mother he explained, “. . . it would be the first room entirely in my latest style in America . . . I think it would be the cheapest possible kind of publicity for my style. The whole would be elegant but so simple.” Mies and Reich simplified the existing interiors, combining plain white walls, sisal matting, and a limited range of tubular steel furniture with navy blue silk curtains hung from floor to ceiling to define the spaces and to hide extraneous architectural detailing.

Furniture and exhibition designs developed by Charlotte Perriand in association with Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier, 1929. © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art. Photography by Martin Seck.

“METAL plays the same part in furniture as cement does in architecture. IT IS A REVOLUTION,” declared Charlotte Perriand in 1929. At the time she was working on a model apartment for the Paris Salon d’Automne that would introduce to the public the new line of “home equipment” that she had been developing in collaboration with the architect Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. “While our chair designs were directly related to the position of the human body” recalled Perriand in her autobiography, “they were also determined by the requirements of architecture, setting, and prestige.” The trio’s iconic tubular steel furniture was showcased in an interior with a textured glass floor lit from beneath to refract light on to a glass ceiling. The whole created a vision of de luxe modernity.

A study bedroom from the Maison du Brésil, Cité Universitaire, Paris, 1959. Original furniture and interior by Charlotte Perriand; architecture by Lúcio Costa and Le Corbusier. © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art. Photography by Martin Seck.

Built in a spirit of postwar idealism, this compact and versatile space represented a modernist blueprint for independent living and an investment in citizens of the future. It was one of ninety-five such units designed for Brazilian students at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. Perriand was brought in to develop a modular scheme for the interiors of the Maison du Brésil, in collaboration with her long-time collaborator Le Corbusier and Brazilian architect Lúcio Costa. Perriand was skilled at designing multipurpose furniture for small interiors. The room divider, for example, contained an integrated reading lamp, bedside cubby, bookshelf, wardrobe, and personal storage area complete with colorful plastic trays that slide on racks. The couch served as a seating area during daytime hours, and as a bed at night.

Interiors and furniture for the Marguerita Mergentime apartment, New York, 1935–36. Original design by Frederick Kiesler. © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art. Photography by Martin Seck.

In Depression-era New York where architectural commissions were few and far between, the opportunity to remodel Marguerita Mergentime’s apartment was a lifeline for Frederick Kiesler. At the time he was experimenting with cast aluminum (normally reserved for kitchen utensils and airplane parts), plastics, industrial glass, and new forms of lighting. The space was sculpted by light diffused through translucent materials and bounced off reflective surfaces. The amoeba-shaped nesting tables and swiveling ”eye” of the spouting floor lamp reflect Kiesler’s interest in contemporary cinema and surrealist art, a noted departure from hard-edged forms of modernist design.

 

Click to read a related article, 6 Design-Centric Desinations in New York City You Need to Visit, where we featured the MoMA and this exhibition.

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Juliet Kinchin is curator and Luke Baker is curatorial assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

This article was originally published in the 17th Anniversary issue (January-April) of Antiques & Fine Art magazine, a fully digitized version of which is available on afamag.com. AFA is affiliated with Incollect.