boredom is always counter-revolutionary

This essay seems to have been mentioned here quite a lot already. Again, its written to specific criteria and word length, so parts of it may feel a bit slow as I’ve provided most of the introduction and background elsewhere on this blog. The second half, though, is where it picks up speed and starts to talk about some new ideas regarding “model living”.

Model Living: Experiencing The Ideal Home from The Great Exhibition to IKEA

In defining his term “cultural phenomenology”, Steven Connor identifies our age as one shot through with “an intense exteriorisation of intimacy [whereby] we get our sense of interiority from the outside in, by appropriation, mimicry, purchase and exhibition” (1999, p22). Although Connor is speaking of a subjective, psychological interior, this statement can be read in a more materialist sense to draw a parallel between the formation of the domestic interior during the Nineteenth Century and the establishment of Victorian events such as the Great Exhibition of 1851. These nascent home exhibitions taught these processes of appropriation, mimicry and purchase, and domestic interiors took shape accordingly. Such events constructed images of private domesticity for public exhibition, and similar exhibitions have been staged right through to the present, with an increasing emphasis on model interiors and mock-up furnished rooms for display and consumption. This paper will trace a cultural history of these exhibitions, with particular attention paid to their didactic, prescriptive or propagandist functions; or how the exhibitions take a demonstrative – “this is how to do it” – approach.

My concerns are not primarily with the things being sold – the commodities, gadgets, furnishings – but with how they are sold, how the visitors are encouraged to conceptualise their own homes in the manner of the displayed home, and draw the public space into their private imagination. As such, I am most interested in the phenomenological, experiential aspect of the exhibitions: how, over the years, the feel of the exhibitions has changed; how the visitors are addressed; how they are supposed to react, and how they actually react to the domestic spaces offered to them. This will offer a reappraisal of how private interiors, both physical and psychological, are formed “from the outside in”.

Of course, just as domestic interiors have taken different forms since 1851, the methods of exhibition have also varied. To distinguish between the different epistemological approaches within this genealogy of home exhibitions and locate any recurring features of the idealised domestic space, I have identified four periods, which may overlap historically but remain ideologically distinct. As mentioned, this type of event really hits its stride with the Great Exhibition of 1851, the largest, most successful and most spectacular Victorian exhibition of the material productions of the emergent industrial economy[i]. Most of the contents on display were not directly intended for public consumption, demonstrating instead handicrafts from the colonies or technological advancements in industry. Nonetheless, the exhibition did display all sorts of items that were intended to disseminate into everyday life, as well as offering an impression of a lifestyle of collection, commodities and consumption. Louise Purbrick identifies the Great Exhibition as a “demonstration of industrial quantity” (2001, p3) and Walter Benjamin locates such exhibitions as having “erected the universe of commodities” (1989, p166).

The Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibitions, which have run nearly every year since 1908, represent the second-generation, scaled-down, and domesticized appropriation of the Victorian heroic period of exhibition. As with the Great Exhibition, the Daily Mail shows have existed alongside numerous similar – often event-specific – exhibitions[ii], but I have selected the Daily Mail exhibitions because they demonstrate similar concerns to their Victorian predecessors, relating to the dissemination of predominantly British technological and industrial advancements into the home via the gadget-commodity and new fashions in home furnishing.

The third period is less a fully rendered episteme than a moment of ideological rupture, a challenge to how domestic spaces could be conceptualised, and a reappraisal of a by now established aesthetic. I am referring specifically to the involvement of Alison and Peter Smithson and their House of the Future instalment at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition of 1956. Finally, as representative of the contemporary era of publicised domestic space, I shall be looking at IKEA, to interrogate how this lineage of modelled homes has been co-opted for more overtly commercial purposes. Does a visit to IKEA in 2008 feel the same as a visit to the Great Exhibition in 1851? Are we supposed to feel any of the same things?

Considering the distance between this study and its source material – the temporal distance between now and 1851, for example, or the distance between this study’s sole author and the 6,063,986 (de Maré 1972, unpaginated) visitors to the Great Exhibition, to say nothing of the vast international attendance of IKEA stores or a century of Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibitions – I should perhaps qualify how I intend to cast judgement upon the experiential similarities and differences of such disparate events. I shall piece together a range of accounts and representations of the exhibitions – including their official catalogues, contemporary newsreels and photographs, Mass Observation interviews and overheards, as well as academic interpretations – to coax out an impression of how the general public has experienced these shows, and particularly what the organisers seem to be encouraging them to feel. I appreciate that the term “general public” is fraught with difficulties, not taking into account class or gender, for example, as two factors that will hugely affect how an exhibited model room is read and internalised. Nonetheless, following Raymond Williams, I am concerned not with the reactions of specific individuals as such, but with a social experience, a generalised feeling, and the “changes of presence” (Williams 1977, p132) between each mode of exhibition. These changes of presences are taken to be something inherent to the mode of exhibition and available to any anonymous, unindividuated visitor. As such – if we apply Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model (1973) and consider home exhibitions as media with a message to be broadcast (what the ideal home should look like) – then this study is to pitch itself in the gulf between the moment of production-encoding and the moment of receiving, experiencing, and decoding by the visitor.

To attempt to access first-hand the experience of the Ideal Home exhibition, I approach the contemporary examples – IKEA and the 2008, 100^th Anniversary, Daily Mail Ideal Home show – through personally visiting these places. This methodology may seem contradictory: intensely subjective when I am looking for an unindividuated “social consciousness” (Williams 1977, p130). Instead, this is the most embedded and least mediated method of accessing the feeling that these exhibitions elicit, which as I say, is to be found at the event rather than taken to it. This approach is true to Williams’ sovereignty of lived experience and Connor’s desire to stay as close as possible to “the grain of experience” (Connor 2000, p2).

Nonetheless, this dichotomy between subjectivity and social experience provides the dynamic for this study, which is itself founded on negotiating similar dualisms: between the public space of the exhibition hall and the private spaces constructed therein; between the organizers’ production of a spectacle of domesticity and the consumers domesticizing the spectacle; between the anonymity of the model rooms and the mass-produced items on show, and the projections of personality and individualism that sell these models to the visitors. Perhaps the most fundamental dualism is between the organisers’ intentions and the visitors’ impressions, the experiential divide that Williams identifies when he says that “practical consciousness is almost always different from official consciousness” (Williams 1977, p131).

This official consciousness is exemplified most clearly in the origins of the Great Exhibition of 1851. This was borne from the desires of three men – Prince Albert, Henry Cole and Joseph Paxton, all members of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce[iii] – to “improve general taste which was recognized as being at a low level in England… [and] to wed high art with mechanical skill by means of official encouragement” (de Maré 1973, unpaginated). Along similar lines, Jeremy Black historicizes the exhibition as “an expression of the age of utilitarianism, the idea that human effort could be organised for the improvement of mankind” (2004[iv]). A more hegemonic interpretation is offered by John Golby, who says that the exhibition performed “the regulatory work of the state” whilst still “improving the lot and the minds of the working class” (Purbrick 2001, p13). All of these versions of the history of the exhibition hinge on the idea that the state has something to sell and the exhibition functions as a shop window or a display case: the overwhelming grandeur and spectacular scale would have served to valorise this new assemblage of products. The visitors – coming from a remarkably broad background of class and geography, not least through savvy marketing, improved transport links and differentiated entry prices – were being offered a taste of what was in store for them, so to speak. On a more subconscious level, with the visitor bedazzled by these material possibilities, there is an osmotic shift from taste-making to identity-forming, or as Louise Purbrick puts it:

to visit the Great Exhibition, enter its building and see its collection, was to participate voluntarily in an officially sanctioned display of things; visitors thus inhabited the modern political subjectivities associated with consenting and consuming (Purbrick 2001, p2).

The United States Court at the Great Exhibition of 1851

(Dickinson 1854, reprinted in de Maré 1972)

For the most part, the Daily Mail exhibitions of the Twentieth Century work along similar principles, albeit with the taste-making aspect played down in favour of a more altruistic sense of improving everyday life. In his introduction to the catalogue of the 1947 exhibition, Lord Rothermere emphasises the importance of maintaining domestic stability in the reconstructive, post-war environment:

the prime purpose of this first post war DAILY MAIL Ideal Home Exhibition is to accelerate the pace of [our everyday world]’s recovery and further the re-establishment of that most vital part of the nation’s life which is its family life” (1947, p3).

One of the other organizers, Frank Roots, writes that “no fanciful flights of ambition have been permitted. Every home is eminently practicable and for most of us intriguing” (p7). It would even seem that these intentions have carried right through to the present day, as the exhibition still seeks to “educate and entertain”[v]. There is nothing revolutionary or outlandish about what these exhibitions seek to do: they are not complete reappraisals of domestic life, but a way of keeping the public up-to-date with industry; they offer new things for the home, whilst the basic conceptualisation of the home remains constant, demarcated in terms of the family, practicality and homeliness.

The visitors to the Daily Mail exhibitions arrive to a domestic space predefined in remarkably heteronormative terms. This is further exemplified in the arrangement of the Britain Can Make It exhibition of 1946, with signs introducing each model room, where visitors were to see “The Kitchen of a Modern Mining Village”, designed for “THE FAMILY: Coal miner, middle aged, active trade unionist, member of colliery choir. His wife, a member of Women’s Institute” (Woodham 2004, pp.468-469). It becomes even more particular with the display of “Part of a Living Room, with Kitchen Recess, in a Small House”:

THE FAMILY: Storeroom clerk, middle-aged, collects stamps, reads thrillers, regular picture-goer. His wife, same age and interests. Their daughter, turned twenty-one, loves excitement. Their son, schoolboy and aircraft-spotter” (p469)

These conceptual homes and the identities of their imagined inhabitants are always recognisable, their register pitched between a familiar present and a softly idealised near-future. The rooms feel anonymously individual, remarkably unremarkable, particularly unparticular. This homeliness brings the model lifestyle close to the visitor, within reach, as opposed to how overwhelming the Great Exhibition must have felt with its spectacular and phantasmagorical displays of novelties and innovations[vi]. The Great Exhibition operates through scale: the physical size, the range and the cultural reach of the contents. Even the exhibition hall was an emblem of industrial modernity, dubbed the Crystal Palace. Joseph Paxton was to write, during the building’s construction, “the glass palace is going very well, it begins to have the most imposing appearance, everyone who has seen it appears delighted and astonished” (Auerbach 1999, p52). The effect of visiting this prefabricated, remarkable building that appeared onto the London landscape in record time, attracting both intrigue and scepticism, must have been quite an alienating experience in itself.

The Ideal Home exhibitions, on the other hand, stay much closer to domestic familiarity, tending to recreate recognisable suburban scenes within the exhibition hall. Whilst still quite remarkable in scale and speed of construction, this is hardly an unfamiliar aesthetic. This is a much gentler and more understated demonstration of how modern life is to look.

The Village on the Hill exhibition

Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition 1955

(from Ryan 1997, p102)

With the social dynamics of the domestic space secure, these exhibitions can function simply as display rooms for gadgets, furniture and fashions. As the Daily Mail Ideal Home catalogue of 1947 attests, the visitors are casually being shown “a worthy display of the home comforts that will appeal to Mr and Mrs Everyman” (1947, p21). British Pathé films produced a newsreel of the 1956 Daily Mail exhibition, entitled “How to Make Homes Ideal”. A voiceover addresses the film to “any young man [whose] thoughts turn to love”, and continues to offer the prospective young couple a cheap bungalow, a wedding dress, and “a kitchen brimful of little niceties only a housewife would notice”. This soon-to-be Mr and Mrs Everyman represent the reproduction of domestic space and safe, conservative and quietly aspirational middle-class everyday life that these exhibitions uphold: the Great Exhibition has ushered in the age of consumption and the commodity, now the task is to maintain that age through offering new commodities to consume.

Two young visitors surveying a combined lounge and dining room

at the 1932 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition

(from Ryan 1997, p68 )

The question that follows – if we are assessing how far the visitors’ impressions match the organizers’ intentions – is whether the visitors buy what they are being sold, literally or ideologically. It would seem, for the most part, that they do: that the practical consciousness of this experience correlates with the official consciousness. I say this not because the proposed model rooms are accepted wholesale, transplanted directly into the living rooms of Middle England, but because the visitors engage with the exhibitions on the terms that the exhibition sets. The continued success of the Daily Mail exhibitions is testament to this. For example, Mass Observation conducted a questionnaire of opinions on the Daily Herald’s Modern Homes Exhibition, also in 1946, receiving mainly replies like, “very good idea” and “it looked so clean”[vii]. Another Mass Observation study from the Britain Can Make It exhibition finds an electrician saying that “some of the developments made in the kitchen I hadn’t visualised – all modern and spotless and everything fitting so neatly” (Woodham 2004, p473).

Although visitors’ opinions regarding specific items are mixed, rejecting some suggestions, the judgements passed relate predominantly to use-value: there is no suggestion of a resistance or rejection of consumerist values, or a transcendence or progression from the endless reification necessary for commodity production. The visitors become complicit in the reproduction of a commodity-based lifestyle, a pattern that will, for one thing, ensure they return the following year to buy the newer version of whatever they bought the previous year.

Across the post-war Ideal Home exhibitions, the dominant aesthetic is mostly retrospective and nostalgic, with period architectural styles dominant. This is illustrated in the covers of two flyers distributed at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition of 1947:

Flyers for The Times Furnishing Co. Ltd. and Oetzmann

From the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition 1947

(MOA 1/9/F: Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition Leaflet, March 1947)

The reception of these exhibitions is characterised by consent and, in accordance with the organisers’ plans, they function as an education in consumption whereby the products are not necessarily accepted outright, but the visitors learn how to determine which new commodities will carry their lifestyle towards an aspirational model they are also taught to visualise. However, to trace the dominant aesthetic of the Daily Mail shows – through Deborah Ryan’s The Ideal Home Throughout the Twentieth Century (1997), or the Daily Mail’s own online timeline of the exhibition[viii] – it becomes clear that during the 1950s what has become an established style is momentarily ruptured: although the general form of the exhibitions continues to be mock-up streets and model communities, the type of interior on display moves away from familiar values and demonstrations of an achievable present, and towards new aesthetics and speculations as to how the future could look. This may be thought of as a reassessment of modernity, whereby the modernity that these exhibitions once heralded is, after fifty years of exhibition, not so modern anymore, and needs updating. The question shifts from “Do you remember?” to “Could you imagine?”

As my concerns here are not to produce a comprehensive and empirical historical study, the socio-economic and cultural reasons why this shift should occur is not so much my priority, favouring instead the resultant, manifest aesthetic and the experiential changes that follow. As such, Alison and Peter Smithson’s House of the Future instalment at the Daily Mail exhibition of 1956 is taken to represent this moment of ideological and aesthetic rejection of the status quo. Reacting in part to the institutionalised reproduction of an unambitious conceptualisation of domestic space, the Smithsons’ installation also challenged the austerity of the post-war reconstructive period, shifting the emphasis from preservation to creating anew from this potential-filled period when, as Ben Highmore says, everyday life was “made newly fragile” (2006, p275). House of the Future does not attempt to return to an idealised notion of domestic bliss and happy community, but it is a more exploratory attempt to visualise domestic life according to new values. It is a move towards the future – specifically a middle-class home of 1981 – and a new aesthetic that will emerge, predominantly from the increasing use of plastic.

The House of the Future

(from Ryan 1997, p113)

With its entirely plastic interior, internal patio and unusual geometry, the House of the Future may have been an aesthetic departure from its surroundings at the Daily Mail exhibition, but it is not without its own aesthetic precedents. It is reminiscent, for example, of Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de l’Espirit Nouveau exhibited at Paris’ Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in 1925, in both aesthetic and functional values. Now, it may even appear more kitsch than progressive. So rather than focusing on the specificities of its material difference and the novelties it introduced, I wish to argue that within the context of the home exhibition, the House of the Future offered new ways to experience model living, as a free space rather than the highly scopic and prescribed images of domesticity that were previously the standard.

The House of the Future is best understood in terms of how it makes you feel. Indeed, Peter Smithson would describe his later Team 10 work in a way that directly parallels Raymond Williams’ previously mentioned “structures of feeling” (1977, p128): “the first duty of a building is to be the fabric itself and that fabric is not just the physical fabric, it is the texture, the people, and you [the designer] have to be the servant of that” (Colomina 2000, p17). The disjuncture between viewers’ impressions and organizers’ intentions is here “reworked as an opportunity to fashion a practise that might be purposefully accommodating to the diverse and unknowable practises of inhabitation” (Highmore 2006, p286).

In experiential terms, the House of the Future is an attempt to escape the didacticism of previous approaches to conceptualising idealised domestic life – identified in this paper as the Victorian spectacular approach and the post-war nostalgic status quo approach. Alison Smithson speaks of her intentions to be as unprescriptive as possible in designing domestic space, trying instead

to give people the up-to-date living conditions they should have [in] a building which allowed them to have the freedom to create a new life there… to give them the maximum possibility of choice [and] to prepare habitat only to the point at which man can take over (quoted in Goldhagen 2000, p77).

Clearly, these are vastly different ambitions to the majority of displays at the exhibitions, most of which were run by companies with something to sell. Sarah Williams Goldhagen offers a comprehensive interpretation of both House of the Future and Patio and Pavilion – produced with Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson for the This is Tomorrow exhibition of the same year – according to Sartrean notions of authenticity, whereby genuine experiences are created through an acute awareness of ones own physicality (Goldhagen 2000, pp.77-88). In short, this translates to the material reality of these installations through processes of defamiliarization and decontextualization, whereby objects become alienated from their everyday use-value and become instead materially and compositionally specific. So, for example, the use of plastic within the House of the Future was not only a prediction of plastic’s increasingly important role within commodity production, but an attempt to isolate one material “and use it in a way that does not imitate other materials” (p86) and “express the plasticness of plastic” (p86).

These two installations represent “the home, minimally defined” (p75), shifting the viewer’s attention from displayed items to an examination of the rituals and processes that constitute domestic life. Goldhagen posits Patio and Pavilion as an installation that pulls the viewer into it, so that “one experienced oneself simultaneously as subject and object at exactly the moment that one was asked to consider if this vulgar little shack might accommodate one’s ‘most fundamental needs’” (p85). We could say something similar of House of the Future: the aesthetic departure from a recognisable present and the uncluttered plastic minimalism allow for a more open interpretation that addresses the more fundamental constituents of domestic life, an experience less anchored to contemporary mores and rituals.

The House of the Future exhibition

(from Colomina 2000, p22)

This sense of an environment liberated from its objects can be paralleled with Jean Baudrillard’s understanding of modern interior design, whereby,

function is no longer obscured by the moral theatricality of the old furniture; it is emancipated now from ritual, from ceremonial, from the entire ideology which used to make our surroundings into an opaque mirror of a reified human structure (Baudrillard [1968] 2005, p16).

For Baudrillard, the modern interior carries the freedom to function, and function only. Spaces are not predefined, but “man the interior designer” (p25) is able to construct spaces for himself, just as the viewers of the House of the Future are encouraged to imagine themselves making what they will of that space. However, whilst these intentions may sound liberating and progressive, I wish to suggest two aspects of how these ideals may have been compromised in their actual experiential effect.

Firstly, interpretations of House of the Future and Patio and Pavilion posit the Smithsons as moving away from the intense consumerism experienced elsewhere at the Ideal Home exhibitions. Ben Highmore says that “this practice of making room for diversity was part of the ethical response to consumerism” (2006, p286) whilst Beatriz Colomina compares the House of the Future to a car, as an all-in, mass-produced item that doesn’t need to be constantly refitted with new parts or commodities (2000, p18). In the Baudrillardian sense, “everything communicates” already (Baudrillard 2005, p19). This reading seems apt, but – as with Pop art, with which the Smithsons were associated – this serves to glamorise the commodity-orientated lifestyle, rather than free the subject from it. Instead of producing a prototype free from fetishized production, House of the Future makes the home itself a meta-commodity, an enlargement of the reach of which areas of private life can be shaped by spectacular, commodified relations. Similarly, whilst Baudrillard speaks of an emancipation from ritual, he is unable to identify an emancipation from the objects that sustain ritual within the home. The objects may be free to just function, but this change is mostly superficial as their functions and our subsequent reliance on the objects are never bought into question.

Secondly, and rather ironically, I would suggest that the intended experience of the House of the Future as an escape from ritual would have been compromised by the very rituals of its home exhibition context. The presence of two actors – commissioned and dressed not by the Smithsons but by the Daily Mail organisers – “enacting imagined future rituals of domesticity” (Goldhagen 2000, p75) would have occupied the space, rooting it the present and the conceptual limitations thereof. Quite figuratively, these two actors would have filled the potential imaginative space that the House offered. Likewise, to think back to the claustrophobic familial roles as prescribed by the Britain Can Make It exhibition, these actors were to be found playing equally as heteronormative roles: photos show him sat in the master chair and her in front of her mirror in the bedroom (Ryan 1997, p127). Again, this roots the display to recognisable images of domesticity drawn from a contemporary status quo, which would have to be more firmly undermined for a thorough reappraisal of domestic space and an improved scope for future domestic spaces.

So, the Smithsons’ attempt to introduce a new experiential register becomes recuperated by the commercial imperatives of the ideal home exhibition. Indeed, the entire genealogy of model interiors traced thus far represents a perpetual refinement of the methods used to sell these products and lifestyles. The much-celebrated and hugely successful IKEA approach[ix] – which constructs model rooms alongside shop floor spaces full of the products seen in the rooms – can thus be seen to harness the experiential effect of the display room, and reposition it within an overtly commercial setting. The IKEA promotional aesthetic can be understood as the product of all these years of trial-and-error model interior exhibition, a process that has sought to bridge the gap between ideal and real, between imagination and experience. This is made particularly evident upon visiting this year’s disappointingly unambitious Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, which hardly utilises the model interior, instead feeling like a glamorised market hall with salesmen, videos and special offers. It feels as though this tradition has moved from the specific event to more everyday forms of consumerism: the spectacle has been domesticized, whilst the future has been annexed into a banal present.

Two model rooms

IKEA Wednesbury 25^th March 2008

(Photo by the author)

Whilst there are many factors – from socio-economics to popular taste to design values – contributing to the success of the IKEA approach, I must again remain focussed on how the prototype rooms are experienced in situ. The visitor to the store follows a path laid out on the ground, passing alongside model rooms, into a busy “marketplace” area where the smaller items and furnishings are collected, then moves downstairs to the warehouse-like area for bigger items of furniture and onto the tills. This divide is understood by Rachel Bowlby as combining the two dominant Twentieth Century models for retail: the department store and the supermarket (2000, p10). Whilst the Smithsons’ aesthetic mission was to create an imaginative space within the model rooms, and minimise the top-down didacticism, IKEA moves the other way, filling the rooms with visual information to defer a more comprehensive evaluation of the space.

Hanging from the ceiling are price tags and information cards for each furnishing, annotating the tableau as if it were a catalogue image or webpage with pop-up information boxes. Whilst IKEA’s design values are characterised as minimalistic, clean and simple, its promotional aesthetic is instead busy, distracting and detailed. The visitor is invited to walk into the displayed room, to become actively involved with the tableau and to hunt out the “little niceties” rather than to stand back and survey the totality. Again, the fundamentals of domestic space are taken as given – family homes, kitchens for mother, blue bedrooms for boys – so the attention shifts to the details, the smaller furnishings, gadgets and nick-nacks.

Some rooms are introduced as modelled on real spaces, with large “welcome to my home” signs displaying the owner and a few words on the particularities of the room which, as ever, remains curiously anonymous. Following Guy Debord’s declaration that “in societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an intense accumulation of spectacles” (Debord 2005, stanza 1[x]), IKEA’s model rooms are to be experienced visually, with as little recourse to the imagination as possible.

Model Living Room

IKEA Wednesbury 25^th March 2008

(Photo by the author)

Whilst the House of the Future was compromised by its material reality and exhibition-hall context, the IKEA displays instead celebrate their own imperfections. The slightly shop-spoiled dirtiness and debris, either rubbish from other visitors or misplaced items from elsewhere in the store serve to bring the display closer to the viewer, pulling the idealised space into the domestic imaginary and strengthening the rooms’ appeal. There is, in some ways, an honesty to this approach: this could be your rubbish, your bits left lying around; these rooms are to be used, not just looked at. As Tod Hartman observes, the IKEA displays “are not the impossibly tidy, unattainably beautiful montages of highbrow decorating magazines. Rather, they are eminently democratic – attainable, unpretentious, and inexpensive” (2007, p483).

IKEA billboard on display directly opposite the entrance to

the 2008 Daily Mail Ideal Homes Exhibition

(Photo by the author)

However, this produces a dual identity: the IKEA displays may be democratic in their attainability and embracement of their inconsequential materiality; yet they remain didactic in their prescription of social roles and domestic ritual. The visitor, seeing these rooms that are both idealised and functional sees correct forms, model – but still real – lives. Baudrillard observes how interior decorating is now approached in terms of “problems and solutions” (2005, p315): these models are the solutions to domestic problems the visitor was perhaps previously not even aware of. The spectacle precedes reality, and the visitor’s subjectivity accommodates these models, rather than the other way round. IKEA thus produces “consumption-derived identities” (Hartman 2007, p485) as much as it produces furnishings.

As such, IKEA represents the culmination of this history of model interiors, a history that has brought the idealised image ever closer to home, whilst paradoxically securing how home is conceptualised. Images of private domesticity now permeate everyday life, ostensibly serving to sell products, but more importantly to sell lifestyles and subjectivities, and reproduce the conditions necessary to sell more standardised yet infinitely variable products. The most lasting trait of these exhibitions of model interiors, however, is their ability to self-reproduce.

Bibliography

Auerbach, J.A. (1999) The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Baudrillard, J., Benedict J. (Trans.) (2005) The System of Objects, London and New York: Verso.

Benjamin, W. (1989) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, London: Verso.

Bowlby, R. (2000) Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping, London: Faber and Faber.

Colomina, B. (1999) “Collaborations: The Private Life of Modern Architecture” from The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 48 (3 – Sep. 1999), pp.462-471.

Colomina, B. (2000) “Friends of the Future: A Conversation with Peter Smithson” from October, 94 (The Independent Group) (Autumn 2000), pp.3-30.

Connor, S. (1999) “CP: or, A Few Don’ts by a Cultural Phenomenologist” from Parallax, 5 (2), pp. 17-31.

Connor, S. (2000) “Making an Issue of Cultural Phenomenology” from Critical Quarterly, 42 (1), pp.2-6.

De Maré, E. (1973) London 1851: The Year of the Great Exhibition, London: J.M. Dent Ltd.

Debord, G., Knabb, K. (Trans.) (1967 [1983]) Society of the Spectacle, London: Rebel Press.

Grieve, A. (1994) “‘This is Tomorrow’, a Remarkable Exhibition Born from Contention” from The Burlington Magazine, 136 (1093 – Apr. 1994), pp.225-232.

Hall, S. (1973) ‘Encoding, Decoding.’ In During, S. (Ed.) The Cultural Studies Reader, London: Routledge.

Hartman, T. (2007) “On the Ikeaization of France” from Public Culture, 19, (3), pp.483-498.

Highmore, B. (2003) “Between Modernity and the Everyday” from ‘Team 10 – between Modernity and the Everyday’ conference organised by the Faculty of Architecture TU Delft, Chair of Architecture and Housing, June 5-6, 2003. pp.35-45.

Highmore, B. (2006) “Rough Poetry” from Oxford Art Journal, 29 (2), pp.269-290.

Highmore, B. (2007) “Richard Hamilton at the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958: Gallery for a Collector or Brutalist or Tachiste Art” from Art Journal, 30 (5), pp. 712-737.

Konzelmann, S.J. et al. (2005) The Export of National Varieties of Capitalism: The Cases of Wal-Mart and IKEA, from the CBR Research Programme on Corporate Governance September 2005, London: Birkbeck College, University of London.

Lancaster, B. (1995) The Department Store: A Social History, London: Leicester University Press.

Myers, J. (2004) “The Future as Fetish” from October, 94 (The Independent Group), (Autumn 2004), pp.62-88.

Purbrick, L. (Ed.) (2001) The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ryan, D.S. (1997) The Ideal Home Throughout the 20th Century, London: Hazar Publishing Ltd.

Goldhagen, S.W. (Ed.) (2000) Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press.

Whitely, N. (1985) “Pop, Consumerism and the Design Shift” from Design Issues, 2 (2 – Autumn 1935), pp.31-45.

Williams, R. (1977) “Structures of Feeling” from Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Woodham, J. (2004) “Design and Everyday Life at the Britain Can Make It Exhibition, 1946: ‘stripes, spots and homespun versus chintzy armchairs and iron bedsteads with brass knobs’” from The Journal of Archtecture, 9 (Winter 2004), pp. 463-476.

Radio/Television:

BBC Radio 4 (2006) In Our Time: The Great Exhibition, 27^th April 2006 available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20060427.shtml [accessed 18/3/2008]

Pathé News (1956) “How to Make Homes Ideal”. Newsreel shot from the 1956 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, England: British Pathé.

Catalogues:

1951 Exhibition – Festival of Britain Guide-Catalogue. Catalogue for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Whitechapel Art Gallery (1956) This is Tomorrow. Catalogue for the 1956 This is Tomorrow Exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London

Mass Observation:

Mass Observation Archive (University of Sussex): 1/9/A – Modern Homes Exhibition, London 1946; 1/9/B – Notes, Observations and Overheard Conversations; 1/9/C – Questionnaire Replies; 1/9/F – Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition Leaflets, March 1947.

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[i] Of course, the Great Exhibition has its own precursors and lineage, particularly in the French trade exhibitions, and the department store with its reconfiguring of the relationship between leisure-time and shopping, and the increasingly spectacular relationship between the subject and the commodity. For more information, see Lancaster, B. (1995) The Department Store: A Social History.

[ii] Including the Working Class Home Exhibition (1937), the Daily Herald Post-War Homes Exhibition (1945) and the Britain Can Make It exhibition (1946). For a more comprehensive list, see Woodham (2004, p470).

[iii]Renamed in 1847 to simply the Royal Society of Arts.

[iv] From Radio 4’s In Our Time: The Great Exhibition (27/4/2006) 1:31

[v] From http://www.idealhomeshow.co.uk/100-years-of-the-show/a-brief-history/1940-1970/ [accessed 17/03/2008]

[vi] This is not to say, however, that over the years the Daily Mail exhibitions have not traded to some degree in novelty. However, even at its most quirky, the exhibition never strays far from the domestic: in 1996, the exhibition’s central feature was the biggest bathroom in the world. However, regardless of its size, it was still a bathroom as we expect one to look.

[vii] Mass Observation Archive, from Modern Home Exhibition 1946 directive, 1/9/B: Notes, Observations and Overheard Conversations and 1/9/C: Questionnaire Replies.

[viii] http://www.idealhomeshow.co.uk/100-years-of-the-show/ [accessed 17/03/2008]

[ix] For an analysis of IKEA’s successes and business models, see Konzelmann et al. (2005) The Export of National Varieties of Capitalism: The Cases of Wal-Mart and IKEA; and for an analysis of the role of IKEA products outside of the store, see Hartman (2007) On the Ikeaization of France.

[x] This text is unpaginated, divided instead into aphoristic stanzas.