Read more
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2010. 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 both by professionals and by 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 gender, class, race, sexuality and nationhood; and the experiences of urban and suburban life.>
About the author
Penny Sparke is a Pro-Vice Chancellor at Kingston University, UK. She is also a Professor of Design History and the Director of the Modern Interiors New Book Proposal Research Centre. Her publications include An Introduction to Design and Culture, 1900 to the Present (1986 and 2004); Design in Context(1987); As Long as it's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (1995) and The Modern Interior (2008).Anne Massey is Professorial Fellow in Design and Culture at the University for the Creative Arts, UK. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Pop Art and Design (2017), Designing the Modern Interior (2009) and Hollywood Beyond the Screen (2000), all published by Bloomsbury. She is known for her work on the Independent Group and post-war British culture, including The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945-59 (1995).
