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For many years until the 1920s, interior design existed largely as an afterthought in the household and office. Many architects, unless their clients were the ultra-rich, typically left the task of furnishing work and living spaces up to the eventual occupants of a property, with little consideration as to how the exterior space of the building would harmonize with the interior.
Choices in modes of interior design were also severely limited, with the overriding bias towards the heavy, Victorian concept of clutter. While many brilliant craftsmen created aesthetically stunning and original pieces for home interiors–including furniture, lighting, floor coverings, woodwork, accent pieces, sculpture and art—interiors through the 1920 were praised more for the value and volume of the fine works of craftsmanship and art they contained, and much less for the interaction of the pieces within a room. This design philosophy began to change beginning in the 1920s.
The Art Nouveau movement, which relied on individual craftsmanship and ornamentation in objects to ascertain their value in the home, was slowly replaced by a new design sense brought to bear by modern industry. Manufacturing and automation at the time were in full swing on both sides of the Atlantic, and respect for the sleek utility of modern machines began to replace the Old World virtues of excess, adornment, and frivolity. “Modern marvels” of civil and industrial engineering began to win the respect of the public, and soon these feats of function began to spill over into the world of architecture.
Architects, especially the French architect and designer Le Corbusier, maintained that this new age deserved a brand-new architecture, proclaiming, "we must start again from zero." Skyscrapers soon sprung up in America and Europe, incorporating the same qualities of functionality and technical brilliance championed by other design-intensive disciplines.
Gone were the gargoyles and bas-reliefs of prior years. Instead, new, sleek architectural forms were created. This new movement was known as “International Style”, and its principles still dominate architectural and interior design today. Some of the most impressive examples of modern architecture can be attributed to partisans of Le Corbusier’s International Style, including designs by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany, Theo van Doesburg in Holland, and Frank Lloyd Wright in the United States.
But all of these famous architects understood that by “starting from zero” stuffy Victorian interiors could not be left to despair inside these new, bold architectural creations. Quickly, the philosophy of International Style spread inside modern buildings, bringing revolutionary new contributions in furniture, lighting, floor coverings, sculpture and art to interior spaces, many fashioned by the very architects of the International Style movement themselves.
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