Home, Workplace, and Identity

Detail from the book cover [above], Elsie De Wolfe and a room designed by her [below, Wikimedia Commons]

Ben Koush
May. 28, 2009
12:28 PM

Purchase Alprazolam

Reviews

Purchase Alprazolam, Detail from the book cover [above], Elsie De Wolfe and a room designed by her [below, Wikimedia Commons]

Since there are few serious studies of interior design, The Modern Interior, however slight and scantily illustrated, is a welcome addition to the library. Penny Sparke, an English critic, Buy alprazolam us pharmacy overnight, has written on the subject for several years, including Elsie De Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration (Acanthus Press, 2005). Sparke’s book is not a visual tour of modern interior design, alprazolam expire. Rather it describes the way people live in an industrialized world and identifies in different characters of the spaces they create for themselves the locus of the “modern life.”

The concept of “style” cannot explain the appearance of these spaces. There is a deeper structure underlying their organization. According to Sparke it is the oscillation between the public and private spheres that “defined modernity, and by extension the modern interior, reflecting the constantly shifting identities and the increasingly fragmented experiences of the inhabitants of the modern world” (11), Purchase Alprazolam. Alprazolam lorazepam, Sparke’s premise revolves around two poles—“home” (specifically the parlor and kitchen) and “workplace” (specifically the manager’s office and factory floor)—that at the start of the Victorian era, where the book begins, became rigidly defined in opposition to each other. Hours spent in Spartan, alprazolam generic names, nineteenth-century factory floors supported the acquisition of the multitude of mass-produced, decorative objects that constituted the nineteenth-century interior. Alprazolam sleep, In the first chapters we see interiors of hotels, clubs, restaurants, railway cars, 2 mg alprazolam, and insane asylums outfitted as living rooms. Later chapters show kitchens, Alprazolam 2mg no prescription us pharm, butler’s pantries, and breakfast nooks outfitted as laboratories. Purchase Alprazolam, As the book progresses to what is more typically considered modern design (think Frankfurt kitchen, Florence Knoll, and Eames Aluminum series chairs), we see living and working areas that are nearly indistinguishable from each other. You go to work, then come home, pictures of alprazolam 1 mg, and it all looks the same. Or does it. Receive written prescription for alprazolam offshore, Sparke begins the book with a photo of an abbreviated living room set up in the center of a Canadian mall inhabited by snoozing shoppers in tracksuits. Although everything is mixed up, there is still a semblance of order. We see the living room as “home” despite its place in the center of a concourse, Purchase Alprazolam. It speaks touchingly to the perseverance of a traditional notion of “domesticity” despite the destabilizing effects of industrialization, alprazolam heroin mix.

One of Sparke’s most provocative themes is to explore the ways that the products of industrialization were presented and consumed by (predominantly female) members of households during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It becomes unsettling because we like to think that we’ve devised creative decorating schemes that express our individuality. Alprazolam powder, But how is this achieved. Purchase Alprazolam, Through a selection of standard products, made anonymously in factories available for purchase through such venues as catalogs and department stores. Our individuality is created from what is made available for us to buy.

In addition to the typical discussion of shopping, decorators, alprazolam 2mg no rx, and the books and magazine articles they wrote, Sparke also includes sections on department stores, Is snorting alprazolam bad, couturiers, and actors. Modern haute couture as we know it know it now (House of Dior, Chanal, alprazolam info, etc.) did not exist until the later part of the nineteenth century when constantly changing codes of etiquette required specialists to keep up. Women with the means to do so looked to these “experts, Alprazolam 0.25mg, ” often self-proclaimed, to select what was “fashionable” from a dizzying array of newly available fabrics, accessories, and categories of clothing (sportswear, alprazolam sweating, evening gowns, house dresses, Knock out drugs alprazolam, etc.). The restless cycles of fashion where something is not able to be worn the next year, but must be replaced by something new is, for Sparke, a key condition of modern life, Purchase Alprazolam. To be modern is to be up to date, constantly on the move navigating from one season and one event to the next.

The intersection of clothing (limp, alprazolam mixed with, atectonic, “feminine”) and building (rigid, Ambien alprazolam, upright, “masculine”) is particularly interesting to me not only for its erotic implications but also for the exciting clash of systems is presupposes. Austrian architect Adolf Loos who designed many more interior spaces than buildings famously wrote as frequently, and with just as much vehemence, alprazolam vs phenazepam, about the proper way to dress, the virtues of hygiene, Mexican pharmacies hydrocodone alprazolam, and healthy eating as he did about architecture. A second critic, Walter Benjamin, writing the 1920s and 1930s retrospectively observed:

The nineteenth century, street value of alprazolam er 2mg, like no other was addicted to dwelling. Purchase Alprazolam, It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person and encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might well be reminded of the inside of a compass case where the instrument lies embedded in deep, usually violet, folds of velvet.

Deep violet folds enveloping oneself, Picture alprazolam .9, how positively zygotic and strangely emasculating. What are these modern women doing.

This leads us to the curious heroine of the book, Elsie de Wolfe, order alprazolam by phone, a bisexual actress and fashion model turned decorator in the turn-of-the-century in New York. De Wolfe’s crucial dictum seemed to be that Louis Quinze was appropriate for every situation. To say De Wolfe’s design sense was antithetical to what most people consider to be modern—simple, without to recourse to historical models and a somewhat severe appearance, much like the photograph of the pensive, short-haired bohemian woman with fierce bangs surrounded by tube-steel furniture that appears on the cover of the book—would be an understatement, Purchase Alprazolam. Alprazolam foreign, But her life’s project to gain professional recognition for such efforts was perhaps, in the end, the most modern way to live. De Wolfe and her contemporaries, regardless of their design preferences, carved out a space for a new profession and those who followed would do well to be grateful.

In the end we begin to understand it isn’t so much the final appearance of something but the intent behind its design that makes it modern. It is perhaps disconcerting because it implies that modernism, which we usually consider to be direct and clear, is just as frequently opaque, unstable, and shifting. As Edwin Meese said of pornography when he couldn’t give a succinct definition, “I know it when I see it,” the essence of what is modern must be thoroughly examined to be fully understood. To constantly investigate and keep an open mind is indeed a valuable lesson.