Making America modern

About this book

This comprehensive study of more than one hundred private commissions, model homes, and exhibition displays is a valuable resource for design professionals, historians, and enthusiasts alike, chronicling the development of modern interior design in the United States in the 1930s and featuring interiors by 50 designers, including Virginia Conner, Donald Deskey, Paul T. Frankl, Cedric Gibbons, Percival Goodman, Frederick Kiesler, Eleanor Le Maire, William Lescaze, Tommi Parzinger, Gilbert Tohde, Eugene Schoen, Walter Dorwin Teague, Joseph Urban, Kem Weber, and Russel Wright. More than 200 photographs and renderings illustrate how designers working in the United States in the 1930s forged a quintessentially American modern interior design, using both traditional and innovative materials while incorporating influences as varied as art deco, the Bauhaus, the Viennese Secession, Shintoism, and streamlining. Interiors span the economic spectrum, from those created for wealthy patrons who embraced the modernist aesthetic, such as Walter Annenberg, William Paley, and Abby Rockefeller Milton, to those designed with affordable furniture and furnishings in mind.