Key interiors since 1900

Interior space encloses the daily routines of human life. Each space will invoke different responses due to their function and organisation, their history and atmosphere, and their environmental and material conditions. The room is central to the understanding of the interior. It is an enclosure of space within which occupancy, in its myriad of forms, takes place. This is a book about the history of Twentieth Century Interior Design, as told through a series of exemplary interiors and rooms. The history of Interior Design is often outlined in parallel to the development of architecture, but the process of creating an interior is different to the process of creating architecture, a procedure where ‘new build’ is the primary form of spatial expression. The creation of an interior is generally based around the understanding of, and working with, existing spaces and buildings. Whether the existing component of this process is a real building, or merely the outline of a project drawn on a screen or page, the existing space will provide the impetus for the design and hence the creation of the interior. Therefore the history of Interior Design, whilst inexplicably connected to the enclosure within which it is contained, cannot adequately be reflected solely by the history and development of architecture. This book will define the history of modern Interior Design as told through the development of the discipline of re-using existing buildings and spaces. It will outline the history of the development of the subject through a selection of interiors that have been created as autonomous spaces contained within an existing building envelope. Whilst the architectural container is acknowledged, these interiors have been created in an historic and stylistically independent manner. It is these interiors that constitute what might be considered as ‘exemplary’ forms of Interior Design. In other words the creation of interior space through reuse, interiors that are created independently of, as opposed to simultaneously with the envelope, involves the creation of the most prototypical forms of Interior Design. The author acknowledges that the principle will exclude many buildings, housing what may be considered as ‘classic’ examples of modern interior spaces, but it is considered that this approach could allow Interior Design to separate itself from architectural history, and therefore be able to develop its own spatial and historical discourse through the examination of specific exemplars of interior space.