ARTH 298 - Special Topics in Genre Studies: Reconstructing the Modern Interior from Queen Victoria to WWII

• T - 12:15-14:45
• EV-1.615
• INSTRUCTOR: DR. JOHN POTVIN
  

Since the nineteenth century, the interior as conceptual force and spatial reality referred to: 1) the ‘inside of a building or room, especially in reference to the artistic effect’; 2) the ‘picture or representation of the inside of a building or room’; and 3) ‘a “set” consisting of the inside of a building or room’ of a theatre. In its modern usage the interior functioned at once as a space both artistic and theatrical in its effect, public as much as private, personal as much as collective. This course will chart the emergence of the modern interior and the notion of domesticity beginning in the nineteenth century and ending with the Second World War. Focusing on the European and North American contexts, we will explore the historical, conceptual, theoretical, spatial and cultural facets of modern interior design. We will set out to explore how the modern interior was a product of various forms of historical forces and modes of representation, and question how we can set out to re-construct and/or re-present these spaces of the recent past which likely no longer exist in their original form. We will also explore how the modern interior became a ‘stage-set’ on which identity was designed, performed and consumed. As part of the course assignments, students, in groups, will be involved in researching and reconstructing an exemplary model of the modern interior from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.