Modernity, ideology and the interior Modernity, ideology and the interior

In the framework of 1:1 Period Rooms Penny Sparke (Kingston University London) and Greg Castillo (Berkeley University of California) talked about the interior.

With the introduction of period rooms in 19th-century museums, the private interior went public. Period rooms enabled museums to exhibit their collections to the general public in an accessible manner. They also proved highly useful for propagating ideas of national style and identity. The interior thus became the site of a civilising offensive until well into the second half of the 20th century. The narrative and representational capacity of the interior - the use of which extends far beyond the museum today - will be the focus of an evening with the leading historians Penny Sparke and Greg Castillo.

Penny Sparke (Kingston University London) lectured about the emergence of the notion of the 'modern interior' in terms of the growing emphasis, through the second half of the nineteenth century, on the inside spaces of the middle-class home as places in which identities of class, gender and nationhood were formed; a new language of domesticity was constructed; and aesthetic and ethical reflection and debate took place. Greg Castillo's talk (Berkeley University of California), based on his monograph Cold War on the Home Front (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), examined the era's two contending global design aesthetics - the North Atlantic zone's International-Style Modernism and the East Bloc's Socialist Realism - as used in the battle to win the hearts and minds of cold war citizen-consumers. Castillo's research is the first to reveal how postwar domestic style and consumption were used to promote the respective superiority of the two competing global orders bracketing an "Iron Curtain." Fredie Floré (KU Leuven / UGent) will lead the discussion afterwards with Penny Sparke and Greg Castillo.

Penny Sparke is a Professor of Design History at Kingston University and the Director of the Modern Interiors Research Centre. She studied French Literature at the University of Sussex from 1967-1971 and between 1972 and 1975 undertook research for her PhD in the History of Design at Brighton Polytechnic. She subsequently developed courses in, and taught, the History of Design at Brighton Polytechnic (1975-1982) and the Royal College of Art (1982-1999). From 1999 to 2005 she was Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design & Music at Kingston University and from 2005 to 2014 she was Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise). She has also participated in conferences, given keynote addresses, been a member of journal editorial boards, curated exhibitions, delivered visiting lectures, broadcast and published in the field of Design History both nationally and internationally. Her most important publications include An Introduction to Design and Culture, 1900 to the present (1986 and 2004); _Design in Context _(1987); _Electrical Appliances _(1988); _Italian Design from 1860 to the present _(1989); _The Plastics Age _(1990); _As Long as It's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste _(1995); _Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration _(2005); and _The Modern Interior _(2008). She has also supervised and examined many PhDs in her subject.

Greg Castillo is an Associate Professor at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Associate at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has received grants and fellowships from the German Fulbright Fund, the Getty Research Institute, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Ford Foundation. His publications on cold war design politics and practices include a monograph, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and essays in Cold War Modern: Art and Design in a Divided World, 1945-1975 (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2008), and The Politics of the Kitchen in the Cold War (MIT Press, 2008). While continuing to investigate European interwar and postwar design, he is also researching San Francisco Bay Area counterculture design for the exhibition catalogue _Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia _(Walker Art Center, 2015).