The 21st Century Interior

The interior is a fluid and often disputed territory claimed by architects, interior designers and decorators. In his provocative essay, “Curtain Wars: Architects, Decorators, and the 20th-Century Domestic Interior”, Joel Sanders traces the 20th century “battle” for the interior by professionals from interior decoration, interior design and architecture, concluding with the idea that these once rigid boundaries seem to have collapsed in the early 21st century. While the disciplinary boundaries may have collapsed, the way we think about the interior itself has also changed. While a common-sense definition of the interior as a contained or enclosed space seems straightforward, the interior is more elusive than this initial definition suggests.

I want to begin this series of posts on the 21st century interior with three propositions that might challenge this initial definition. Firstly, the interior is inherently ephemeral, as people are constantly moving objects around in interior spaces, changing the way the space is configured and thus how it operates. Secondly, the interior is in a constant state of flux due to its inhabitation by humans – that is, the interior is in some respect inseparable from the people who inhabit it. Finally, our initial definition of the interior is further destabilized by the saturation of media culture and digital technologies, which affects our understanding of the interior in two ways – in the way physical spaces are reproduced and circulate as either two dimensional photographic or virtual (digital) images, and in the way our use of mobile digital devices change our perception of space.

The Interior: Beyond the Container

To date, the few available histories of the interior have treated it as a subset of architecture, whereby enclosed spaces designed by well-known architects, interior designers, decorators or design firms, are analyzed as coherent, stable objects for study. For example, this sense of the interior as a contained architectural space is emphasized by design historian John Pile in the introduction to his pioneering book, A History of Interior Design: “interior design is inextricably linked to architecture and can only be studied within an architectural context” (Pile, 2005: 11) Pile’s narrative of exemplary architectural containers from the caves at Lascaux to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, is accompanied by images of furniture and objects typically found within them.

More recently, Susan Yelavich, in the introduction to her book, Contemporary World Interiors, highlights the lack of critical attention given to interior design compared to architecture or other design disciplines. She writes: “discussions of the interior have been prejudiced by its perception as a container of ephemera” (Yelavich, 2007: 1). The book itself comprises a survey of exemplary contemporary interior spaces organized according to loose typologies: “The House”, “The Loft”, “The Office”, and so on. Most of these spaces were designed by well-known designers, architects or design firms, and Yelavich makes no distinction between disciplines. This suggests that we may be beyond the point where the interior is considered simply a subset of architecture, and that the boundaries between disciplines in the 21st century are more fluid than in the last century.

Although differently organized to Pile’s book, Yelavich’s range of contemporary spaces contains images of empty architectural containers largely devoid of people. While there is some attempt in both books to provide a little social context, many of the important social questions (Who uses these spaces? When? Why? How do they affect their inhabitants? How do they relate to their socio-economic context?) remain unanswered. Given the interior’s condition of instability noted above, it is worth extracting the interior from this particular architectural context – less for the sake of disputing disciplinary territories, and more in order to expand our understanding of the interior as something other than a decorated architectural container.

John Pawson, Calvin Klein store, New York, 1995

The Interior: Space of Inhabitation

If we are to think about the interior as more than an architectural container, we must firstly acknowledge that it is also a space of human habitation. In his book, A Philosophy of Interior Design, Stanley Abercrombie argues that while architectural histories tend to focus on the facades of buildings (the exterior), to understand the containers within (the interior), requires a different experience: “We do not merely pass them on the street; we inhabit them. When we enter a building, we cease being merely its observer; we become its content.” (Abercrombie, 1990: 3) Importantly, the interior is defined by Abercrombie as inseparable from the people who inhabit it, so an interior history that simply catalogues and analyzes empty architectural containers seems inadequate.

Despite Abercrombie’s point about inhabitation, a brief flip through any recent book or magazine on interior design (or architecture for that matter) will reveal scant evidence of human habitation. In photographs of contemporary interiors, the absence of people (and their ephemera) is remarkable. If we follow Abercrombie’s idea, the interior is not an empty, designer container, but a space that is always marked by human habitation. Even when a house is empty, someone has left a pair of dirty socks on the floor or dishes in the sink; even when the office is empty, someone has left a coffee mug or a stack of papers on the desk. The interior is always contaminated by traces of human presence.

The Interior: A Dynamic Process

In the 21st century, our understanding of the interior is predominantly a visual one. This is no doubt compounded by a media culture in which the first time we “see” an interior space is often as a glossy color photograph in a magazine, book, brochure or website. This mediation of the interior by a flat, two dimensional image gives us a limited understanding of the space. For design historian and theorist Suzie Attiwill, this flattening of three dimensional space into a two dimensional image suppresses the interior’s temporal aspect: “Interior design histories have … ignored temporality in the design of interiors through a focus on objects and built space as static form.” (Attiwill, 2004: 6) Given our history of interiors is based on two dimensional images, our interaction with the temporal aspect of the interior is lost. What is also lost is the range of sensory phenomena beyond the visual – the sounds and smells (or lack thereof), the touch and weight of materials. By including these additional aspects of the interior – the temporal and the phenomenological – into an interior history, we can start to understand how the interior is more than simply an architectural container.

Histories of the interior thus far tend towards a mummification of spaces as empty containers, their ephemera frozen as in a museum’s period room. Even when considering contemporary interiors in books, magazines or websites, our contemporary culture of the spectacle privileges visual perception, suppressing the rich phenomenological experience when we interact with a space. The fixity of photographs tends to reinforce the idea of the interior as an “ideal” or pure space comprising a series of abstract forms, lines, color and objects such as furniture and fixtures. It may well be easier to admire a pure empty container, and such spaces uncontaminated by inhabitation are certainly easier to catalogue, classify (according to style or function) and analyze as data.

Finally, beyond an architectural container filled with ephemera, the interior is also a dynamic space. It is dynamic in at least four senses: in the sense of people flowing in and out; in its interactions with the surrounding context; in its interactions with media culture (the circulation of images); and in its interactions with new technologies (which includes the virtual realm from CCTV cameras to cellphones or mobile listening devices that alter our perception of space). These dynamic aspects of the interior suggest that issues such as how we interact with and experience spaces seem more vital than simply cataloguing styles or functions of architectural containers. In this way, we may begin to consider how the interior affects psychological states or plays a role in shaping individual or collective identities through projections of lifestyles, class, gender or social values.

Philippe Starck, Hudson Hotel bar, New York, 1999.

Contemporary New York Interiors

My starting point for this series on interiors was a graduate course I taught at Pratt Institute between 2005 and 2007 which focused specifically on contemporary interiors in New York. For the series of case studies which I hope to post over coming months, I aim to examine some of the complexities of the interior sketched above through the analysis of concrete examples drawn from those classes. However, any discussions of the interior inevitably reach the issue of accessibility and all of the case studies to follow are spaces that are publicly accessible spaces that I have actually experienced and spent time in. This necessarily limits the study to a narrow range of interiors. Despite the arguments about images of empty architectural containers above, the case studies will mostly be accompanied by images of these spaces as empty architectural containers, again given the difficulty gaining permission to photograph them.

In some sense this project has already begun on this blog, with my analyses of The Myrtle Avenue Style, the section on designer interiors in the Meatpacking District post, the Starchitect Condos post, and the section on the Frank Gehry/G Tech- designed Issey Miyake store in Portrait of the Architect as an Artist. For those interested readers, I will include bibliographies for further reference, and if anyone has further ideas or readings please let me know – comments are most welcome. Finally, in advance, many thanks to all of my students from Pratt Institute’s Interior Design program who, through their research, discussion and enthusiasm, helped both stimulate and formulate many of the ideas to follow.


Bibliography

Abercrombie, Stanley, A Philosophy of Interior Design, New York, Harper and Row, 1990.

Attiwill, Suzie, “Towards an Interior History”, IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association journal), Brisbane, QUT Publishing, 2004. Download the journal here.

Pile, John, A History of Interior Design, John Wiley and Sons, New Jersey, 2005 (second edition)

Sanders, Joel, “Curtain Wars: Architects, Decorators, and the 20th-Century Domestic Interior”, Harvard Design Magazine, Number 16, Winter/Spring 2002. Online here.

Yelavich, Susan, Contemporary World Interiors, Phaidon, London, 2007.

Sharon Mesmer: Annoying Diabetic Bitch

In the closing years of the Bush era, poetry from the Flarf collective emerged as one of the most challenging creative responses to contemporary American culture. The era’s key themes – 9/11 and the subsequent wars, the ongoing occupation of Iraq, the rise of the religious right, tensions over immigration, and the conspicuous consumption of the credit bubble economy – have littered Flarf poetry over the past few years. Poets such as K. Silem Mohammad, Nada Gordon, Gary Sullivan, Drew Gardner, Sharon Mesmer, and others have actively taken up the challenge of creating a literature of critical engagement in a culture characterized by the almost complete pervasiveness of mediated communication (recently dominated by the internet, but also TV and radio). Diving headfirst into the information flows, Flarf poets have surfaced with a practice that operates like the literary equivalent of burlesque: the pastiche of “serious” content mashed up with kitsch, the corrosive parody, the teasing humor, the glittering costumes and play with identities, and the essentially performative nature of burlesque are consistent with much Flarf poetry.

Burlesque’s intention was rarely to shock (in the 20th century avant-garde sense), but rather to titillate and seduce, while at the same time overturning and challenging social norms. While it may not be possible to shock a literary audience anymore, the extreme Flarf of Sharon Mesmer’s recent book, Annoying Diabetic Bitch, may prove challenging (at least in this burlesque sense) to some readers. In Mesmer’s hands, the earnest lyrical voice of confessional first-person poetry has degenerated into scatological language, garbled gibberish, inane conversation and insults as she mines the excesses of conventionally unpoetic realms such as online chat rooms, spam and celebrity gossip websites for material. While lacking in earnest gravity and narrative continuity, the voices Mesmer employs are nonetheless compelling and at times, the dialogue she employs reads like a series of warped comedy skits – her reading at the Flarf Festival 06 and the audience reaction here really capture the sense of a Flarf poem as a kind of burlesque performance.

Characterized by abrupt changes in voice and register, Mesmer’s poetry is composed from within a culture of extreme distraction. She creates a strangely artificial zone inhabited by characters derived from chat room handles such as “SmarmyMan” and “Fckme69” or pop cultural figures such as the Olsen twins, and the use of words and phrases such as “like, totally”, “crazy ass” and “go figure”. The characteristically Flarfy juxtapositions of “serious” political or philosophical content with frivolity or banality serve to undermine any attempt to establish a clear polemical position. Conventional literary criticism (such as this essay) and close reading techniques seem only marginally useful in coming to grips with the Flarf of Annoying Diabetic Bitch. Indeed, as Mesmer points out in the poem “Why I Love Literary Criticism”, “literary criticism is extremely boring, whilst a squid superconducting quantum interference devices is exciting.”) The latter squid may well serve as a handy metaphor for a Flarf poet: conducting (in both senses of the word) interference devices within the streams of contemporary media culture.

In the book’s Postscript, Mesmer describes how some of the poems were composed using the results of Google searches in which she entered odd word combinations into the search engine. This technique appears most obviously in poems such as “Ass Vagina”, a poem that reads like a kind of pornographic spam salad, beginning: “Free Lindsay Jessica Carmen topless puss ass butt vagina 100% free”. The mash-up of porn search tag phrases is pushed into absurdity with subsequent reiterations and mixes in later lines, such as: “Hairy preggo men teen orgy Greenville manufacturing district with endangered hairy ass teen rappers 100% free”. Again, the performative nature of the repetition of key terms (“ass”, “hairy”, “100% free”) continually undermined by unrelated material makes for a hilarious live reading experience (see here). Mirroring internet searching, language shifts horizontally in these poems, skimming across the surface of meaning. Perhaps Mesmer’s poetry thus cynically performs the absence of transcendence in contemporary American culture (other than the excitement of being pulled along the information stream by a superconducting squid).


Mesmer teasingly offers up mashups of incredibly inane, unsophisticated language and banal declarations, almost as if to challenge our expectations of what poetic language is or should be. Beyond the literary provocation, she is also highlighting the flippant superficiality of much online culture – the exaggerated whining of blog culture appears in numerous poems, the self-centered and superficial voices of “I am Beautiful” take vain declarations to extremes (“I also have a beautiful soul, to go with my body”), and the repetitive insults of “Annoying Diabetic Bitch” and its companion piece, “Fine Hormony Bitch”, reflect the online culture of discussion board flaming:

You annoying diabetic bitch.
You anorexic bulimic diabetic bitch.
You dumb annoying talentless diabetic bitch, eat some diabeties.
You and your bitch monster diabetic junkhead father,
and your diabetic cat, your pathetic diabetic cat that eats birds

A poem such as “I Wuv Bumblebees” pushes this inanity envelope to the extreme, opening with a series of variations and extensions on the phrase “I Wuv Bumblebees” and continuing:

I wuv kittycats and I have three cats.
No – ha! – seriously, I wuv bumblebees more
and I think you’re a deadly bumblebee crack whore
(oh, I meant “fucking legend”).

Mesmer’s parody of such online banter exposes cracks in the culture of banality, bursting at certain points into violent confrontational language as the wuvable bumblebee suddenly becomes a “deadly bumblebee crack whore”. While titillated by the transformative bumblebee, the reader is ultimately left frustrated, as the final lines serve to deflate any rhythmic sense or continuity of the bumblebee theme:

And you only have to insert “Flight of the Bumblebee” to produce
duotone balls, pink and white,
and anal beads of purple.
I’m sick of this.
Let’s go pirate gaming at Brickfest.

Cruising through the datascapes of distraction horizontally from bumblebees to anal beads, Mesmer ends her “search poem” with a signature abrupt and illogical change of course: an invitation to attend a Lego convention. Like the form, Mesmer’s content is also “irrational”, sliding horizontally across contexts as it gains and sheds meaning in a literary equivalent of channel or web surfing.

As with other recent Flarf volumes (see my previous reviews here and here), contemporary political realities are prominent in Annoying Diabetic Bitch. The collusion of the religious right and recent American imperialism are highlighted in the poem “My Jesus in Lint Form”:

My Jesus in lint form taught me
About taking barbarism to new levels,
Levels heretofore perceived only in metaphors
Of demon legions in a post-Dutch world.

But the most scathing parodies are reserved for the commander in chief, who Mesmer has performing thus in “I Am A Very Confident Little Fellow”:

When I do my flight suit sausage strut
On the deck of the frigate, flippin’ the bird
The grunts all know I have the primo cunt
And a whole butt-load of dung-sniffin’ butt monkeys.

While the sacred icon of the presidential figure is dragged through the scatological mud-pit several times in the book, the various voices Mesmer inhabit reflect varying political positions (presumably apart from her own). In the poem “I Know That Babies Feel Just As Nervous and Confused As You Do”, for example, she pushes a contemporary anti-immigration voice to extremes to expose its inherent racism: “I’m not all left-wing and shit, but I know the Religious Right can be easily replaced by a baby with a Pez dispenser … And you know what else I know? That America is becoming another Europe where the birth rate is so low the continent is now overpopulated by immigrants from Muslim countries, and that’s why I’m urging white people to have babies because most immigrants show up here with bad fucking attitude problems. Same with their babies.”

With the end of the Bush era only weeks away, perhaps the parodies of Annoying Diabetic Bitch already seem dated. In the not too distant future, critics may look back on this poetry as a cynical response to a particular era in American culture that has passed. However, there is much in Mesmer’s book that indicates productive future possibilities as well: the stinging comic parodies, the inhabitation of various online voices and the engagement with the particular languages and modes of contemporary communication. Finally, Flarf’s convincing convergence of literature, performance and communications technology (both as a means to build literary communities and as a data mine for both content and form) has created a 21st century poetry that is both entertaining and critically engaged.


Further reading

An interview with Sharon Mesmer
Sharon Mesmer’s blog

Russel Wright House and Studio, East 48th St

In my last blog entry, I mentioned a possible connection between architect William Lescaze’s house on East 48th Street and designer Russel Wright’s house on the same street. Geographically, the connection is closer than I’d imagined – Lescaze lived and worked at 211 East 48th St, while Russel and Mary Wright lived at 221. Historically, while both were designer home-cum-offices in midtown Manhattan, Lescaze’s 1934 house can be seen as a continuation of a certain austere and uncompromising version of prewar International Style modernism, while the Wright’s 1949 house might represent a alternative attitude towards modernism, with an emphasis on informality, relaxation and an intimate relationship between interior and exterior. The Wrights’ townhouse on East 48th St is also significant as it served as a kind of laboratory for their ideas about modern American lifestyle that culminated in their 1950 bestseller, Guide to Easier Living.

American Modern Lifestyle

Although best known as an industrial designer, Wright began his design career in the 1920s designing sets, props and costumes for Broadway productions. In the early 1930s he shifted into product design, creating a series of bar and serving accessories from spun aluminum. Marketed and successfully sold during the Depression years, Wright’s serving accessories were designed for informal dinners or cocktail parties rather than formal dinners or afternoon teas. Wright’s most commercially successful and best-known design was for the ceramic dinner service, American Modern. First marketed in 1939, American Modern quickly became the best selling dinner service in the United States, and remained so until the mid-1950s. The dinnerware was innovative in a number of ways: it was marketed as flexible (as consumers could mix and match pieces within a range of modern colors), easily washable, durable and importantly, inexpensive. But most of all, it appealed to an emerging informal lifestyle, characterized by a shift away from the excessive number of delicate and decorative pieces needed for formal entertaining.


The hand-crafted look of the American Modern pieces belied their mass production, allowing them to retain the aura of human craftsmanship in an increasingly mass-produced and mechanized world. A further key to the success of the American Modern line was its marketing, largely overseen by Russel’s wife Mary. She created “stage sets” for department stores and promotional material (see photo above). In these, domestic life was portrayed as theater and its commodities were sold as part of a new, casual American lifestyle, free from formal European models that had been the mainstay of an aspirational American middle class for generations.


Staging American modernism: The Guide to Easier Living

After creating some of the props for this emerging lifestyle, Russel and Mary Wright published the script in 1950. Their Guide to Easier Living focused on not only how to design interior spaces that would be suitable for modern middle-class living, but also as a guide to housekeeping and casual entertaining. Their proposals included open floor plans which flowed seamlessly between kitchen, dining room and living room, and an emphasis on open, flexible interior spaces with lightweight modern furniture. There was not only an emphasis on practical, easy to clean and maintain homes but also a shift away from the formal, rule-bound Victorian lifestyle of previous generations to a more relaxed, spontaneous way of living.


Rather than a guide to taste, the Wrights’ book functioned more as a Do-It-Yourself manual. While they emphasized modernism in general, the Wrights were not too proscriptive as to precisely which furnishings, appliances or décor to adopt. Instead, the book contained detailed analyses of many new materials and their properties – new textiles, flooring materials, synthetic coverings for furniture – all analyzed in terms of their practicality, durability, cleanability and comfort (rather than their aesthetic appeal). Of course, Russel’s own American Modern dinnerware was a perfect fit for the Easier Living lifestyle, as were his various furniture designs of the time, particularly the Easy Living range.

East 48th Street: the Easier Living Laboratory

During the late 1940s, the Wrights’ renovation of a New York city townhouse functioned as a laboratory for this new vision of a more relaxed and casual, yet distinctively modern lifestyle. In 1949, the Wrights moved to their newly renovated townhouse at 221 East 48th Street. It included a design studio on the first floor, living space on the second floor, with the third and fourth floors rented out. Rather than a machine for living, here was postwar modernism American-style, where efficient and functional meant easy to maintain, flexible and comfortable. Rather than the purity, abstraction, universal truths and technological fetishism associated with prewar modernism, the Wrights’ were creating modern life as style. Although this was a New York townhouse situated in dense midtown, the modernism is perhaps closer to a Californian suburban model (and not surprisingly the Guide features various references to Californian designers and architects, particularly Richard Neutra and Harwell Hamilton Harris).


The first floor design studio included a small reception room and conference room as well as the working studio at the rear. The reception area featured a frosted glass partition and built-in desk, while the conference room was similarly spare but both revealed a careful attention to lighting and presentation as these were public spaces for meetings with clients. The rear studio space featured an S-shaped wall comprised entirely of six foot high double hung windows overlooking the garden (see photo above). This curved window wall not only created a distinctive effect from outside but also shaped the studio from inside as a kind of garden pavilion as much as a rational modern workspace. An anonymous writer in a contemporary issue of Interiors described the studio floor like this: “It is difficult to find a single non-functional object, and extraneous ornament is conspicuous by its absence.” Although sparse and functional, the studio was also described as “unexpectedly poetic” due to the lemon yellow ceiling and the intimate connection with the exterior garden.

However, upstairs, Mary’s bedroom combined modern built-in cupboards with pink lace curtains, pink walls and a deep green carpet. The Interiors writer continued: “The uncompromising puritans of contemporary design may be disturbed by the fact that the Wrights have set redolently Victorian rooms side by side with pristine modern ones on the upper floors of the house … the melange suggests that the Wrights are practical people (they had a number of Victorian pieces) and that they have a sense of humor. Or perhaps they decided that it would be stimulating and not at all unpleasant to step from the Hardoy chair and raised fireplace of the living room, into a quaint bedroom (Mary Wright’s) where festoons of Nottingham lace dyed solid pink adorn the windows, and thence back to a terrace curved like the desk of an excursion steamer.” It may also be because their vision of modern design was not primarily aesthetic nor technological, but about how individuals could style and inhabit spaces to suit their particular needs.


The Wrights’ living spaces were open and flexible, with built-in desks and cupboards (to maximize both storage space and floor space) and fluorescent lighting hidden under bookshelves (to create an intimate atmosphere). Idiosyncratic innovations included a storage wall that concealed both a piano and a movie projector which could project onto a window blind opposite which doubled as a movie screen (see photos below). This was modernism from the inside out, transforming a small living space into a movie theater, its furniture designed for comfort, ease of cleaning and ease of moving. The living space continued almost seamlessly onto the terrace outside which featured outdoor furniture covered in yellow sail cloth to contrast the lush greens of the carefully designed garden.


A link to Lescaze’s house on the same block was mentioned in the Interiors article when the writer added that Lescaze’s staff had dubbed the house “A Streetcar Named Desire” due to its curved studio windows and spiral metal stairs which resembled a contemporary streetcar. However, I believe this resemblance was short-lived. An inconsistency in the photographs I have of the ground floor confused me for a while (see the photo above of the rear of the studio and the one below it of the living room looking out onto the garden) and I can only assume that the curved studio was replaced by a living room between the visit of the Interiors writer and the photograph above taken from Albrecht’s book. Perhaps this adds to the Wrights’ ideas about the flexibility of modern living! With Mary’s death in 1952, while Russel continued to live at East 48th St, he devoted increasing time and energy into creating the ultimate stage of his lifestyle vision: the designer house and landscape, Manitoga.



Bibliography

Albrecht, Donald, Robert Schonfeld and Lindsay Stamm Shapiro, Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

Wright, Russel, Good Design is for Everyone: In His Own Words, Garrison, NY: Manitoga/Universe, 2001.

Writer unknown, “Idyll on 48th Street: The Russel Wright Homestead”, Interiors, No 109, 1949.

The website for the exhibition "Russel Wright: Living with Good Design" has some excellent essays on Wright's life and work.

William Lescaze House, 211 East 48th St

While reading Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York recently, I came across a 1934 article by Mumford on William Lescaze’s Manhattan home. Lescaze House is in midtown, specifically, 211 East 48th St between 2nd and 3rd Aves. Last year, a colleague mentioned Lescaze House to me after a lecture I gave at Pratt on Russel Wright’s nearby house and studio (the connection will become clear in a future blog entry). So I sought out the house, took a few photographs and always meant to find out more about it. Finally, last week, I discovered a reference to an article and photographs of Lescaze House in a 1936 issue of Decorative Art, the Annual Issue of the Studio Yearbook, which I knew our library would have. So, to accompany my photograph (below), I have included some initial research on Lescaze House along with photographs scanned from the 1936 issue of Decorative Art, as well as an earlier Lescaze project I found in a 1934 issue of the same journal. My interest here is both early modernist architecture in New York City, but also in the figure of Lescaze, a modernist pioneer on the East Coast whose work (and biography) seems comparable to the better known West Coast modernists of the 1920s and 30s such as Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler.


Born in Onex, near Geneva, Switzerland, in 1896, Lescaze studied architecture at Zurich’s Eidgenössische Technische Hoschscule. As a student there between 1915 and 1919, he was mentored by the progressive architect Karl Moser, who would later become a founder of CIAM (an organization which Lescaze was also involved in). Lescaze’s student years in Zurich were marked by his exposure to early European modernism – from Dada and Futurism to calls for a new architecture by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut and Erich Mendelsohn. After graduation, Lescaze spent a brief time working with pioneer modernist Henri Sauvage in Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1920. His early interests included large scale public housing and urban planning, and he hoped there might be more work of this kind in America than there was in postwar Europe.

Lescaze initially found work as a draftsman in Cleveland, where he lived for several years with little hope of fulfilling his modernist ideas. However, he befriended the poet Hart Crane and became known for his radical expressionist, cubist-inspired paintings. In 1923 he moved to New York and survived for several years designing interiors for restaurants and nightclubs before settling into a more austere modernist vein in the late 1920s for office, retail and apartment interiors. In these, Lescaze was dedicated to interiors in which furniture and interior spaces were integrated into a unified whole, characterised by a rational, geometric aesthetic without decorative detail. His design of a studio apartment for the conductor Leopold Stokowski on E71st St in 1928-29 was uncompromisingly modern – an open space multipurpose sitting room/dining room/library featuring built-in bookshelves of finely crafted wood and modern tubular metal furniture – the emphasis was on functionality, simplicity, economy and comfort. Similar ideas about designing for efficient yet comfortable modern lifestyles were emerging in the late 1920s in California, the most notable example being Neutra’s Lovell Health House, but I suspect Lescaze's lack of recognition in many histories is related to the fact that his 1920s work was entirely interiors.


In 1929, Lescaze began a partnership with George Howe and began working soon afterwards on their first major commission, the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society (PSFS) building in Philadelphia (above). Completed in 1932, the PSFS building is widely cited as the first International Style, or Functionalist, skyscraper in the United States. With its inclusion in Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock’s MoMA exhibition on The International Style in the same year, the PSFS building became Lescaze and Howe’s best known project. Featuring a unified exterior and interior design scheme, with an emphasis on transparency (rare for a bank), tubular steel furniture throughout, and technological innovations such as central air-conditioning and aluminum-framed windows, the PSFS building’s fine detailing and meticulous design was made possible by a pre-Depression budget which then bought materials (such as marble for the walls and exotic woods for furniture) and labor at Depression-era prices.


The Howe and Lescaze partnership was never close and dissolved in 1933 (though officially a year later). In the few years they were together, they completed some innovative modernist projects in both the US and in England, including the Fredrick Vanderbilt Field House in Connecticut in 1930-31 (see photos above and below). Ideas developed by Le Corbusier and De Stijl were successfully integrated on the East Coast for the first time in a project such as this freestanding house: the flat roof, the unadorned geometric forms and large windows, the free flowing interior spaces, the rooftop garden, and technological devices such as central heating and air conditioning. The Field House was described in the 1934 edition of Decorative Art these photos came from as “The Machine for Living”.


Lescaze’s own house and studio in Manhattan which he designed and built 1933-34, may be the first modernist house in New York City. It sat among a row of 19th century brownstones, its white concrete and glass bricks proudly proclaiming its difference. This 1938 Beatrice Abbott photograph clearly shows the contrast between Lescaze House and its 19th century neighbor. Continuing in an uncompromising modernist vein, Lescaze’s exterior facade features a white concrete rectangle punctuated with rectangles comprised of glass bricks, no applied ornamentation, no historical references and little aesthetic consolation to its context apart from the scale and floor divisions. Glass bricks were almost unknown in the US at this time but had been used in Europe, by Le Corbusier for one, but most notably in Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet’s “Maison de Verre” of 1927-32. In Lescaze House, the glass bricks create “window-walls” that are impervious to the human gaze but let light penetrate, both from outside in during the day, and from inside out at night, to spectacular effect (see below photograph of the house at night).


Lewis Mumford was particularly excited about the clearly visible number on the house’s facade: “plain numbers and visible signs,” he wrote, “ are one of the real contributions of modern architecture. Howe & Lescaze set an excellent precedent in their Philadelphia bank.” (Sidewalk Critic, p.116) I couldn't see the number so can only assume it's gone. Mumford was also excited about the use of airconditioning and Lescaze’s maximization of light in a city where bringing natural light into 19th century brownstones was proving challenging for modernist architects.


The house follows a basic brownstone footprint with a narrow street frontage, but this particular site extends back an unusually long way. It comprises four stories: the right-hand stairs go down to the ground floor studio and office space for Lescaze’s architectural practice; the left-hand stoop goes up to the first floor, comprising kitchen, dining room and library; the second floor contains bedrooms; and the third floor a living room. The interior follows the logic of the exterior – absence of applied ornamentation in favor of austere geometric forms, an emphasis on spare, functional furnishings and technological innovation. With the exception of the piano and a couple of Aalto bentwood chairs, all of the furniture was designed by Lescaze.


The third storey living room (above) was described in Decorative Art as follows: two walls were painted “chrome yellow” with the wall facing the street comprised entirely of glass bricks and the rear wall almost entirely windows. Built in furniture was made from walnut, and the carpet, upholstry and fabrics were described as “chocolate-colored”. While the emphasis was on natural light, artificial lighting in the house was mainly concealed in alcoves behind built-in units. Technological innovations included a central radio with speaker extensions in every room, telephone extensions in every room and “heating and ventilation by air-conditioning”, unheard of in domestic interiors at this time.


The dining room, overlooking the rear terrace (which sat atop the ground floor studio), featured walls painted a light, neutral color, grey rubber floor tiles and chromium-plated furniture upholstered in corduroy. Lescaze House is an exercise in design for a modern lifestyle: Lescaze was interested in efficiency and simplicity in housekeeping, economy in materials and labor, as well as maximizing the health-giving properties of natural light both in the interiors and through the rear terrace (the floor of which was partially made of glass bricks, to allow light to penetrate the studio below). Lescaze developed his modernist ideas further with a series of projects for the broadcaster CBS in the late 1930s and finally, in a fulfilment of his earlier ambition to build large-scale modernist housing, through his work on the Williamsburg Housing Development in Brooklyn (1935-38).


Color photographs of Lescaze House and PSFS Building by D.J. Huppatz

Bibliography

Albrecht, Donald, and Thomas Mellins, “Going Gershwin”, Interior Design, March 2007 (article on Lescaze and Howe’s PSFS Building).
Landmarks Preservation Commission of New York, proposal to designate the Lescaze House as a Landmark, January 27, 1976.
Lanmon, Lorraine Welling, William Lescaze, Architect, Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1987.
Wojtowicz, Robert, ed., Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York, New York: Princeton University Press, 1998.