A history of style and the modern interior: From Alois Riegl to Colin Rowe

Author: Sarah Deyong Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 2 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/deyong-2018-history-style-modern-interior.md

Summary

Deyong argues that behind the modern avant-garde's search for a style unique to its time lie two opposing theories of style: Gottfried Semper's Der Stil (1861), which traces architecture to craft, technique and performance and presages "form follows function," and Alois Riegl's Late Roman Art Industry (1903), which identifies style with the psychology of form — ornament as the visible expression of an inner desire (Wollen), and perception alternating between optic and haptic modes. Semper's functionalism applies to structure and the exterior; Riegl's and Worringer's psychology-of-form notion of style proved decisive for the modern interior. The chapter traces this alternate trajectory — van de Velde against Muthesius in the 1914 Werkbund debate, Loos's tactile interiors against his austere exteriors, Cézanne and Cubism, De Stijl's counter constructions, Mies's Barcelona Pavilion, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes's transparency, and Rowe & Slutzky's "phenomenal transparency" at Le Corbusier's Villa Stein — down to UN Studio's "blob-to-box" model, arguing that the history of the modern interior is an alternate history of modern architecture: one relating not to engineering and technical performance but to "the philosophy of aesthetic experience and the psychology of perception." Its conclusion collapses both canonical dichotomies at once: the split between form and function is artificial, and so too is the dichotomy between architecture's interior and exterior.

Key Claims

Art, architecture and interiors have intertwined histories because they bear on the question of style: since style pertains to an aesthetic sensibility of a 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 underwrote the avant-garde: Semper traced architecture's origins to craft, technique and performance (the amphora's shape as an index of how Greeks collected water from roofs); Riegl identified style with the psychology of form, defining ornament as the visible expression of an inner desire (Wollen) to transform the world via our interaction with it.
Riegl's two alternating modes of perception — optic (long-range vision: perspective, ancient Greek art) and haptic (close-range, tactile: flat reliefs, late Roman art) — parallel Worringer's 1907 doctoral-thesis categories of abstraction (an inner sensation) and empathy (a joyous affinity with the material world).
Semper's definition presaged "form follows function" and applies mainly to structure and exterior; with the modern interior, it is Riegl's and Worringer's notion of style that proved influential.
The 1914 Werkbund debate between Hermann Muthesius and Henry van de Velde dramatizes the split: Muthesius, following Semper, held a new style must emerge from standardization and mass production; van de Velde, following Riegl, asserted the primacy of aesthetic expression above standardization ("wanting to see the effect before the cause… destroy[ing] the embryo in the egg").
The Werkbund debate "play[ed] out… and manifest[ed] itself in the schism between the exterior and interior": Behrens's AEG Turbine Factory (1908) has an iron frame and glazing anticipating curtain-wall construction, yet its façade language is "compromised" because the brick-corner masses are not load bearing — semantic confusion of old and new technologies.
Loos manifests the same schism: exteriors austere and minimal, interiors tactile and luxurious (the bedroom for his wife Lina Loos made out of fur). His interiors seem to contradict his writings condemning ornament, but "follow a different attitude toward dress and decorum" (Tournikiotis's argument). For Loos, domestic life was "an intensely private affair reserved for the interior"; for commercial projects and public figures the privacy logic did not apply, and he adorned his exteriors (American Bar 1908, Goldman & Salatch tailor shop 1909–11, the unbuilt Josephine Baker house 1928).
The Baker house's black-and-white stripes may have been inspired by the nautical pattern on women's bathing suits (via Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin) — a gender-and-fashion reading of Loos's most public "ornament."
Although Loos "infamously condemned ornament" in "Ornament and Crime," he distanced himself from "the purists who pushed the [logic of function] to the absurd, [in claiming] that ornament should be systematically abolished" ("Ornament and Education," 1924) — and his architecture might be said to be "fundamentally about the interior, as evidenced by his concept of the Raumplan (space plan)."
Gropius purged the Bauhaus curriculum of its formative Expressionist experiments (a movement associated with Riegl's and Worringer's theories) by the time he stepped down in 1928 — enacting the functionalist argument that constitutes "the canonical version of the history of modern architecture"; the opposing argument on style (Riegl, Worringer, van de Velde, Loos) "points to an alternate history centered on the modern interior."
In the avant-garde's search for a new style, "the driver must not have been architecture, but the fine arts, especially painting": rejecting realism accorded with Riegl's and Worringer's theories, since perspectival construction "reduces time to a static moment" and thus presents "a false picture of reality."
Cézanne "painted not what the eye sees in a kind of optical illusion, but what the mind-body complex perceives in time" — temporal "distortions" (tabletop stretched downwards, wall bent sideways) depicting reality not in a static moment but "in the duration of days, weeks, and months"; per Merleau-Ponty, such distortions stem from the artist's desire to depict reality in the process of becoming.
De Stijl distilled painting to three primary colors and horizontal/vertical lines — a distillation that, as Yves-Alain Bois observed, "did not come readily, but was determined after much struggle and debate." Oud (from sculpture) reduced architecture to cubic masses; van Doesburg (from painting) distilled it to planes — rotating Mondrian's grid on the diagonal in the Café Aubette (1927), and, with van Eesteren, drawing the Counter Constructions for the Hôtel Particulier (1923) in axonometric (plan and section simultaneously): horizontal and vertical planes exploded apart and suspended in space — a shift in De Stijl's generative elements "to planes rather than lines or masses."
This De Stijl idea "may also have been the source of Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (1929)" — a counter composition of planes and volumes in which marble, chrome and glass are substituted for the three primary colors; the composition is "dynamic, changing in time as the visitor zigzags through an enfilade of open spaces."
Moholy-Nagy (at the Bauhaus from 1923) proposed a new space-time vision; his student Gyorgy Kepes defined the new vision as transparency — "the simultaneous perception of multiple spatial locations 'without optical destruction of each other'" (Language of Vision, 1944).
Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky ("Transparency: Phenomenal and Literal," written 1955–56) distinguished the literal transparency of glass from the phenomenal transparency of composition (Léger's Three Faces: overlapping shapes and colors seen simultaneously in front of 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" — Le Corbusier's Villa Stein at Garches, where solid elements (walls, columns) create implied spatial figures (slits, slots) in plan and section.
Villa Garches contains "not only a composition of solid elements but also a counter-composition of implied spatial volumes" — a doubling of the solid-void (figure-ground) relation reminiscent of De Stijl's counter constructions, and a design strategy still relevant today.
The strategy's most recent manifestation is UN Studio's "blob-to-box" model, "where the shape of the void has a presence equal to the object-ness of the blob."
Conclusion: "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."

Connections

Concepts: style · optic-haptic-perception · space-time-continuum · phenomenal-transparency · counter-construction · interior-architecture · interiority · domestic-interior · separate-spheres · gender-and-the-interior · abstraction · architectural-ornament · perception · aesthetic-experience · modernism · historiography-of-the-interior · movement-perception · suprematism Authors: Sarah Deyong · Gregory Marinic (ed.) · Adolf Loos · Le Corbusier · Maurice Merleau-Ponty (quoted on Cézanne) Debates: The Werkbund Debate — the 1914 Muthesius/van de Velde dispute as the founding dramatization of the two styles · interior-design-vs-architecture — the interior/exterior schism as the architectural face of the disciplinary split · ornament-vs-purity — Loos against the purists; Riegl's Wollen as ornament's positive theory · postmodernism-vs-modernism — the alternate (non-canonical) history of modernism Related source notes: Hollis — (Re)constructing Histories — the sibling chapter (Ch. 1) of the same reader: Hollis's survey-of-styles critique meets Deyong's alternate, interior-centred style history · Taylor & Preston — Proximities — the interior as a visual, tactile, phenomenological field of cultural production · Merleau-Ponty — Phenomenology of Perception — the perception theory Deyong's trajectory presupposes · Summerson — The Classical Language of Architecture — the canonical style-history tradition against which the "alternate history" is set

Direct Quotes

The chapter carries no page numbers in the wiki's OCR copy; Deyong's own prose is located by section heading. Passages quoted from other authors carry the page numbers given in Deyong's endnotes.

"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." (opening, § untitled)

"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)." (Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, p. 231, quoted in § "Two modern definitions of style")

"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". (van de Velde, "Werkbund Theses and Antitheses," p. 30, quoted in Deyong's n. 3)

"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." (§ "Two modern definitions of style")

"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." (§ "Two modern definitions of style")

"the purists who pushed the [logic of function] to the absurd, [in claiming] that ornament should be systematically abolished." (Loos, "Ornament and Education" (1924), quoted in § "Two modern definitions of style")

"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)." (§ "Two modern definitions of style")

"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." (§ "Two modern definitions of style")

"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." (§ "Abstraction and the space-time continuum")

"[Cézanne] painted not what the eye sees in a kind of optical illusion, but what the mind-body complex perceives in time." (§ "Abstraction and the space-time continuum")

"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." (Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt," Sense and Non-Sense, quoted in § "Abstraction and the space-time continuum")

"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." (§ "Abstraction and the space-time continuum")

"As a composition, Mies's design is dynamic, changing in time as the visitor zigzags through an enfilade of open spaces." (§ "Abstraction and the space-time continuum", on the Barcelona Pavilion)

"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, p. 77, quoted in Deyong's n. 11)

"The originality of their analysis, however, lies not with painting, but with interior architecture conceived as an interplay between solid and void." (§ "Form and counter-form", on Rowe & Slutzky)

"In the Villa Garches, therefore, we find not only a composition of solid elements but also a counter-composition of implied spatial volumes." (§ "Form and counter-form")

"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." (§ "Form and counter-form")

"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." (§ "Form and counter-form")

"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." (§ "Form and counter-form", closing)

Open Questions

Deyong asserts the De Stijl counter construction "may also have been the source of Mies's Barcelona Pavilion" — the influence is "well documented" (Schulze) but the chapter offers compositional analogy rather than documentary proof; how strong is the causal claim?
If the interior/exterior dichotomy is as artificial as form/function, what disciplinary organization follows? The chapter demonstrates the schism's history but leaves its dissolution undesigned.
Can Rowe & Slutzky's "interior architecture conceived as an interplay between solid and void" be reconciled with the alteration-centred conception of interior architecture (Kurtich, Scott, Brooker & Stone — see source-notes/hollis-2018-reconstructing-histories)? Deyong's interior architecture is compositional; theirs is operational.
Does the Riegl–Worringer lineage of Wollen (inner desire) anticipate or contradict the haptic turn's critique of ocularcentrism — given that Riegl's haptic is a mode of vision, not of touch as in Pallasmaa?
Is UN Studio's "blob-to-box" a continuation of the counter-form strategy or its calculation by other means (the void's shape "equal" to the blob's object-ness — but computed, not perceived)?