How does one turn a house containing artworks into a museum? How does one narrate the story of the lives that were lived there? How authentic can a retrospective reconstruction of interior spaces and their contents be?
The contributors of "The Modern Period Room," drawn from a broad range of disciplines, consider the interiors of the modern era and their more recent reconstruction from a variety of different viewpoints. Beneath the conceptual and physical strategy of the representational technique of the modern period room lie numerous conflicting intentions.
This collection of essays by design historians, architects and curators engages with these tensions. The authors explore themes and examples by architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Truus Schroeder and Gerrit Rietveld, Erno Goldfinger and others in a bid to reveal the specific cultural encoding of presented interior spaces.
The book's critical engagement with the issues and conventions which surround the modern period room will allow historians and theorists of architecture, design and social history to investigate the contexts in which this representational device has been used. The various models of period room enables the reader to understand just how dynamic, contributory and ultimately interventionist the presentation of the period room is in the process of architectural and design history making.

"Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior "examines the interior as a "stage" upon which modern life and lifestyles are consciously fashioned and "performed," and from which modern identities are projected by and through design. Scholars from Europe, Canada, America and Australia present a range of interior environments--domestic interiors, sets for stage and film, exhibition spaces, art galleries, hotel lobbies, cafes and retail spaces--to explore each as an intersection of fashion, lifestyle and performance. Sharing the thesis that the fashionably dressed body and the interior can be seen as part of the same creative and expressive continuum, the essays highlight the ways in which interiors can give shape to and dramatize modern life.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2010. Designing the Modern Interior reveals how the design of the inside spaces of our homes and public buildings is shaped by and shapes our modern culture. The modern interior has often been narrowly defined by the minimalist work of elite, reforming architects. But a shared modernising impulse, expressed in interior design, extends at least as far back as the Victorians and reaches to our own time. And this spirit of modernisation manifested itself in interiors, designed both by professionals and by amateurs, which did not necessarily look modern and often even aimed to imitate the past. Designing the Modern Interior presents a new history of the interior from the late 19th to the 21st century. Particular characteristics are consistent across this period: a progressive attitude towards technology; a hyper-consciousness of what it is to live in the present and the future; an overt relationship with the mass media, mass consumption and the marketplace; an emphasis on individualism, interiority and the 'self'; the construction of identities determined by gender, class, race, sexuality and nationhood; and the experiences of urban and suburban life.

"Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior "examines the interior as a "stage" upon which modern life and lifestyles are consciously fashioned and "performed," and from which modern identities are projected by and through design. Scholars from Europe, Canada, America and Australia present a range of interior environments--domestic interiors, sets for stage and film, exhibition spaces, art galleries, hotel lobbies, cafes and retail spaces--to explore each as an intersection of fashion, lifestyle and performance. Sharing the thesis that the fashionably dressed body and the interior can be seen as part of the same creative and expressive continuum, the essays highlight the ways in which interiors can give shape to and dramatize modern life.