Decorative Art in Modern Interiors 1966/7 [antikvár]

Peter Cook What of the future? We are in the midst of a revolution. It is a quiet but far-ranging revolution. It is effecting our habits, our responses and perhaps the level of our endurance. The social and economic emancipation that is going on at this time can be only for the good, but in the process many of our traditional standards of comfort are suddenly going to appear as what they are: makeshifts. The machines and devices for living in are still based on the standards of the horsehair sofa and the horse and buggy. Houses are planned with the constraints of wattle and daub and the two-inch nail. The eventual direction of this social revolution has not yet fully emerged, neither have all its manifestations. Its reality can most clearly be seen in the young. Children who have been brought up on space travel and bright colours, washable plastics and throw-away handkerchiefs will not only be ready to accept this way of living in their homes: they will demand its inherent standards. You play with a clip-in plastic seat in the nursery: the next thing you know and it is in a restaurant. It is a natural progression in the same way that the more sophisticated services such as electricity rapidly became universal. It is anyhow certain that the spiral of a society demanding more time in which to enjoy itself, and having been given this time, demanding yet more artifacts, must also have its direct effect on our immediate environment. Already, the traditional cycle of eating-sleeping-sitting, which motivated most interior design has begun to extend. It is remarkable how literally these three requirements were interpreted for hundreds of years. Even now, we are all familiar with the limited range of choice in such things as tables and worktops. It is as if there were only about half a dozen activities in the home: and only about two standard sizes of people practising them. The real extension of the traditional limits is to be seen on a different level: the family car is leading relentlessly to the two-car family, the foreign holiday leading to 'foreign exchange' of children. Perhaps everybody will soon have a week-end house. The possibilities of a breakout from the old constraints of life are now being tested by an increasingly demanding public. Yet if we turn in again and look at the motives for the way we design our homes they are conspicuous by their resemblance to those of yesterday. The style of the furniture may be different, but it is all too often basically the same 'three-piece' in another guise. We are socially and technologically struggling to rid oursehres of the constraints of discomfort and tedium and now is the time for us to extend this struggle into the rethinking of our rooms and the bits and pieces with which we clutter them. At the same time, we can take this present opportunity to make the space around us really expressive. If we crave excitement then we can have it. The edge of the TV screen is not the limit of a changing environment. All the colours of the spectrum are now within our grasp, and colour can be projected. We can reproduce the images of yesterday by photograph or film, and the slide show has taken the place of the family album. It is only an extension of all these to conceive of a living-room that could simulate by colour, sound or projected images, any atmosphere one required simply by throwing a switch. On a more immediate level, we are able to have a room that can certainly adapt for several requiremems or atmospheres if we design carefully. The materials from which we can now achieve this new utility and virmosity are further facets of the ability of design to rise to the demands made upon it by human sophistication. The concept of 'furniture', of 'rooms', of 'machines' and 'natural' furnishing or building materials is about to change. They are aU becoming scrambled together. Is a wall a wall or is it a moving partition or is it a piece of furniture? Some types of appliance walls are all three and pieces of mechanical equipment as well. Does the floor have to remain an inflexible, bland, flat square? If we seriously begin to use the three dimensions that space really consists of we can reinterpret this until the floor can be anything: a hard, flat washdown surface; a rolling, lounging, contemplative surface; a surface to be laid upon (and therefore padded and covered accordingly) and even dug into. Several designers are exploring the possibilities of sinking areas of seating, dining tables, beds, or simply warm pockets below the main floor. Various ideas have been devised for the whole house to be a series of floor levels into which you sit and store things, so that furniture as such is completely eliminated. Every other dimension of the space we live in is undergoing a similar rethink at this time. Naturally, tins does not mean that everybody is forced to live like this.