The Modern Period Room: The Construction of the Exhibited Interior 1870û1950

How does one turn a house containing artworks into a museum? How does one narrate the story of the lives that were lived there? How authentic can a retrospective reconstruction of interior spaces and their contents be? The contributors ofThe Modern Period Room,drawn from a broad range of disciplines, consider the interiors of the modern era and their more recent reconstruction from a variety of different viewpoints. Beneath the conceptual and physical strategy of the representational technique of the modern period room lie numerous conflicting intentions. This collection of essays by design historians, architects and curators engages with these tensions. The authors explore themes and examples by architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Truus Schroeder and Gerrit Rietveld, Erno Goldfinger and others in a bid to reveal the specific cultural encoding of presented interior spaces. The book's critical engagement with the issues and conventions which surround the modern period room willallow historians and theorists of architecture, design and social history to investigate the contexts in which this representational device has been used. The various models of period room enables the reader to understand just how dynamic, contributory and ultimately interventionist the presentation of the period room is in the process of architectural and design history making.