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1AS LONG AS IT'S PINK
2THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF TASTE
3PENNY SPARKE
4PART THREE: MODERNITY AND FEMININITY, 1940-1970
5Contents
68 "The Happy Housewife': Domesticity Renewed 165 9 'A Kind of Golden Age':
7Goods and Femininity 187
810 'The Anxiety of Contamination': Highbrow Culture and the Problem of Taste 204
9Conclusion Postmodernity, Postmodernism and Feminine Taste 222
10Preface vii
11Introduction "The Architect's Wife' 1
12Notes 237 Bibliography 255
13Index 273
14PART ONE: FEMININE TASTE AND DESIGN REFORM, 1830-1890
151 'An Institution of God Himself':
16The Domestic Ideal 15 2 "The Things which Surround One":
17The Domestic Aesthetic 31 3 'Those Extravagant Draperies":
18Domesticity Contested 50
19PART TWO: MODERNITY AND MASCULINITY, 1890-1940
204 'Everything in its Place': Women and Modernity 73
215 'Letting in the Air': Women and Modernism 97 6 "The Selling Value of Art': Women and the Moderne 120
227 'We are All Creators": Women and Conservative Modernism 140
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24utilitarian role being the provision of an emotional base for family life, particularly in rearing children), the shoppine environment was extending the physical boundaries of women's sphere and taking on a role as the key site for feminine taste.
25CHAPTER FIVE
26‘Letting in the Air':
27Women and Modernism
28'We have torn down the musty hangings which the Victorians erected ... we are determined to let in the air and to ventilate every corner of our mansion"
29- Cynthia White
30'As soon as the work of cleansing and sweeping out has been finished, as soon as the true form of things comes to light again, then strive with all the patience, all the spirit and logic of the Greeks for the perfection of this form."
31- Henry Van de Velde
32he cultural responses to modernity were numerous. It had a dramatic influence on the ways in which painting,
33literature, drama, and music all redefined themselves at the turn of the century. In response to what was seen as the collapse of a shared social, cultural, spiritual and moral order, and the increasing pre-eminence of science and technology, the arts turned inwards into an analysis of their own forms. In no area was this more apparent than in architecture and town planning, the physical fabric and the site of modernity itself. Not content with standing back and watching the inexorable logic of modernity wreak havoc on the urban landscape, members of the architectural profession intervened in an effort to stem the flow of the disorder they saw around them. They set out to endow architecture with a controlling power such that it could create not only its own destiny but those of its inhabitants as well.
34The 'call to order' proposed by the supporters of the ratio
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38nal household movement in relation to domestic work was paralleled by a much more ambitious one in the architectural definition of the house itself. The latter programme of rational reform was instigated by large numbers of avant-garde architects in Europe, America and Britain in the period between the turn of the century and the inter-war years. It was an intense and far-reaching programme, directed primarily at the architectural structure itself, but also articulating its aims to encompass technology, politics, economics and aesthetics. In formulating its theories, it drew on nineteenth-century thinkers, especially the British design reformers Pugin, Ruskin and the protagonists of the Arts and Crafts movement. By the inter-war years it had transformed those early thoughts almost beyond recognition in the light of the demands of modernity. The modernists exalted, in highly rhetorical terms, the wonders of the new technology, of the new architecture and design, and of the new way of life that, they believed, flowed naturally from these elements.
39Architectural modernism set out to control not only the material chaos and fragmentation that resulted from the process of modernisation but also the alienation of modern man (women were rarely discused in this context) as he grappled with modernity in all its guises. From the outset the social and the architectural were, for the modernists, intrinsically linked. Together they defined the 'problem', the solution for which was envisaged as creating a material order which would not only inject a level of rationality and purpose into everyday life but would also, in the words of Mies van de Rohe 'establish new values'. To these ends, the modernist architects wrote articles and books, lectured, proposed buildings (and even built some), and talked and argued endlessly among themselves about the best strategies to be adopted. Their work and words, spreading over at least two generations, broke down into three main phases – protomodernism which lasted between 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War; high modernism which was in evidence between 1918 and the late 1920s; and disseminated modernism which took its influence, as much a style as an ideal, into the international arena in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War. However, its
40influence didn't stop there, as yet another, even more democratised and culturally influential, phase of modernism came into being after 1945.
41The movement was a global one, emerging simultaneously in a number of western industrialised countries. Its early stirrings in the USA and Britain were quickly taken up by Germany, Belgium and Austria where it took on new strengths. The Art Nouveau movement of the turn of the century - a pan-European and American movement in essence (with strong nationalist tendencies within it) which was concerned to locate a new ahistorical style for modernity - existed at its inception serving to consolidate some of its preoccupations, especially those concerned with architectural structure. From its base in the Germanic countries in the early century architectural modernism moved across to Holland and the USSR, aligning itself, in the latter instance, with the socialist revolution taking place there. By the 1920s, however, it was in France and Germany that the theoretical foundations of high modernism were laid down. Following that heroic decade, it was transformed into a stylistic and ideological movement which influenced progressive architecture and design in, among other countries, the USA, Great Britain, Sweden, Denmark and Italy. During its lifetime it attracted many people who committed their ideas to numerous texts - evidence of its ambitions if not of its achievements. Given the chronological and geographical spread of architectural and design modernism it is not surprising that the movement was characterised, indeed like all the other forms of modernism, by its internal inconsistencies and contradictions as much as by the shared beliefs of its protagonists. Nonetheless, the impact of the dramatic volte-face it presented, in theory if not in reality, was both sudden and deeply felt.
42Under modernism's influence so complete was the proposed breach with the past that by the inter-war years the material world of the late nineteenth century had been irrevocably transformed. That transformation was effected by a shared commitment to a number of broad themes, all of which centred upon the renewal of the architectural language on the basis of a vocabulary which was inspired by, and considered
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47appropriate for, the new democratic, technological society. Unlike the rational household movement, initiated by and participated in by women as a way of achieving greater freedom and equality with men, the rationalisation of the fabric of the house itself, and of the city in which it was situated, was proposed by members of a profession made up almost exclusively of men, and adhering to a completely masculine value
48system
49nineteenth century, had come to constitute an important aspect of their culture. Once again that displacement was represented by a denial of the centrality of feminine taste, and all that went with it in social, cultural, economic and political life. That denial was built on the earlier one contained within nineteenth-century design reform, but now it moved into an international arena and across social boundaries.
50Modernism's radical programme was overtly directed not at gender, but at class. In line with socialist principles it advocated a classless society and looked to mass production as a source of the democratisation of material goods that would help bring that society about. 'We must never forget,' wrote the French architect Riuox de Maillou, 'that we are a democracy, that we live in a century oriented ever more towards democracy, and that there can be no art if there is no society to enjoy it, to want it, and by wanting it, to allow it to be produced.* This sentiment was reiterated in the late 1920s by the members of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne which was formed in Switzerland:
51Rooted in the desire for a total urban transformation, within which changes to the family dwelling would play a necessary part, the predominant model for that renewed dwelling was, like that of the rational household, the modern factory rather than the domestic haven. Furthermore, the values which underpinned that ideal were linked with the public sphere: the repeated emphasis upon rationalisation, standardisation, objectivity and functionality which ran through modernist propaganda from the turn of the century onwards was evidence of the movement's essentially masculine perspective. It was a perspective which was to reinforce the growing marginalisation of feminine values within material culture, and, by implication, within culture as a whole.
52Through the institutions which adopted and promoted its views, and through the vast numbers of mass-produced goods which eventually came under its sway, modernism had, by the middle years of this century, become a powerful cultural force. Its influence was felt across a wide spectrum of material culture, in large public housing projects, in household furnishings and interiors, and in a range of domestic equipment. More importantly, perhaps, the values embraced by architectural modernism informed the criteria which have been consistently applied to the influential 'establishment' judgments about the material environment, from buildings to tea-pots, throughout this century. The concept of good design', a term used widely to separate the chaff from the wheat where material goods are concerned, was entirely dependent upon its laws. The effect of modernism's eventual cultural supremacy was to displace even further those alternative values - values which were linked with the symbolic role of goods in establishing women's socio-cultural and personal identities - which, through the
53Rationalization and standardization ... expect from the consumer a revision of his demands in the direction of a readjustment to the new conditions of social life. Such a revision will be manifested in the reduction of certain individual needs henceforth devoid of real justification; the benefits of this reduction will foster the maximum satisfaction of the needs of the greatest number, which are at present restricted.
54The principles underpinning mass production could, they believed, result in a process of democratisation, providing the beneficiaries, in the face of their 'real needs', denied their individual wants and desires. Fundamental to the modernists' vision was a hypothetical notion of a collective society: from the outset, the new standardised architecture and design presupposed a standardised society with standardised needs. Nowhere was this more evident than in the way in which several of its protagonists defined the functional bases of the new dwelling. For Le Corbusier, for example, a house was, essentially,
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59a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. A receptacle for light and sun. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work and personal life [while the number of rooms needed were) one for cooking one for eating. One for work, one to wash yourself in and one for sleep.
60The reduction to these functional base-lines of existence served to standardise the needs of the user and to eliminate personal idiosyncrasies and taste. Nowhere was there a space for display, social interaction, or any other form of psychological fulfilment of a stereotypically feminine kind. The German architect, theorist and pedagogue, Walter Gropius's 'townsman' was a similarly standardised, masculine being for whom 'the decisive consideration in the choice of a dwelling is utility'. Hannes Meyer, Gropius's successor at the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany, was even more rigorous about the standardised requirements of architecture and town-planning - The demands we make on life today are all of the same nature depending upon social stratification. The surest sign of true community is the satisfaction of the same needs by the same, means' - demonstrating, perhaps, the most totalitarian face of modernism. It extended also to the mass-produced consumer goods that were to have a presence in the modern home, among them, the folding chair, roll top desk, light bulb, bath
61Henry Ford's Highland Park Factory, 1913. Illustrated here is the moment at which the body of the "Model T' Ford automobile finally met the chassis. Ford's ideas about production, based on the principles of rationalisation and standardisation, were am important influence upon modernist architectural and design theory. (Ford Motor Catripediy)
62tub and portable gramophone (which were) typical standard products manufactured internationally and showing a uniform design'. Although operating at the extreme end of modernism
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67Meyer's ideas revealed the extent to which individualism was banished, along with the aesthetic function of the architectural interior and its furnishings. Thus was eradicated, it was proposed, if only by implication, the housewife's role as the beautifier of the home'. Feminine taste had no part to play in this new picture of things.
68The rejection of individualism and its replacement by collectivism, and the determining of the logic of consumption by rationalised mass production, were aspects of modernist theory developed in reaction to the inherited and despised nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. These propositions directly undermined the role of feminine culture which had increasingly become linked with the ideas of taste, desire and consumption as the nineteenth century drew to an end. The subordination of these forces to those of rationality and production placed an overt emphasis on modernism's commitment to the public, masculine sphere, in which it discovered all the principles necessary for its programme of reform.
69A dislike of bourgeois culture and the feminised domestic aesthetic so closely linked with it ran through the modernist of the period, uniting many of its different faces. There may have been no common solutions but there was, at least, a common enemy. This shared conviction emerged from a number of texts, among them that of Maillou, who located bourgeois taste in the 'Louis-Phillippe era'.10 The Austrian writer and architect, Adolf Loos, one of the key spokesmen of early modernism, was equally damning about the bourgeois interior,
70ularly disparaging about 'windows hung with lace curtains' and 'walls papered with damask', 13 both associated with the middle-class parlour.
71For almost three decades the idea of bourgeois taste, linked with that of display, and, by implication, the aesthetic of feminine domesticity, provided an image against which modernist architects could react. Their programme of reform was rooted in an attempt to counter that image and to renew the language of material culture such that it could be cleansed of all associations with it. In the course of formulating that new language they were absolutely clear-sighted about what they were rejecting - all of it linked in some way with the idea of domestic display and feminine taste. Fashion and novelty were repeatedly singled out for disapproval, as signs of a decadent culture. Loos was characteristically adamant in his rejection: Fashion! What an appalling word!'14 while the German architect Hans Poelzig was equally dismayed by the fact that 'we are still chasing after fashionable manners that after a short time, having been vulgarized by a series of imitators, become the object of contempt'.15 He contrasted this with what he called 'real architecture ... the product of intense thought by artistic considerations'.lNearly three decades later the German architect and furniture designer, Marcel Breuer, a student and subsequently a highly influential teacher at the Bauhaus, reiterated the same belief: 'We have tired of everything in architecture which is a matter of fashion; we find all intentionally new forms wearisome, and all those based on personal predilections or tendencies equally pointless'.
72Fashion, most modernists agreed, was superficial and, above all, unsatisfying in falling short of the ideal to which they all aspired, embodied in the neo-Platonic idea of universal form. Purity, universality, simplicity, geometry and standardisation were linked, in modernist rhetoric, in their ability to transcend the ephemeral and confront the essence. 'We did not base our teaching on any preconceived ideas of form,' explained Gropius, 'but sought the vital spark of life's ever-changing forms ... [A] 'Bauhaus style would have been a confession of failure and a return to that very stagnation and devitalizing inertia which I had called it into being to combat". The idea of
73and so the domination by the upholsterer began; it was a reign of terror that we can still all feel in our bones. Velvet and silk, Makart bouquets, dust, suffocating air and lack of light, portières, carpets and 'arrangements" - thank God, we are done with all that now.''
74Many other modernists shared Loos's sentiments. However, it was in the words of the French architect, Le Corbusier, writing in the 1920s, that the hatred of the bourgeoisie could be found at its most vehement. In The Decorative Art of Today he referred to the 'bourgeois king' with his 'bric-a-brac mind', an overt reference to the middle-class interior. He was partic
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79away from the world of nature towards culture. And with culture came the rejection of ornament. Le Corbusier revealed his dependence upon Loos when he described decoration as,
80vitality contrasted with inertia, of activity opposed to passivity, emerged over and over again, suggesting, paradoxically, that it was change, renewal - the very essence of fashion – which the modernists sought, motivated by fear of sameness. Ideologically, however, the idea of fashion was linked inextricably with the old bourgeois value system within which display and social aspiration had played such an important
81baubles, charming entertainment for a savage ... it seems justified to affirm: the more cultivated a people becomes, the more decoration disappears. (Surely it was Loos who put it so neatly.)**
82part.
83Contained within these words, if only obliquely was the assumption that 'savages' and women were both inferior to 'civilised' man and that their shared dependence upon nature and decoration was a sign of their shared evolutionary inferiority.
84The outcry against ornament ran as a leitmotif through modernist writing and practice. The Russian artist Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner were adamant that,
85We reject decorative colour as a painterly element in threedimensional construction. We demand that the concrete material shall be employed as a painterly element.
86Novelty, closely allied to fashion, was also inextricably linked to that 'old' culture and the modernists were keen to show their disapproval of that false notion. The ideas inherent in our movement are too serious for us to indulge in frivolous dalliance with changing fashions and novelty for its own sake," wrote the German Hermann Muthesius, the chief importer of British Arts and Crafts ideas into his country, while Gropius also rejected what he called 'transient novelties'. But it was the idea of ornament which roused the strongest feelings amongst modernist architects, as they strived to renew the language of architecture, and thus to control, rather than be controlled by, the culture it found itself within. Without doubt, the most influential text was Adolf Loos' essay of 1908, provocatively titled 'Ornament and Crime'. Loos' ideas - themselves influenced by those of Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, who had written in 1892 that 'ornament is mentally a luxury not a necessity?! – were to influence all the key modernist protagonists of the 1920s. In 1898 Loos also embraced Sullivan's ideas about women's 'natural' inferiority claiming that, 'the woman has fallen behind sharply in her development in recent centuries'. By the time he came to write 'Ornament and Crime', however, in which he made his famous claim that 'the path of culture is synonymous with the separation of the ornamental from the functional', it was nonEuropean "primitive man', another inferior in the evolutionary hierarchy, rather than woman, who was singled out as being responsible for this 'regressive behaviour. 'The Papuan covers everything within his reach with decoration, from his face and body down to his bow and rowing boat,' he wrote."
87Loos introduced his ideas within a framework of Darwinian evolutionary theory which defined man's progress as a move
88We reject the decorative line. We demand of every line in the work of art that it shall serve solely to define the inner directions of force in the body to be portrayed."
89The German architect Hugo Häring proclaimed seven years later that,
90We now consider it uncultivated to apply Pallas Athena to the bottom of a bowl; we regard it tasteless to fashion vessels in the shape of heads of animals and use their interior as containers; we no longer make table legs look like lion's feet.*
91No naturalistic ornament, and no decorative application of colour or line were permitted in modernist architecture and design. Both implied a denial of function, a denial of the inherited Arts and Craft principle of 'truth' to materials, a denial of purity and of the essential universality of the object. Above all,
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96Gropius reiterated this idea of the disappearance of the wall. Now a non-structural element given the new uses of steel, concrete and glass in architectural construction, the wall no longer acted as the same psychological barrier that it had less than a century earlier. The modernist house was conceived as a much more open space with utility determining the uses of its components. With this new sense of openness came a redefinition of the spaces that existed in the domestic dwelling. Sharp distinctions, it was proposed, should be eroded. While specific room functions continued to exist, the equipment within the spaces was to become less indicative of social ritual and more utilitarian in nature. Le Corbusier, for example, recommended storing as much as possible behind screens and shutters, thus eliminating any kind of display:
97decoration and ornamentation were part of bourgeois culture, that root of all decadence in architecture and design. As Gropius explained, 'that is why the movement must be purged from within if its original aims are to be saved from the straitjacket of materialism and false slogans inspired by plagiarism or misconception'.
98The sense of outrage and moral panic which underpinned his and others' reactions drove them to propose extreme solutions in their search for purification. In the process of formulating those solutions, they undermined and repressed, however unwittingly, feminine culture as it was defined. stereotypically at that time. A
99The feminine aesthetic which had helped define woman's self-image and identity in the nineteenth century had been crystallised in the Cult of Domesticity, in particular through the creation of domestic display. The domestic interior, and above all the feminine spaces of the parlour or drawing room and bedroom or boudoir, played an important role in this process. One of modernist architecture's key propositions was a total redefinition of the nature and significance of the interior of architectural structures, the domestic dwelling among them. They eradicated the idea of gendered spaces in the home and instead opened up the interior to became an extension of the exterior. Gone was the idea of enclosed, womb-like fixed spaces with their rigid symbolic and ritualistic meanings and in their place was a more flexible set of possibilities linked to functions of a much more utilitarian nature.
100The transformation of the interior was discussed, as were so many other aspects of the modernist building, in formal rather than symbolic terms, that is, with regard to mass and space rather than meaning. The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was among the first to radicalise the interior. 'The sense of interior space', he wrote
101'Hence there is no longer any cabinet-makers' furniture in the house ... The reduction of furniture to the state of pigeon-holes which, if necessary, form the wall itself, can also be obtained by basic methods of construction in reinforced concrete."
102He also advocated the use of office furniture in the domestic setting as well as a range of standard items which could be obtained from the local store, among them doors, windows, radiators, light-bulbs and wash-basins. The architect's task was to supervise the equipping of the house in such a way that no further subsequent 'arranging' was necessary on the part of the future inhabitants. While the addition of a few personal items, such as books and paintings, were permitted, the inhabitants' role was to perform the activities that had been anticipated for them in the functional zoning of the house. No longer was there a need, it was implied, for any Ruskin-style 'arranging' on the part of the housewife. Her role as a creator of social display and exerciser of taste in the domestic context was rendered, as a result, entirely redundant.
103These ideas were put into action most effectively in Le Corbusier's Pavillon de L 'Esprit Nouveau, designed for the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. In this project he aimed to 'solve once and for all both the problem of furniture and that of the aesthetic content of the home'. One of the
104'as a reality in organic architecture co-ordinates with the enlarged means of modern materials. The building is now found in this sense of interior space; the enclosure is no longer found in terms of mere roof or wall but as 'screened space. This reality is modern. 28
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109pavilion's most prominent features was the sense of continuum between the inside and the outside such that the distinction between them was rendered ambiguous. This was emphasised by his leaving a tree on the site which was allowed to penetrate a hole cut into the building. Later, with his collaborator in furniture design, Charlotte Perriand, whom he described as 'our expert in domestic interior design'' he developed these ideas further. In stripping the house of its 'clutter', as he called it, he was aiming to create a meditative environment, encouraging contemplation - 'And perhaps we will take pleasure in contemplation, during this hour of rest, this hour of relaxation at home'." What he failed to suggest, however, was a new role for women now that the beautifier of the home' was, in his eyes, relegated to the past.
110By the 1920s, women had entered the public sphere to a significant extent, both as paid workers and consumers. Feminine taste continued to play its role, catered to by the 'spectacle' provided by department stores. Le Corbusier was not unaware of this and he extended his critique of bourgeois culture to include the department store and its contents, targeting women and salesgirls as the guilty parties. He blamed 'the display in shops and department stores' for encouraging 'iconolatry" – the (false) worship of icons - and referred to what he evocatively called 'our boudoir-bazaars full of trinkets",35 thereby reinforcing the link between feminine domesticity and the aesthetic of the marketplace. His most vehement attack on woman and consumption, however, was contained in this chant:
111it, Le Corbusier was evoking the whole gamut of exhilarating experiences for women participating in the public activity of shopping, which Zola had so evocatively described.
112Le Corbusier reserved his strongest condemnation for the shopgirl herself, that newly arrived female worker whose role it was to spread the culture of consumption that he so despised. Elaborating his dislike of surface decoration, he admitted, sardonically, that it could be 'as charming, as gay, and as shop-girl-like as you would want', continuing, less ambiguously, to describe, 'The pretty little shepherdess shopgirl in her flowery cretonne dress, as fresh as spring seems, in a bazaar such as this, like a sickening apparition from the show cases of the costume department in the ethnographic museum'.
113Although it was the context, rather then the girl herself, which he was blaming for this show of tastelessness there was, nonetheless, a sense in which Le Corbusier held her responsible for complicity with it. Indeed, for a number of decades girls working for the retail trade had been viewed with moral ambivalence. Living independently of their families and participating in city life in ways in which, hitherto, only female prostitutes had been able to the respectability or otherwise of these new female workers had been a subject of much discussion. In questioning her role in matters of taste Le Corbusier was simply adding a new dimension to that moral debate. Women, claimed Le Corbusier, were also responsible for the decline in the decorative arts. He wrote in a manner which recalled the words and moralising tone of Charles Eastlake,
114Decoration on all castings (iron, copper, bronze, tine etc). Decoration on all fabrics (curtains, furnishings, fashions). Decoration on all white linen (table cloths, underwear, bed linen). Decoration on all papers. Decoration on all pottery and porcelain. Decoration on all glassware. Decoration in all departments! decoration, decoration: yes indeed, in all departments; the department store became the ladies' joy!
115So young ladies became crazy about decorative art - poker-work, metal-work, embroidery. Girls' boarding schools made room for periods of applied Art and the History in their timetables... At this point it looked as if decorative art would founder among young ladies, had not the exponents of the decorative ensemble wished to show, in making their name and establishing their profession, that male abilities were indispensable in this field: considerations of ensemble, organisation, sense of unity, balance, proportion, harmony.
116The Ladies' Joy (Le Bonheur des Dames) was the title of a novel by Emile Zola from the previous century. In recalling
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121on the fabric of the building and spoil its organic clarity.
122In the engineer, the factory and the rules of mass production was seen as escape from the bottomless pit of taste. Found there were a set of principles and rules, based upon reason and organisation, which could provide sure footholds. Countless fallacies were attached to this belief, but on a metaphorical level, it worked and interest in geometry, objectivity and what came to be called the theory of 'functionalism' derived directly from it. Le Corbusier was articulating the thoughts of many of his fellow architects when he wrote that,
123This open condemnation of female amateurism and praise of male professionalism revealed his belief in the idea of two gendered systems of aesthetics, the masculine being naturally superior to the feminine.
124While it was he who articulated the principles of high modernism and became probably the most internationally influential of the movement's protagonists, Le Corbusier cannot be charged with the sole responsibility of bringing about a masculinisation of architecture and design at this time. The disapproval of domestic display, of ornament, of historicism, of fashion and novelty and of bourgeois culture in general was widespread. Collectively, the modernist architects voiced and demonstrated their disapproval in such a way that trivialised and marginalised feminine culture as it had developed in the nineteenth century, a result not simply of their shared negative feelings but also of their modernist articulations, rooted exclusively in masculine culture and the masculine sphere. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the formulation of what came to be called 'The Machine Aesthetic'. Although mass production and the factory were never really more than a source of metaphorical inspiration for modernist architecture and design, they also served to bring to the modernists' attention ideas about standardization, universality and democratization which became so central to their thoughts. For many of them the engineer became a hero. "The essence of what these people are doing,' wrote the Dutch architect and designer Henry van de Velde, 'is reason and their means is calculation. It is their employment of reason and calculation that can lead to the purest and most certain beauty.'' Here was a way out of, what was for them, the cul-de-sac of intuition - a set of mathematical rules which could lead to a new aesthetic. Many others followed Van de Velde's line of reasoning, putting their faith in the pure logic of engineering science. As Hans Poelzig explained,
125Geometry is the means with which we have provided ourselves for looking around us and expressing ourselves ... geometry is the basis ... It is also the material foundation for symbols signifying perfection, the divine. It brings us the lofty satisfaction of mathematics."
126Objectivity underpinned the work and ideas of the architects and designers linked with the Dutch De Stijl group. Its key spokesman, Theo Van Doesburg, explained why: 'In order to create something new, we need a method, that is to say, an objective system. If we discover the same qualities things in different things, we have found an objective scale."
127The modernists believed themselves to be following the logic of science and its offshoots into the worlds of technological progress and mechanised mass production. Not only did the American factory and its production system fascinate them and provide a model for them, it also produced standardised goods and materials for them to use. As if by magic, the logic of the production system was translated in their eyes, into the geometrical appearance of the goods produced and they were exaltant in their admiration for them. The automobiles, the items of plumbing and bathroom equipment, the filing cabinets, the pieces of office furniture, the electric light-bulbs and the 'everyday drinking glasses and bottles of various shapes'** constituted the modernists' 'type-forms". These were simple modern goods untainted by the aesthetic thumb-print of social display - the naive, innocent products of the engineer, not the
128It is left to the engineer to calculate and design a unity between load and support, the right measurements for the parts of the structure consisting of various materials. The architect all too often seeks his salvation in purely decorative constructions that have to be imposed
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133decorative artist.
134The theory of functionalism lay at the heart of the modernist architectural project. In its simplest form it required that the internal structure and utilitarian function of a building or object should determine its nature and appearance. This became a rule of thumb for designers and architects, a strategy to prevent them being distracted by the 'thrills' of the marketplace and of ensuring that the psychological and symbolic roles of the object were kept to a minimum. 'The shape of an object", wrote Hugo Haring in 1927, 'is determined by the forms arising out of its purpose', reiterating Loos's statement of nearly three decades earlier that, 'The beauty of a useful object only exists in relation to its purpose. Gropius expressed the same sentiment in relation to work at the Bauhaus school,
135Modernist buildings and designs, were destined for the urban environment. Le Corbusier's interest in town planning was a direct response to his own experience of modernity. "The increasing disorder in our towns,' he wrote 'is offensive: their decay damages our self-esteem and injuries our dignity .. They are not worthy of the age. They are no longer worthy of us'." This was reinforced by his feelings about modern Paris in particular, the urban space within which, several decades earlier, the 'flaneur', Charles Baudelaire had envolved his own poetic responses to the effects of modernity on city life.
136At dusk, at six o'clock on the Champs Elysees, everything suddenly went mad. After the vacuum, the traffic furiously started up again. Then each day increased this turmoil further. You go out and the moment you are out of the door, with no transition, you are confronting death: the cars are racing past."
137An object is defined by its nature. In order, then, to design it to function correctly - a container, a chair, or a house - one must study its nature; for it must serve its purpose perfectly, that is, it must fulfil its function usefully, be durable, economical and 'beautiful'.
138Only after a number of rationally-conceived criteria were fulfilled could the idea of beauty enter into the picture.
139While the idea of functionalism seemed a simple one, its execution was not always straightforward and the idea of "looking functional very often replaced that of 'being functional'. Inevitably, what was emerging was a new style which mirrored, rather than determined, a new way of life. It was a style which prioritised all those values linked with masculine culture and which pushed to one side those that could be thought of as feminine. In attempting to formulate an architectural and design theory which would move beyond cultural difference - a kind of Esperanto which would communicate on the basis of the universal language in which it was expressed – modernist architecture and design were risking alienating one half of the population - women. Intended to eliminate class and geographically-related cultural differences, it overlooked the fact that it was formulated in terms which only related, and which therefore were only easily and directly communicable, to one half of the society at which it was aimed.
140The desire to bring a sense of order into urban existence underpinned the modernist architectural project in its many guises. One strategy was to introduce functional zoning which separated pedestrian walkways from the traffic. Siting their reforms in the urban context inevitably reinforced modernism's fundamental distance from feminine culture. This was compounded by the definition of the architectural interior, and indeed of the furniture within it, as an articulation of space which existed within a yet larger spatial system, that of the town or city. This was at odds with the much more personalised, enclosed definition of the interior which had been women's most recent experience of it. For them, the material model for the interior had been that of fashionable dress rather than the city. A symbol of personal and social identity, an extension of the body and of a gendered self, and a marker of social positioning, their relationship with fashionable dress had taught middle-class women how to use material culture to their own ends. In the nineteenth century this relationship had been extended to the domestic interior which became a site for social display and self-identification. In emphasising the urban context of the house and thereby minimising its inward orientation, modernist architects were,
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145Every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wall-papers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin. His home is made clean. There are no more dirty, dark corners. Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanliness ... once you have put ripolin on your walls you will be master of yourself.
146in effect, denying women that relationship.
147Elizabeth Wilson has explained that women's experience of the city differed in essence from that of men."" The modernists' desire to create order in the city threatened to destroy the very characteristics that women, through their participation in consumption, commerce, leisure and the spectacle of the city, enjoyed in urban life. 'The utilitarian plans of experts whose goal was social engineering' were the main enemy of women's relationship with the city. By rationalising the city and emphasising its functions rather than its meanings, modernists were minimising its role for women.
148The rational reform movements, which focused on hygiene and household and which were displacing the role of feminine taste within the domestic environment, were embraced enthusiastically by the architectural modernists and used by them to further their cause. In defining the aims of the German Werkbund, a body set up to help encourage high standards in the design of German's mass-production goods, Herman Muthesius drew an analogy between form and cleanliness – 'form is a higher spiritual need to the same degree that cleanliness is a higher bodily need'. In the equation of cleanliness with good form the spiritual and the bodily were merged. The bathroom made a frequent entry into modernist rhetoric as a key site for cleanliness, hygiene, modern technology and modern design. Loos was the first to isolate it, eulogising the advanced level of bathroom equipment in the USA, while Le Corbusier inherited the same obsession:
149Control achieved through a coat of white paint.
150The most direct link between the application of scientific management in the home and the architectural and design modern movement came through the influence of Christine Frederick's translated writings. Rationalised housework inspired a number of modernist architects to translate the ideas involved into material form. One of modernist architecture's most significant achievements in the area of housing, a scheme built in Frankfurt between 1925 and 1930 by the architects Ernst May, Adolf Meyer and Ferdinand Kramer, had kitchens designed by Grete Schüette-Lihotsky, which were influenced directly by Frederick's guidelines.
151Systematic housekeeping and modernist architecture aligned themselves in the shared aim of rationalising both the house and what was going on inside it in order to transform the way in which its inhabitants lived. Into an arena which had hitherto housed feminine values, themselves formed in part by the nature and role of that material environment, they were implanting an ideal rooted in masculine values. By attempting to transform both the physical nature and the function of that environment the modernists were proposing a transformation of women's role and value-system. Neither the rational household movement nor architectural modernism provided any ideas or suggestions as to how that transformation could, or should, take place, however. Within both movements the traditional sexual division of labour in the home was never questioned. Only the American material feminists had proposed architectural changes based on revised ideas about gender roles and their ideas were either unknown to the modernists or, if known, ignored.
152Architectural modernism implied an end to the rule of women's tastes in the domestic arena and a clean wipe of the slate such that their influence was eradicated once and for
153Demand a bathroom looking south, one of the largest rooms in the house or flat, the old drawing-room for instance. One wall to be entirely glazed, opening if possible on to a balcony for sun baths; the most up-to-date fittings with a shower-bath and gymnastic appli
154ances.
155The idea of bodily cleansing becomes a metaphor for cultural cleansing within modernist architecture and it found its most obvious aesthetic expression in the dominance of the colour white. Le Corbusier waxed lyrical over the benefits of whitewash,
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160their own in an attempt to liberate themselves and others.
161Where the world of commerce, and the system of values which have guided its successes, is concerned, however, quite a different picture emerges, a picture in which gender cultures were not so easily ranked. When modernism had to confront the 'real', rather than the idealised world of mass production, and its twin, mass consumption, the compromises that had to be forged brought feminine culture back into the frame once again.
162all. In their place it substituted the controlling hand of the professional (male) architect and designer, working in tune with modernity, defined in masculine terms, and with a renewed architectural language which aimed to minimise the possibility of a resurgence of feminine values in the formation of the material environment. Design, defined as a professional and controlling activity, was to replace taste, defined as an amateur and essentially passive set of responses. In that cultural take-over bid, masculine values were to replace the feminine in the domestic interior.
163In terms of buildings built and consumer goods designed architectural modernism remained a minority movement. Nonetheless it entered mainstream culture in a number of subtle ways, providing an ideological framework for much architectural and design theory and practice since that time. Most of the architectural and design educational institutions established in this century developed curricula based on modernist principles; the industrial design profession embraced its ideals; and many museums collected modern massproduced work, selected according to criteria rooted in modernism. This has resulted in the formation of a design canon to which many objects have been judged either to be of 'good' or of 'bad' design. The leading design reform bodies of this century - among them Germany's Werkbund; Sweden's Svenska Sjlödforeningen; Britain's Design and Industries Association and its Council of Industrial Design - also adopted modernist principles in their efforts to raise standards in design. In addition, many of this century's design propagandists, working with the printed word and through other mass media, have embraced modernism and worked towards spreading its ideals as widely as possible.
164In these, and many other ways besides, the ideals underpinning architectural and design modernism have filtered into the public consciousness. Most professional practice has been judged by its standards and has stood or fallen according to its terms of reference. Its hierarchy of values have subtly invaded the world of amateur aesthetic choices as well. Inevitably, given its gender bias, it has not served women well except when they have decided to join its ranks and adopt its values as
165Why do car manufacturers use paisley interiors to sell their products to women, and does it work?
166Is women's taste really different to men's? Who says so? And does it matter?
167In this highly original book Penny Sparke uses familiar objects of our everyday environments - furniture, cars and domestic appliances and interiors - to look at how taste has become a gendered issue in our culture. Ever since the industrial revolution, the cluttered interior has been associated with femininity while the minimal forms of modernist architecture have acted as markers of a masculine aesthetic.
168As Long as Ir's Pink argues that 'taste' has been a quality assigned to women while 'design' is a man-made construction which has taken aesthetic authority away from women. This in turn has succeeded in trivializing and marginalizing women's material culture. Ranging across histories of domesticity, feminine consumption and home-making, as well as modern design and broader cultural theories, Penny Sparke offers a completely new version of the history of our modern material culture.
169h
170Cover detall from adala Supplied by The
171A
172Panda 1964 photo Chve Antown r oduced courtesy Fiat Aulas UK LII.
173ISBN 0-04-440923-03
17400999>
175UK 29.99 AUS $24.96" CAN $1896
176*Ecommended
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