(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)

Chapter 2

A history of style and the modern interior

From Alois Riegl to Colin Rowe

Sarah Deyong

From a historical perspective, the idea of modern architecture may be seen to coincide with the invention of modern art, and the same may be said of the modern interior. In fact, art, architecture, and interiors have histories that are intertwined, in part, because they bear on the question of style. Since style pertains to an aesthetic sensibility that we tend to associate with a given cultural period, rather than a discipline, the historical provenance of the modern interior cannot be easily separated from the history of its sister fields insofar as it constitutes a predominantly visual, tactile, and phenomenological mode of expression.

Two modern definitions of style

Behind the modern avant-garde’s attempt to define a new style unique to its time, one can find two opposing theories underwriting this effort: Gottfried Semper’s Der Stil (1861) and Alois Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry (1903). In their respective books, Semper traced the origins of architecture to craft, technique, and performance, while Riegl identified style with the psychology of form. The focus of Riegl’s study is, therefore, not any purposeful object, as it was for Semper, who understood the shape of an amphora as an index of how the ancient Greeks collected water from the roofs of their houses. Rather, his study focuses on ornament, which he defined as the visible expression of an inner desire (Wollen) to transform the world via our interaction with it. $^1$ He stated,

man is not just a being perceiving exclusively with his sense (passive), but also a longing (active) being. Consequently, man wants to interpret the world as it can most easily be done in accordance with his inner drive (which may change with nation, location, and time). $^2$

Riegl further identified two modes of perception alternating throughout history, optic and haptic, and associated different artistic styles with the dominance of one perception or the other. While optic perception refers to a kind of long-range vision, characteristic of perspective and ancient Greek art, haptic refers to a kind of close-range vision and tactile perception characteristic of flat reliefs and late Roman art. This schema parallels that of other art historian-theorists, notably Wilhelm Worringer, who, in his 1907 doctoral thesis, defined art in terms of two similar categories: abstraction, an inner sensation, and empathy, a joyous affinity with the material world.

Semper’s definition of style must have presaged the modernist dictum form follows function, but in this regard, it is a definition that applies mainly to the building’s structure and exterior. With the modern interior, on the other hand, it is Riegl’s and Worringer’s notion of style that would prove influential. A good illustration of this influence is the well-

known Werkbund debate between architect Hermann Muthesius and artist Henry van de Velde in 1914. Whereas Muthesius, following Semper, believed that a new style must emerge from standardization and the techniques of mass production, van de Velde, following Riegl, asserted the primacy of aesthetic expression above standardization. $^3$

This debate would play out in early Werkbund projects and manifest itself in the schism between the exterior and interior. Peter Behrens’s AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin (1908), for instance, illustrates the ambiguous adaptation of old and new building technologies. While its iron frame and large expanses of glazing anticipate curtain-wall construction, the language of its façade is nevertheless compromised by the fact that the brick-corner masses are not load bearing. Such semantic confusion is also evident in the schism between interior and exterior with respect to another Werkbund member, Adolf Loos, a critic of the Viennese Secessionist movement. While Loos’s exteriors are austere and minimal, his interiors are tactile and luxurious: the bedroom he designed for his wife, Lina Loos, is made out of fur. As such, his interiors may seem to contradict his own writings condemning ornament, but it could also be argued that they follow a different attitude toward dress and decorum. $^4$ Indeed, for Loos, the domestic life of the individual was an intensely private affair reserved for the interior, but for commercial projects and public figures, this logic of privacy did not apply, for Loos did, in fact, adorn his exteriors. These latter projects include the American Bar (1908), the tailor shop for Goldman & Salatch (1909–11), and the unbuilt house for Josephine Baker, an African American entertainer and one of the most celebrated women of her time (1928). $^5$ Baker was an avid swimmer, and the house’s striking pattern of black and white stripes may have been inspired by the nautical pattern on women’s bathing suits. $^6$ Although Loos infamously condemned ornament in his essay, “Ornament and Crime,” he also distanced himself from “the purists who pushed the [logic of function] to the absurd, [in claiming] that ornament should be systematically abolished.” $^7$ Indeed, it might be even said that Loos’s architecture is fundamentally about the interior, as evidenced by his concept of the Raumplan (space plan).

The schism between interior and exterior can be seen in other early examples of modern architecture, including Gropius’s Fagus Factory (1911, with Adolf Meyer), and in the history of the Bauhaus itself. By the time Gropius stepped down as the school’s director in 1928, he had purged its curriculum of its formative experiments with Expressionism in favor of a strict functional approach to style. But if the functionalist argument constitutes the canonical version of the history of modern architecture, the opposing argument on style, offered by Riegl, Worringer, van de Velde, and Loos, points to an alternate history centered on the modern interior.

Abstraction and the space-time continuum

Riegl’s definition of style in terms of haptic perception, as well as Worringer’s category of abstraction, may have given unprecedented direction to the ideas of the modern avant-garde. If so then the driver must not have been architecture, but the fine arts, especially painting. In their search for a new style, many modern artists rejected realism, and this accorded well with the theories of Riegl and Worringer. Since perspectival construction reduces time to a static moment, it followed that classical painting was predicated on a drawing convention that presents a false picture of reality.

Indeed, in confronting the conventions of classical painting, Paul Cézanne radically reframed the problem of representation at the turn of the twentieth century, and painted not what the eye sees in a kind of optical illusion, but what the mind-body complex perceives in time. His paintings register temporal “distortions” like a tabletop stretched downwards or a wall bent sideways. In other words, they depict reality not as it is experienced in a static moment but in the duration of days, weeks, and months (Cézanne sometimes took months to complete his paintings, and even then, he considered them unfinished). According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, such distortions stem from the artist’s desire to depict reality in the process of becoming. He wrote,

it is Cézanne’s genius that when the overall composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right, but rather, contribute, as they do in natural vision, to [the] impression of an emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.8

Cézanne is generally considered the father of Cubism, which, in turn, inspired other avant-garde movements from Suprematism to De Stijl. But in the case of De Stijl, we find not only the manifestation of a space-time continuum, but also greater experimentation with abstraction. To this end, the Dutch De Stijl movement strove to eliminate all traces of naturalistic representation, reducing the elements of painting to the minimum abstract essentials: three primary colors (blue, red, and yellow), and horizontal and vertical lines.

This distillation, as Yves-Alain Bois has observed in “The De Stijl Idea,” did not come readily, but was determined after much struggle and debate. It evolved as slowly in painting as it did in sculpture and architecture. While the architect J.J.P. Oud took his cue from sculpture and reduced the essential elements of architecture to cubic masses, Theo van Doesburg took his cue from painting and distilled the essential elements to planes. In his interior design of the Café Aubette (1927), he rotated Mondrian’s abstract grid on the diagonal, possibly to neutralize the horizontal and vertical lines of the existing architecture (in one photograph, van Doesburg aimed his camera so that the vanishing point appeared to dissolve in the diagonal composition of the mural).9 However, his real breakthrough did not come until his famous Counter Constructions for the Hôtel Particulier (1923) with architect Cornelis van Eesteren. From van Eesteren, van Doesburg had learned how to draw in axonometric, a drawing convention that shows the plan and section simultaneously; and using this technique, he drew counter constructions of the hotel’s cubic masses, using horizontal and vertical planes exploded apart and suspended in space. The counter constructions, therefore, mark an important shift in De Stijl’s thinking about the generative elements of architecture, here distilled to

horizontal and vertical planes rather than lines or masses. This idea, moreover, may also have been the source of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (1929). For it too is a counter composition of planes and volumes; although, instead of the three primary colors, Mies has substituted marble, chrome, and glass (Figure 2.1). As a composition, Mies’s design is dynamic, changing in time as the visitor zigzags through an enfilade of open spaces.

Figure 2.1 Interior of Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe Image credit: Sarah Deyong

Form and counter-form De Stijl’s space-time concept parallels that of other architectural developments related to modern painting. In the first years of the Bauhaus, Gropius recruited artists from the German Expressionist movement – a movement that is often associated with Riegl’s and Worringer’s theories. Following in their footsteps, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who joined the school in 1923, proposed a new space-time vision. His student Gyorgy Kepes

expanded on this concept and further defined the new vision in terms of transparency; that is, the simultaneous perception of multiple spatial locations “without optical destruction of each other.”11

In the 1950s, the term was famously resurrected by architectural historian Colin Rowe and artist Robert Slutzky. In their essay, “Transparency: Phenomenal and Literal,” the authors made an important distinction between the literal transparency of a material like glass and the complex visual effects of composition.12 Analyzing Fernand Léger’s painting, Three Faces, they explained how the overlapping composition creates an ambiguous tension, where shapes and colors are simultaneously seen both in front and behind each other.

The originality of their analysis, however, lies not with painting, but with interior architecture conceived as an interplay between solid and void. Here, the authors’ primary example is Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein at Garches, where solid elements like walls and columns create implied spatial figures like slits and slots. They described how the openings of the vertical windows along the exterior end walls line up with an interior row of columns to form an implied slot running parallel to the front façade. This slot, they wrote, is mirrored by a second parallel slot; it runs behind the garden façade and is implied not only by the vertical side windows, but also by the penthouse terrace that projects beyond the ends of the lateral side walls. Perpendicular to these slots is a central space whose contour can be discerned by a second row of interior columns, intersecting the first. This implied spatial figure is traversed by an irregularly shaped slot, configured by a low, curved wall (forming a bookshelf and railing to the opening below), and by the outline of the two stairways that flank it.

While these implied figures work as three-dimensional extrusions of the plan, there are other implied spatial figures that are best represented in section. Elements like the main garden terrace, the third-floor balcony, and the penthouse terrace form a composition of objects and their counter forms. The parapet on the third-floor balcony, for example, forms a bounding surface to the implied volumes of both the main garden terrace below and the penthouse level above. Furthermore, the canopy, whose

underside is painted blue, forms a bounding surface not only to the implied figure of the garden terrace, but also extends the interior of the sitting room on the third floor (Figure 2.2). In the Villa Garches, therefore, we find not only a composition of solid elements but also a counter-composition of implied spatial volumes.

This doubling of the solid-void (or figure-ground) relation is reminiscent of De Stijl’s counter constructions and constitutes a design strategy that is still relevant today. Conceivably, its most recent manifestation is what UN Studio has called the “blob-to-box” model, where the shape of the void has a presence equal to the object-ness of the blob (Figure 2.3). But as I have been tracing here, this modernist strategy owes its provenance to a particular definition of style in art and architectural history – a provenance that goes back to the likes of Riegl and Worringer. If Semper represents the trajectory of functionalism relegated to structure and the exterior, then Riegl and Worringer form an alternate trajectory relegated to painting and the interior. This alternate history relates not to engineering and technical performance, but to the philosophy of aesthetic experience and the psychology of perception, in a word, a cultural sensibility. Just as the split between form and function is ultimately an artificial one, so too is the dichotomy between architecture’s interior and exterior.

Figure 2.2 Interior of Villa Stein at Garches by Le Corbusier

Figure 2.3 UN Studio, “blob-to-box” model

Notes

Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2004).
Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (1901; Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1985), p. 231.
For van de Velde, “The desire to see a standard type come into being before the establishment of a style is exactly like wanting to see the effect before the cause. It would be to destroy the embryo in the egg”. See “Werkbund Theses and Antitheses”, in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (London: Lund Humphries, 1970), p. 30.
This point has been argued by Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), p. 23.
Commissioned by the owners of Goldman & Salatch tailors, the Looshaus in Michalerplatz, situated directly across from the Imperial Palace, was designed as an apartment complex with retail on the ground floor. While the tailor shop was embellished with Doric columns and marble, the façade of the apartments above was quite austere. In fact, it was so austere that Loos was ordered to adorn the apartment windows with flower boxes.
For this and other references to gender and fashion, see Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 81–82.
“Ornament and Education” (1924), Spoken Into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897–1900 (Chicago: Graham Foundation; New York: IAUS, 1987).
Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty noted, “The lived object is not rediscovered or constructed on the basis of the contributions of the senses; rather, it presents itself to us from the start as the center from which these contributions radiate. We see the depth, the smoothness, softness, the hardness of objects; Cézanne even claimed that we see the odor. If the painter is to express the world, the arrangement of his colors must bear within this indivisible whole, or else his painting will only hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, the unsurpassable plenitude which is for us the definition of the real.” See “Cézanne’s Doubt” in Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 14–15. I am grateful to Yehuda Safran for showing me this essay.
Van Doesburg’s influence on Mies van der Rohe is well documented. See, for example, Franz Schulz, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 117.
Van Doesburg’s influence on Mies van der Rohe is well documented. See, for example, Schulz, Mies van der Rohe, p. 117.
Kepes writes: “Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations. Space not only recedes but fluctuates in continuous activity. The position of the transparent figures has equivocal meaning as one sees each figure now as the closer, now as the further one.” Kepes, Language of Vision (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1944), p. 77.
The essay was written in 1955–56. It was published in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1976), pp. 159–183.
Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, UN Studio: Design Models, Architecture, Urbanism, Infrastructure (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008).