A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colors in Modern Architecture

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

William W Braham

William Braham's essay weaves a path through a complex series of occasions and circumstances that link interior design's historical alliance with decoration, including more recent negations of ornament fostered by modernism. Central to this discussion is Braham's interest in the genealogy of colour, including its effacement through architecture's promotion of 'natural finishes'. Writing as both academic and architect, Braham notes that the authority of the natural generates an opposition between natural and applied, a situation that also contributes to the bifurcation between interior design and architecture as professional domains. In this excerpt the discussion is grounded in an examination of books as displayed collections and their reading as decorative wall elements.

This essay examines a decorative convention – the display of books in modern interiors – that appears in both The International Style (1932) by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson and The Personality of a House (1930) by Emily Post. Looking at books in this way constitutes a partial history of the architectural palette that arises from the privileging of natural over applied finishes. The internal logic of that practice and its class and gender characterizations are discussed in the context of the separation of architecture from interior design. The 'natural' palette and its host of attendant conventions is everywhere visible in contemporary architecture and interior design and even helps to define the boundary between the two practices, to explain what is and is not architectural. (… p 4)

At present applied color is used less. The color of natural surfacing materials and the natural metal color of detail is definitely preferred. Where the metal is painted, a dark neutral tone minimizes the apparent weight of the window frame. In surfaces of stucco, white or off-white, even where it is obtained with paint, is felt to constitute the natural color. The earlier use of bright color had value in attracting attention to the new style, but it could not long remain pleasing. It ceased to startle and began to bore; its mechanical sharpness and freshness became rapidly tawdry. If architecture is not to resemble billboards, color should be both technically and psychologically permanent.¹

While the errors, exaggerations, and omissions of the exhibition have been examined and debated since its inception, the fact remains that it produced a startlingly successful manual of style, similar in approach to the numerous home and interior design manuals that preceded it.² The International Style promoted a highly refined and selective taste that relied directly on the distinction between natural and applied color, explicitly deploring the artifice and impermanence of paint, and boldly claiming the status of a natural finish for white and off-white tones. Those conventions continue to persuade. The logic of the natural/neutral palette still appears in contemporary 'high-tech' buildings and expensive consumer products, visible also throughout architecture, interior design, and shelter magazines. It is not the only decorative palette that is observed, but it retains a particular authority. It is the palette of architecture in its 'return to basics,' resonating with the environmental, the preindustrial, and somewhat paradoxically, with the primitive, known equally well for bright colors. (… p 5)

The closed bookcase has its own history, traceable to the time when books were rare and required protection. As Edith Wharton described it in The Decoration of Houses, the 'natural bookcase was a chest with a strong lock.'³ The open and decorative display of books only became common with their increased production and availability in the eighteenth and, especially, the nineteenth centuries. The decorative convention derived initially from private libraries where different forms of storage and their decoration had been explored by those privileged enough to own substantial collections. Books still suggest something of that aristocratic provenance, and their public display in the homes of the middle class – designed or not – owes much to that formation. As the numbers of books, the kinds of literature, and literacy itself expanded, so too did the means of storage and display, as well as the social meaning of books. Like the displays of other collections – ceramics, stuffed animals, and musical recordings – objects are deployed, in part, to represent the character of the occupants, but books exceed the personal statement and have attained the status of an objet-type, a decorative convention that can be deployed even in the homes of nonreaders …

Two aspects of the decorative formation of concern to this inquiry are the representation of architectural authenticity and the development of interior design as a distinct and separate practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.⁴ These two aspects are deeply intertwined: When decorative elements are deemed artificial, they and their advocates are excised from mainstream architectural practice, and displaced into interior design. The resistance of books to that displacement, even in decorative application, suggests other distinctions by which plainly decorative elements can remain architectural. Certainly the actual reading of books preserves their affiliation with other objects of utility, but the strongly polarized conventions of modern gender roles play their part as well. Although interior design constitutes one of the many divisions of labor within the modern building trades, the distinction is a highly gendered one, in which the activities and

individuals engaged in it are implicitly assumed to be feminine. The gender connotation derives partly from the fact that women dominate the profession of interior design, a situation conditioned by the removal of men and their work from the home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (… p 7)

It is Ruskin's warning about exterior paint that indicates one of the operational principles by which natural and applied colors are distinguished.

The true colours of architecture are those of natural stone, and I would fain see them taken advantage of to the full … [L]et the painter's work be reserved for the shadowed loggia and inner chamber … $^{5}$

This is a real distinction of craft; the demands on exterior finishes differ substantially from those of the interior, the facts of endurance and weathering draw a line precisely between colorful natural materials and applied colors. Fifty years of experimentation with modern polychromy had taught nineteenth-century architects the importance of 'structural' colors, not only through the experiences with paint in their colder, wetter climate, but from the recognition that the applied coloring of ancient and medieval buildings had been lost to time. $^{6}$

But what, operationally, is a natural color? The processes of finishing, of dressing, cutting, polishing, curing, sealing, and so on, can modify the visual appearance of materials every bit as much as any opaque coating. In practice, materials like wood, stone, brick, metal, and leather grown or produced through natural processes are valued as such when their finishes enhance or at least do not obscure the complexity, depth, or variety of their appearance. Technically, there is little difference between a stain and a paint, except that the latter obscures the material, reducing it to the thin, surface color of the finely ground substances suspended in the binder. … The natural can only be understood as a somewhat flexible category of finishes, not by a single principle of use, manufacture, or appearance. … It is little wonder that the efforts of Owen Jones, Gottfried Semper, or Adolf Loos to regulate the logic of coating materials turns on the question of imitation. $^{7}$ Excluding it, as Loos's Law of Cladding sought to do, leads directly to the difficult pursuit of authenticity that characterizes the natural/neutral palette. Admitting the imitative practices faux-bois or faux-marbre, for example, opens the door to all applied ornament.

These questions are not meant to eliminate or undermine the concept of natural materials and finishes in construction or design. They derive from a host of very real physical and phenomenal observations and, more importantly perhaps, they hold a useful place in the everyday discussion of materials and finishes. As such, they offer one of the sites or topics with which architecture must contend, the topics that architects should approach with humility because they result from the kinds of broad cultural negotiation to which public

constructions aspire. $^{8}$ That does not mean that critical investigations should be suspended by reifying the everyday or the primitive. Shifting authority to ‘other’ sources of that kind is precisely the problem. The difficult question raised by the authority of the natural has two aspects, the one concerns the opposition between the natural and the applied/artificial, the other concerns the related opposition between architecture and interior design. Why are applied, surface colors allied with artifice in the opposition to the equally contrived finishing of natural materials? And why are similar terms used in the opposition between two disciplines whose actual work so often overlaps and coincides? (… p 9)

The contemporary polarization of the natural and the artificial aligns ornament and applied colors with artifice, complexity, curviness, and femininity, building on the now apparently common-sense distinction made in German aesthetic theory between the ‘Core-form’ and ‘Art-form,’ between the essential, working aspect of an artifact and its supplemental, aesthetic features. $^{9}$ The fully gendered distrust of ornament is the dark side of aesthetics. It informed the growing ethic of simplicity, as expressed in German building culture, for example, by Heinrich Tessenow, when he observed that ‘ornament has, and this is said with some apprehension, a lady-like quality.’ $^{10}$ Not surprisingly, he was trying to distinguish ‘artistic’ from ‘aesthetic’ qualities, following the terms of the Arts and Crafts movement to which he had been converted through the writings of Morris and Ruskin, and then Hermann Muthesius’s 1904 report on The English House. $^{11}$ Tessenow, however, recognized the historical nature of his characterization, noting that ‘the actual value of ornament can be found in the same place as the actual values of lady-like qualities … Today real lady-like qualities – distinctly opposed to feminine ones – are rare; we lack the necessary appreciation for them.’ $^{12}$ ‘Lady-like’ ornament, in common with the clothing and manners of the eighteenth century courtier for example, was simply out of place in the modern building.

But of course the ornament of the nineteenth century differs radically from that of the eighteenth century. If Giedion made no other point, it was that we had to be redeemed from the excesses of nineteenth-century industrialized ornament. The proliferation of mass-produced decorative goods and the successive movements of reform and education are bound together; manuals of interior design and programs of public art education attempt to manage or suppress the proliferation of kitsch, camp, and low art. $^{13}$ Canons of taste like The International Style must everywhere negotiate the political and class distinctions inherent in this process. As Hitchcock and Johnson explained about their work, ‘[T]he current style sets a high, but not impossible standard for decoration: better none at all unless it be good. The principle is aristocratic rather than puritanical.’ $^{14}$ Oscar Wilde would have agreed with the standard if not the specifics of the style. Edith Wharton’s book has also been criticized as a design guide only for the wealthy, while Elsie de Wolfe used her career as a professional designer to transform herself into an English

peer. Like gender formations, the ‘aristocratic’ standard of decoration is both an emblem or badge and a shifting collection of principles and artifacts with which it is discovered, negotiated, and enforced.

A remarkable book that illustrates these methods and exemplifies the fully developed class and gender characterizations of interior design is Emily Post’s book, The Personality of a House: The Blue Book of Home Design and Decoration, which was published just prior to the mounting of Hitchcock and Johnson’s exhibition. $^{15}$ (… p 11)

Her general ethic, ‘emptiness is always an essential of classic beauty and dignity,’ is virtually identical to de Wolfe’s ‘simplicity and reticence,’ and the ‘better none at all’ of The International Style. Although she devotes one chapter to the formal rules for color combination, implicit terms for the distinction between natural and artificial colors are developed throughout the book. They receive special emphasis in her chapter on the design of ‘A Room for a Man,’ in which she articulates the now familiar gendered assumptions about colors, finishes, and books that had crystallized since the turn of the century:

All plain wood-lined rooms are good, as are also walls painted or papered in neutral tones of putty, or sand, or olive-gray, or wrapping-paper brown, made colorful by many books (red ones!). For a man’s study – unless he never reads – the most furnishing decorations are well-filled book-shelves, not too closely matched. Odd lots of books, reference books in calf or leather, or at most, sets of favorite authors in cloth bindings, are far more suggestive of the man who reads than are even rows of splendidly-tooled bindings – unless bindings are his hobby. $^{16}$

Elsie de Wolfe, too, understood books as a means of introducing colorful variety into the neutral/natural palette acceptable for the masculine stereotype of the library. ‘Here, if anywhere, you would think a monotony of brown wood would be obvious, but think of thousands of books with brilliant bindings. … Can’t you see that this cypress room is simply glowing with color.’ $^{17}$ Books provide a subversive decoration, introducing colorful variety under the guise of craftsmanship and scholarship, apparently slipping a feminine note of decoration into obviously masculine interiors. (… p 12)

But the importance of color in the convention of the masculine library cannot be overstated. In Style-Architecture and Building-Art Muthesius had earlier observed that because previous styles of architecture had no distinctly interior decoration, transferring exterior features to the interior, that ‘color becomes preeminent’ in the modern interior, ‘for we are aware that it, more than architectural form, acts strongly and directly, and creates an ambience.’ $^{18}$

The narrow convention observed by Emily Post still remains recognizable and legible today. The similarities between de Wolfe's library, Emily Post's 'Room for a Man,' and the room of The International Style exemplify the fully formed concept of modern color and finish in which simple, achromatic surfaces and natural materials are deemed masculine by virtue of their authenticity (or are they authentic by virtue of their masculinity?). That identity is remarkably independent of style, and it continues to characterize designers, occupants, and finishes to this day, warping and restricting design practices with its definitions. The opposition of natural finishes to applied colors derives its energy from resistance to the artificiality of 'taste,' which is affiliated with intuition, irrationality, and the feminine. The repeated efforts to develop a definitive science of color effects, either functionally, linguistically, or psychologically are all efforts to excise such subjectivities from architecture. The fear of taste also exacerbates the gap between the practical applications of color, which require the attention to arbitrary elements noted by Perrault, and the discourse which seeks to explain them. Colors are selected and applied in projects everywhere with little of the critical discussion received by the forms to which they are applied.

In a subsequent section of her book, Emily Post discussed the construction of 'Faked Bindings for Decoration' to artificially produce the look of masculine amenity. $^{19}$ This practice, and the decorative deployment of 'real' books too, operate not according to the logic by which formal architectural principles are explained, but according to the negotiation of identity and its discovery through representations. As illustrated in the bookcase collage by Max Ernst, that negotiation involves both the inspecting gaze of the occupant and the return look of the interior. A wall of books not only appears masculine, but reassures its occupant that he or she is conforming to the complex image of rationality, literacy, and authenticity that books convey. Again, the emphasis here is not on identities per se, but on the tension between the decorative urge to include a variety of color and the defensive exclusion of explicitly decorative practices. The logic of color conventions cannot be grasped by theories of identity without an equivalent consideration of decorative variety and the attention to occasion, both of which require narrative forms for their exploration.

The selection of colors and finishes is always an exercise of taste, and any such acknowledgment makes evident the deep affiliation of architecture with the other arts of convention – dressing, dining, dancing, or other activities. That perhaps is the deepest fear expressed by the privileging of natural over applied color: that acknowledgment of the arts of convention and the necessity of timeliness would undermine a profession dedicated defensively to timelessness. This is not an apology for individual tastes, but the observation that authenticity is simply a matter of appearances. It is through the discriminations of taste, shaped according to class and gender, as well as to form, material, and workmanship, that we discriminate among the qualities of materials and their finishes. The

composition of material and color palettes is among the most demanding forms of discrimination required of architects and designers, and for which the wall of book filled shelves might serve as an apt reminder. (… p 13)

Notes

1 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style [1932], W W Norton & Company (New York), 1966, p 75.
2 For a history of the exhibition see Terence Riley, The International Style: Exhibition 1 and the Museum of Modern Art, Rizzoli (New York), 1992.
3 Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr, The Decoration of Houses, C Scribner's Sons (New York), 1897.
4 C Ray Smith, Interior Design in 20th Century America: A History, Harper & Row Publishers (New York), 1987. Margaret Milam Sharon, Historical Perspectives on Interior Architecture/Design as a Developing Profession, PhD diss, University of Kentucky, 1992.
5 This quotation is from a slightly different version of the lecture. Oscar Wilde, 'Art and the Handicraftsman', The First Collected Edition of the Works of Oscar Wilde, vol 14, Dawsons of Pall Mall [London], 1969, pp 292-308.
6 The concept of structural polychromy is examined at length in David Van Zanten, The Architectural Polychromy of the 1830s, Garland Publishing (New York), 1977; Robin Middleton, 'Colour and Cladding in the Nineteenth Century', Daidalos, 51, March, 1994, pp 78-89.
7 The question of authenticity in painting or cladding is taken up by a variety of authors. Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), 1989, p 127. Owen Jones, Grammar of Ornament [1856], Van Nostrand Reinhold (New York), 1982, Proposition 35. Adolf Loos, 'The Principle of Cladding', Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897-1900, MIT Press (Cambridge), 1982, pp 66-9. Amédée Ozenfant, 'Colour in the Town', The Architectural Review, 82, July 1937, pp 41-4.
8 The concept of rhetorical topics in architecture is discussed in David Leatherbarrow, The Roots of Architectural Invention: Site, Enclosure, Materials, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), 1993.
9 A distinction introduced in Carl Botticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, Ernst & Korn [Berlin], 1869. For a discussion, see Harry Francis Mallgrave, 'Introduction', Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, Getty Center for Art and Humanities (Santa Monica), 1994, pp 45-6.
10 Heinrich Tessenow, 'Housebuilding and Such Things' [1916] 9H, On Rigor, 1989, p 27.

11 Hermann Muthesius, The English House [1904], Rizzoli (New York), 1987. 12 Muthesius, The English House, p 30. 13 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Duke University Press (Durham), 1987. 14 Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style, p 75. 15 Emily Post, The Personality of a House: The Blue Book of Home Design and Decoration, Funk & Wagnalls Co. (New York), 1930. 16 Post, The Personality of a House, p 406. The reference to red books comes from an anecdote that she relates earlier in the book: 'This reminds me of a story that is true: The wife of an eminent author who had enlarged their library living-room was annoyed at the distressing emptiness of so many of the new bookshelves. So she went to a store that had advertised cheap editions and asked for 'lots of books.' Said the clerk: 'Which books may I get you?' To the horror of the clerk, she answered, 'Red ones!' She giggled afterwards at the clerk's obvious estimate of her literary taste,' p 188. 17 De Wolfe, The House in Good Taste, The Century Co (New York), 1913, p 78. 18 Hermann Muthesius, Style-Architecture and Building-Art: Transformations of Architecture in the Nineteenth Century and Its Present Condition [1902], Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities (Santa Monica), 1994, p 86. 19 Post, The Personality of a House, p 438.

William W Braham, 'A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colors in Modern Architecture', Journal of Architectural Education, vol 53, no 1, September 1999, pp 4-14.

(Excerpts pp 4-13)