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Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today (20% Discount Flyer)

 

Fiona Fisher, Trevor Keeble, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, Brenda Martin

Four members of The Modern Interiors Research Centre have co-edited this awaited volume, companion to Designing the Modern Interior (2010).

Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior examines the interior as a stage upon which modern life and lifestyles are consciously fashioned and performed, and from which modern identities are projected by and through design.

Scholars from Europe, Canada, America and Australia present a range of interior environments - domestic interiors, sets for stage and film, exhibition spaces, art galleries, hotel lobbies, cafés and retail spaces - to explore each as an intersection of fashion, lifestyle and performance. Sharing the thesis that the fashionably-dressed body and the interior can be seen as part of the same creative and expressive continuum, the essays highlight the ways in which interiors can give shape to and dramatise modern life.

About the Authors/Editors:
Fiona Fisher and Patricia Lara-Betancourt are Postdoctoral Researchers in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University, London.
Trevor Keeble is Associate Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University.
Brenda Martin is the Curator of the Dorich House Museum at Kingston University.

CONTENTS
General Introduction, Brenda Martin, Kingston University, UK

PART I: 1850-1900
Introduction
1. From Historic Dress to Modern Interiors: The Design Theory of Jakob von Falke, Eric Anderson, Kendall College of Art and Design, USA
2. Sensation and Interior Description in Nineteenth-Century London, Mark Taylor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
3. Wearing and Inhabiting the Past: Promoting the Colonial Revival in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century America, Bridget A. May, Marymount University, USA
4. The Viennese Coffeehouse: A Legend in Performance, Tag Gronberg, University of London, UK

PART II: 1900-1940
Introduction
5. 'At Home' at the St James's: Dress, Décor and the Problem of Fashion in Edwardian Theatre, Christopher Breward, Victoria and Albert Museum, UK
6. Designing Lucile Ltd: Couture and the Modern Interior 1900-1920s, Samantha Erin Safer, Victoria and Albert Museum, UK
7. 'Paris, Hollywood': Viewing Parisian Modernity through the Lens of the Séeberger Brothers, 1909-39, Andrew Stephenson, University of East London, UK
8. Fashioning Thrift: Finding the Modern in Everyday Environments, Mary Anne Beecher, University of Manitoba, Canada

PART III: 1940-1970
Introduction
9. The Modern Home, Western Fashion and Feminine Identities in Mid-Twentieth-Century Turkey, Meltem Ö Gürel, Bilkent University, Turkey
10. Breakfast at Tiffany's: Performing Identity in Public and Private, Marilyn Cohen, Parsons The New School for Design, USA
11. Front and Back of House: Staging Queer Domesticity in New Canaan, Alice Friedman, Wellesley College, USA
12. Dressing the Part(y): 1950s Domestic Advice Books and the Studied Performance of Informal Domesticity in the UK and the US, Grace Lees-Maffei, University of Hertfordshire, UK

PART IV: 1970-PRESENT
Introduction
13. In-habiting Site: Contemporary Art Practices Within the Historic Interior, Helen Potkin, Kingston University, UK
14. Lobby Living: the Performance of Lifestyle, Nicky Ryan, University of the Arts, UK
15. 'Stay with Armani': Giorgio Armani and the Pursuit of Continuity, Stability and Legacy, John Potvin, University of Guelph, Canada
16. Designing for the Screen: the Creation of an Everyday Illusion, Teresa Lawler, Kingston University, UK
17. The Spectacular Form of Interior Architecture Under the New Conditions of Urban Space, Pierluigi Salvadeo, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

For further information see: http://www.bergpublishers.com/?tabid=15037

 

Designing the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today (Berg, 2009)

 

Designing the Modern Interior reveals how the design of the inside spaces of our homes and public buildings is shaped by and shapes our modern culture. The modern interior has often been narrowly defined by the minimalist work of elite, reforming architects.  But a shared modernising impulse, expressed in interior design, extends at least as far back as the Victorians and reaches to our own time.  And this spirit of modernisation manifested itself in interiors, designed by both professionals and amateurs, which did not necessarily look modern and often even aimed to imitate the past.  Designing the Modern Interior presents a new history of the interior from the late 19th to the 21st century.  Particular characteristics are consistent across this period: a progressive attitude towards technology; a hyper-consciousness of what it is to live in the present and the future; an overt relationship with the mass media, mass consumption and the marketplace; an emphasis on individualism, interiority and the ‘self’; the construction of identities determined by class, race, sexuality and nationhood; and the experiences of urban and suburban life.

 

Edited by:
Penny Sparke, Anne Massey, Trevor Keeble, Brenda Martin

 

Contents:
General Introduction: Penny Sparke

 

Part One: The Late Nineteenth-Century Interior: Emma Ferry, Introduction; Trevor Keeble, Plate Glass and Progress: Victorian Modernity at Home; Fiona Fisher, Privacy and Supervision in the Modernised Public House, 1872-1902; Sabine Wieber, The German Interior at the End of the 19th Century.

 

Part Two: The Early Twentieth-Century Interior: Penny Sparke, Introduction; Christopher Reed, Taking Amusement Seriously: Modern Design in the Twenties; Elizabeth Darling, ‘the scene in which the daily drama of personal life takes place’: towards the modern interior in early 1930s Britain; Irene Nierhaus, the modern interior as a geography of images, spaces and subjects: Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s Villa Tugendhat, 1928–1931; Hilde Heynen, ‘Leaving Traces’: Anonymity in the Modernist House; Charles Rice, The Geography of the Diagram: the Rose Seidler House. 

 

Part Three: The Mid-Twentieth-Century:  Anne Massey, Introduction; Peter Blundell Jones, Hans Scharoun and the Interior; Pat Kirkham, New Environments for Modern Living: ‘At Home’ with the Eameses; Penny Sparke, Italy’s New Domestic Landscape, 1945–1972; Alice T. Friedman, Ship Shapes: Ocean Liners, Modern Architecture and the Resort Hotels of Miami Beach, Anne Massey, Nationalism and Design at the End of Empire: Interior Design and the Ocean Liner.

 
Part Four: The Late-Twentieth-Century Interior:  Trevor Keeble, Introduction; David Crowley, The Dark Side of the Modern Home: Ilya Kabakov and Gregor Schneider’s Ruins; Sarah Chaplin,  Locating the Modern Impulse Within the Japanese Love Hotel; Alison J. Clarke, The Contemporary Interior: Trajectories of Biography and Style; Anne Chick, Living the Sustainable Life: A Case Study of the Beddington Zero Energy Development (BEDzed) Sustainable Interior.

 

 

Journal of Design History (volume 21, number 1, spring 2008)

 

This special edition of the Journal of Design History explores the professionalisation of interior design through a series of essays, a number of which were first presented at the annual conference of the Modern Interiors Research Centre in 2006.

 

Edited by:
Anne Wealleans (née Massey) and Grace Lees Maffei (University of Hertfordshire)

 

Contents:
Grace Lees-Maffei and Anne Wealleans: Introduction
Reggie Blaszcyk: Designing Synthetics, Publicising Brands: Dorothy Liebes, Du Pont Fibers and Postwar American Interiors
Tracey Avery: Acknowledging Professional Interior Design? Developing Design Practices for Australian interiors (1880-1900)
Rebecca Houze: At the Forefront of a Newly Emerging Profession? Ethnography, Education, and the Exhibition of Women’s Needlework in Austria-Hungary in the Late Nineteenth Century
Bridget May: Nancy Vincent McClelland (1877-1959): Professionalizing Interior Decoration in the Early 20th Century
Penny Sparke: Interior Decoration and Haute Couture: Links Between the Developments of the Two Professions in France and the U.S.A. in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries – A Historiographical Analysis.

 

Dora Gordine: Sculptor, Artist, Designer (Philip Wilson, 2007)

 

In 1938 Dora Gordine was hailed as 'possibly becoming the finest woman sculptor in the world'. For over thirty years she was widely regarded as a major presence in European sculpture; for her contribution to the inter-war art movement known as the Rappel à l'Ordre, as a prominent member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and as a founder of the Society of Portrait Sculptors. She was widely admired as a creator of psychologically acute portrait heads, idiosyncratic public memorials and sensuous figure-sculptures. She also merits attention for her highly individual sense of style evident in the studio-homes she had built for herself in Paris, Singapore and London. The last of these homes, Dorich House, which is on the edge of Richmond Park, is the most architecturally intriguing and was designed by Gordine herself - an achievement virtually unheard of for a woman artist at the time of its construction in 1936. Gifted, charismatic, imperious and irrepressible, 'La Gordine' led a fascinating life travelling extensively in Europe, North America and South-East Asia. An air of mystery has often been associated with the artist, who was readily prepared to foster the uncertainty concerning her background and nationality. This richly illustrated book is the first to reveal the reality of her colourful life.  It contains a wealth of previously unpublished material and incorporates the first catalogue raisonné of Gordine's impressive sculptural oeuvre. 

 

Edited by:
Jonathan Black and Brenda Martin

 

Contributors:
Jonathan Black and Brenda Martin, Introduction
Jonathan Black, Portraiture, Patronage and Networking
Fran Lloyd, Modern Sculpture: Gordine and Her Contemporaries
Jonathan Black, Orientalism and ‘exotic’ Sculpture in an Imperial Age
Penny Sparke, A Modern Decorator in the French Tradition
Brenda Martin, Four Studio-Houses: A Negotiation of Modernism
Jonathan Black, Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture.  

 

The Modern Period Room, The Construction of the Exhibited Interior 1870-1950 (Routledge, 2006)

 

With contributors drawn from a broad range of disciplines, The Modern Period Room brings together a carefully selected collection of essays to consider the interiors of the modern era and their more recent reconstructions from a variety of different viewpoints.  Contributions from leading design historians, architects and curators of the history of the domestic interior in the UK engage with the issues and conventions surrounding the modern period room to expose the conflicting tensions that lie beneath the conceptual and physical strategy of the modern period room's representational technique. Exploring themes and examples by prestigious architects, such as Ernö Goldfinger, Truus Schroeder and Gerrit Rietveld, the authors reveal the specific coding of presented interior spaces. This illustrated new take on the historiography of twentieth century show interiors enables historians and theorists of architecture, design and social history to investigate the contexts in which this representational device has been used. 

 

Edited by:
Penny Sparke, Brenda Martin, Trevor Keeble

 

Contents:
Trevor Keeble: Introduction
Jeremy Aynsley: The Modern Period Room – A Contradiction in Terms?
Lesley Hoskins: Interiors Without Walls: Choice in Context at MoDA
Daniel Robins: Stopping the Clock: The Preservation and Presentation of Linley Sambourne House, 18 Stafford Terrace
Sarah Chaplin: The Double Life: The Cultural Construction of the Exhibited Interior in Modern Japan
Paul Overy: The Restoration of Modern Life: Interwar Houses on Show in the Netherlands
Alexandra Griffith Winton: ’A Man's House is his Art': The Walker Art Center's Idea House Project and the Marketing of Domestic Design 1941-1947
Fredie Floré and Mil De Kooning: Domesticity on Display: Modelling the Modern Home in Post-War Belgium (1945-1950)
Sebastiano Barassi: Kettles Yard: Museum of Way of Life?
Eleanor Gawne: Two Viennese Refugees: Lucie Rie and her Apartment
Harriet McKay: The Preservation and Presentation of 2 Willow Road for the National Trust
Brenda Martin: Photographs of a Legacy: Dora Gordine and Dorich House

 

 

Women's Places: Architecture and Design 1860-1960 (Routledge, 2003)

 

This collection of essays asks: What was different about the environments that women created as architects, designers and clients at a time when they were gaining increasing political and social status in a male world? Through a series of case studies, Women's Places: Architecture and Design 1860-1960, examines in detail the professional and domestic spaces created by women who had money and the opportunity to achieve their ideal. Set against a background of accepted notions of modernity relating to design and architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this book provides a fascinating insight into women's social aspirations and identities. It offers new information and new interpretations in the study of gender, material culture and the built environment in the period 1860-1960.

 

Edited by:
Penny Sparke and Brenda Martin

 

Contributors:  
Penny Sparke: Introduction
Louise Campbell: Questions of Identity: Women, Architecture and the Aesthetic Movement;
Trevor Keeble: Creating 'The New Room'. The Hall sisters of West Wickham and Richard Norman Shaw
Penny Sparke: Elsie de Wolfe and her Female Clients, 1905-1915: Gender, Class and the Professional Interior Decorator
Alice T. Friedman: Your Place or Mine? The Client's Contribution to Domestic Architecture
Lynne Walker: Architecture and Reputation: Eileen Grey, Gender, and Modernism
Tanis Hinchcliffe: Marie Dormoy and the Architectural Conversation
Brenda Martin: A House of her Own. Dora Gordine and Dorich House
Elizabeth Darling: Elizabeth Denby or Maxwell Fry? A Matter of Attribution