Variations in Home Design

VARIATIONS IN HOME DESIGN

Interior Design

As the United States slipped deeper into hard times in the 1930s, manufacturers turned to industrial designers in hopes of stimulating plummeting sales. Manufacturers challenged industrial designers to develop a visual idiom capable of communicating such positive thoughts as "up-to-date," "technologically advanced," and "modern" for their products and thus attract an uncertain buying public. Leading industrial designers, including Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes, and Walter Dorwin Teague, set about reinventing a range of household gadgets from irons to blenders. They were influenced by the rounded corners and streamlining of modern airplanes, trains, and automobiles. Radio cabinets, furniture, pens, toasters, and silverware appeared in shiny metals with curves, etchings, and the appearance of technological advancement.

The Tubular Chair

Several important modern architects experimented with furniture design in the 1930s. In 1925 Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer, a student of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, designed his first tubular chair, whose simple lines gained popularity in the 1930s. Composed of two leather squares framed by parallel steel tubes, the chair was shaped like the numeral 5 without the horizontal top. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 1930 Barcelona chair and Alvar Aalto's 1934 lounge chair followed Breuer's innovation. Trimmed of all ornament and embellishment, the tubular chair expressed the streamline aesthetic of modernism.

Functionalism

The Century of Progress Exhibition of 1933-1934 introduced functionalism to the American public in its "House of the Future" show. There the public saw the machinelike contours of new tables, chairs, dishes, and household items. Throughout the exhibition and particularly in the "House of the Future," the future was conceived of as technologically advanced by its rejection of Victorian excesses. Ornamentation was discarded for streamlined simplicity. Gone were overstuffed chairs and sofas cluttered with pillows and finely handcrafted details. Modern sofas were narrower, with slim cushions and armrests, and were unadorned by complicated patterns or pillows. Chairs were noted for the prominence of the frames. Solid wood frames with one-or two-toned colored cushions were popular. Rooms were planned to enhance their function as living spaces rather than being museum-like parlors from which to conduct business. Bookshelves were incorporated into the walls, and carpets were of single, subdued colors. Functionalism in furniture design remained out of the reach of all but the most affluent consumers until the late 1940s, when the designs were adapted for mass production.

American Homes

The Colonial Revival style home remained the most popular house in the United States during the 1930s. These homes typically included an accentuated front door with a decorative crown supported by slender columns to form an entry porch. The symmetrical facade generally included first-floor double windows with double-hung sashes and second-floor single windows. A revival of the Dutch Colonial style was particularly popular in the 1930s. The distinguishing features of these homes were the roofs, which sharply sloped upward to a triangular peak. Many of these homes had front porches composed of a steep overhanging roof and narrow columns. These homes were typically found on the eastern seaboard.

Varieties

A revival of the Tudor Style was also popular in the 1930s. These homes had steeply pitched roofs, with side gables and a facade marked by prominent cross gables. In imitation of British country homes, Tudor homes had tall, narrow windows that typically clustered in groups with multipane glazing. The facades also relied on brick or stone, with stucco or wood exteriors. In western states the Spanish Eclectic style was popular. These homes had low-pitched, red-tiled roofs with little or no eaves overhanging, stucco exteriors, and arches popular in Spanish architecture over the door or windows. A variation on the Spanish Eclectic was the Monterey home, a two-story home with a low-pitched gabled roof, balconies, and mission-style windows. This style blended Spanish adobe construction with pitched-roof English shapes brought to California from New England and fused Spanish Eclectic and Colonial Revival details. Throughout the 1930s these homes tended to favor Spanish detailing.

High Style

Art deco and modernist aesthetics made themselves felt in home designs during the 1930s. Modernist houses had smooth wall surfaces generally of stucco, flat roofs, asymmetrical facades, and often horizontal grooves or lines. Many incorporated the modern emphasis on curves and continuous round corners. Typically these homes had small windows. International Style homes also had flat roofs and smooth, unornamented walls but none of the detailing of art deco buildings. In many International Style houses walls were not used for structural support but were instead more like curtains hung over a structural steel skeleton. Freeing exterior walls from structural demand permitted greater variation in the exteriors, such as long ribbons of windows, some of which wrapped around the building's corners, and large floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. These homes were rare and avant-garde, mostly clustered in fashionable suburbs in the northeastern states and in California.

Sources:

Virginia and Lee McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses (New York: Knopf, 1992);

Meyric R. Rogers, American Interior Design: The Traditions and Development of Domestic Design from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Norton, 1947).