Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media

Designing the French Interior traces France's central role in the development of the modern domestic interior, from the pre-revolutionary period to the 1970s, and addresses the importance of various media, including drawings, prints, pattern books, illustrated magazines, department store catalogs, photographs, guidebooks, and films, in representing and promoting French interior design to a wider audience. Contributors to this original volume identify and historicize the singularity of the modern French domestic interior as a generator of reproducible images, a site for display of both highly crafted and mass-produced objects, and the direct result of widely-circulated imagery in its own right. This important volume enables an invaluable new understanding of the relationship between architecture, interior spaces, material cultures, mass media and modernity.

Anca I. Lasc is Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Design at Pratt Institute, New York City, USA. Her work focuses on the invention and commercialization of the modern French interior and on the development of the profession of interior designer in the nineteenth century. She has published articles in Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture and the Journal of Design History and has presented at numerous conferences, including those organized by the College Art Association, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Society for French Historical Studies.

Georgina Downey is an independent scholar and Visiting Fellow in the Graduate Art History Program at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She lectures on a sessional basis at the South Australian School of Art and the University of Adelaide, and she has recently served on the Board of the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. Her writings have appeared in Interior Design and Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2013), the proceedings of the Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association (IDEA) Conference, Brisbane 2010, theAustralian and New Zealand Journal of Art, the Journal of Australian Studies, the Journal of Australian Cultural History, Broadsheet, Artlink and Photofile. She is the editor of the recently published collection of commissioned papers entitled Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns(Bloomsbury, 2013).

Mark Taylor was Professor of Architecture at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. His primary research focus was the history and theory of the modern architectural interior with an emphasis on cultural and social issues. He published several books including Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (2006), Interior Design and Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2013), Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Flow: Interior, Landscape and Architecture in the Era of Liquid Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2018). He was co-editor of Domesticity under Siege: When Home isn't Safe (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2022) with Georgina Downey and Terry Meade.