Making America Modern: Interior Design in the 1930s

Marilyn F. Friedman

OUT OF PRINT

This lively and important examination of the development of modernism in America during the 1930s comprehensively details, year by year, individual projects and their impact on modern interior design in America today. A beautiful and comprehensive overview with stunning images on almost every page, this book shows how designers like Deskey, Frankl, Lescaze, Parzinger, Rohde, Schoen, Connor, and Le Maire forged something new—an American movement defined by simplicity, practicality, and comfort that embraced experimentation and variation in materials and style.

Press and Awards


March 2018
Hardcover
240 pages
205 illustrations (34 in color)
8.5 x 10.5 inches

ISBN: 978-0983863236

Description

Making America Modern is a valuable resource for scholars of twentieth-century American interior design as well as an informative and engaging narrative of the introduction of Modernism into the American home.”
–Kathleen Murphy Skolnik, Art Deco Home Journal

Design historian Marilyn F. Friedman chronicles the evolution of modern interior design in the United States throughout the 1930s. With 200 images and detailed descriptions, she presents more than one hundred interiors by fifty designers, including Donald Deskey, Paul T. Frankl, Percival Goodman, Frederick Kiesler, William Lescaze, William Muschenheim, Tommi Parzinger, Gilbert Rohde, Eugene Schoen, and Kem Weber; set designers Cedric Gibbons and Joseph Urban; and industrial designers Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Russel Wright. The book also highlights the work of women modernists who are practically unknown today, including Virginia Conner, Freda Diamond, Eleanor Le Maire, and Madame Majeska.

Interiors cover the economic spectrum, from those created for wealthy patrons who embraced the modernist aesthetic, including Walter Annenberg, William Paley, and Abby Rockefeller Milton, to those designed with affordability in mind, including private commissions, as well as furniture and model rooms for manufacturers, design associations, and museum exhibitions. The book also profiles in detail entire model homes that highlighted new concepts in design and construction, such as Norman Bel Geddes’ House of Tomorrow for Ladies’ Home Journal; Macy’s Forward House; Frederick Kiesler’s Space House for the Modernage showroom; Eleanor Le Maire’s House of Planes for Abraham & Straus; and the model houses at the 1933 Chicago and 1939 New York World’s Fairs.

About the Author
Marilyn F. Friedman is a design historian whose work focuses on the development and popularization of modern design across America during the 1920s and 30s. Born and educated in New York, Friedman studied design history at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, earning a Master of Arts degree, which led to her first publication, Selling Good Design: Promoting the Early Modern Interior (Rizzoli, 2003). She regularly contributes articles to design journals and museum publications and has lectured throughout the United States, and in England and Canada.