Shaping the American Interior ─ Structures, Contexts and Practices

This book maps out the development of the larger professional structures of interior design in the US from 1870 to 1960. Featuring new writings from some of the leading researchers in the field, chapters will explore early educational programs and professional organizations, the relationship of interior design to the contemporaneous professionalization of architectural practice, the opportunities offered by department stores, antiques firms, materials manufacturers, and shelter magazines, and the organization and management of large commercial interior design firms. Moving away from biography, this book will critically investigate how interior designers collectively responded to and defined the market for their ideas and services, balancing their roles as artists with the pressures to professionalize and rationalize their work.

Paula Lupkin is a historian of design, architecture, and cities. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on the spatial production of modernity under capitalism, investigating its impact on the designed world and the built environment. Her research and publications, including her first book, Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Modern Urban Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), address the ways that architecture, interiors, cities, and landscapes shaped and were shaped by new ways of living, working, designing, and consuming. Her work has been supported by the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, and the Clements Center for Southwestern Studies at Southern Methodist University.

Penny Sparke is Professor of Design History at Kingston University, London. She studied French Literature at the University of Sussex from 1967-1971 and was awarded her PhD in Design History from Brighton Polytechnic in 1975. She taught Design History at Brighton Polytechnic (1975-1982) and the Royal College of Art (1982-1999). She has given keynote addresses, curated exhibitions, and broadcast and published widely. Her publications include Italian Design from 1860 to the present (1989); The Plastics Age (1990); As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (1995); An Introduction to Design and Culture, 1900 to the present (3rd edition 2004); Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration (2005); and The Modern Interior (2008).