Mary Anne Beecher, PhD | History of Interior Architecture
his website presents a virtual exhibition of
key storage features that helped define modern
American domestic space in the early twentieth century.
By navigating the plan of a typical middle-class bungalow, you
can enter six galleries that explain and interpret a variety of innovative
storage products and spaces. Galleries are made up of advertising images,
photographs and drawings published in popular shelter magazines of the era.
The bungalow, a low compact house with a minimum number of rooms and simple rectilinear detailing, helped define the character of newly constructed suburbs of the early twentieth century. Designers of these houses prided themselves on the creation of efficient space. Therefore, they minimized circulation spaces and deliberately incorporated larger and more regular storage opportunities throughout the structure.
By applying storage principles, designers of affordable modern bungalows achieved a feeling of spaciousness and order.
In this 1923 bungalow design, provided to a reader by the Home Builders' Service Bureau of House Beautiful magazine, nearly every room contains discreet closets, cabinets, or bookcases that illustrate the evolving storage concepts of the early twentieth century. In order to improve upon the ill-defined and inconvenient storage spaces of the nineteenth century, builders and home owners introduced new objects, cabinets, and spaces that incorporated one or more of the following attributes into their designs: portability, elasticity, accessibility, disclosure, safeguarding, and consolidation.
© 2004 Department of Architecture and Allied Arts and Interactive Media Group