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Post War Atomic-Age Interiors

Architectural historians generally identify 1933 as the year mid-century modern design began in America. Certainly, the concepts that later influenced mid-century design began in the 1930s, more in Europe than in the U.S. They did not really flower until the end of the World War stimulated the demand for affordable housing on a massive scale.

Post-war housing featured "minimalist" interiors, devoid of unnecessary ornamentation, and focused squarely on function.

New materials, many the products of war-time development such as plastics and engineered wood products, dramatically influenced mid-century designers. Plas­tics such as vinyl, Plexi­glas, and Lucite found a place in post-war design for their own qualities, rather than as an imitator of other materials such as wood or stone.

Furniture was about being functional. It served a purpose, and its purpose was paramount in its design. Lines were kept clean.

Advances in technology and scarcity fueled much of the transition from a heavy emphasis on natural materials during the prior Arts & Crafts period to engineered materials – chrome, Formica, and vinyl.

Traditional materials like wood, rattan, and natural fibers remained, however, and the natural and man-made were combined in new and innovative ways.

Plain doors and windows, minimal trim, if any, and unadorned walls contributed to the "vanilla" look of the period. But, most homes did not stay vanilla very long. Homeowners immediately set about adding the special touches that made their new house a unique home.

Gypsum Drywall Comes of Age

The material that had the most influence on Post-war modern interior design was gypsum drywall which came into nearly universal use after the World War to replace wet plaster walls.

It was invented in 1916 by Sackett Plaster Company (a subsidiary of United States Gypsum Corporation (USG) after 1909) and originally called Sacket Board. It was promoted as a fire-resistant replacement for wet plaster that was quick and easy to install.

Acceptance of the new material was slow in coming, however.

Plaster had been the standard wall treatment for hundreds of years and homebuilders, conservative by nature, were reluctant to adopt the unfamiliar material.

USG changed its name to the catchier in an attempt to draw more attention to the material.

What turned the tide, however, were the multiple disadvantages of wet plaster to the feverish world of post-war homebuilding.

It was time-consuming to install and required highly skilled labor. Plasterers often apprenticed for a decade before they were considered to have mastered the craft.

The time and skill required made wet plaster relatively expensive.

Its long curing time often meant weeks and sometimes months of drying before a wall could be painted or wallpapered.

In the frenetic Post-war housing boom which built more than 21 million new homes between 1946 and 1960, plaster slowed the building process substantially.

Drywall, by contrast, could be installed and finished, ready to paint, in three days.

Builders were forced by competitive pressures to adopt the new wall system to save both time and money, and by 1950 it had become the standard in most of the country.

Minimalist Retro Interior Moldings

Wet plaster walls necessarily included large gaps and required wide moldings to conceal the gaps. Accordingly, moldings in the Victorian and Arts & Crafts periods were wide and thick, up to 9" wide and 1" thick. Made mostly of oak or cherry, they were usually varnished to emphasize the figure of the wood.

Gypsum Drywall eliminated the need for wide moldings and made others totally unnecessary. Crown molding, necessary with wet plaster to hide potential cracks where walls met ceilings, was no longer needed. Nor was picture rail – needed to hang pictures on plaster walls into which a nail could not be easily driven without rock boring tools.

Only the absolutely essential moldings were retained – baseboard along with window and door casings. Some builders eliminated even this minimal room trim.

In part, the change was stylistic, but it was also necessary because clear, knot-free, hardwood for moldings was getting scarcer, harder to come by, and more expensive.

Old-growth forests had been largely depleted.

Gum­wood, popular in inexpensive trim and moldings in the 1920s and '30s had been almost used up by 1945. It is still so rare and expensive that it is cataloged and sold as a hardwood – even though it is anything but.

Old-growth pine was also largely gone. Only in the American west was suitable molding still available in the form of Douglas Fir, but the large old-growth fir trees suitable for knot-free molding would be gone by 1970.

Plantation trees – trees grown as a commercial crop – barely existed and the extensive replanting that has since provided molding grade lumber was still in its infancy.

Builders turned to finger-jointed pine, a manufactured product made by joining small pieces of pine boards with modern adhesives. Stained, the joints were visible, so painted pine molding became the trim of choice.

Narrow and relatively thin, minimalist trim became the new standard. Baseboards were eventually reduced to 3-1/4" with a thickness of 3/8" – the current standard. Door and window casings were standardized at 2-1/4".

The decorative function of moldings was de-emphasized. They often were painted the same color as the wall on which they were installed to make them nearly invisible.

Some architects eliminated wood trim completely, creating a "reveal" where walls joined floors in which a recess at the bottom of the wall marks the transition rather than wood trim.

At windows and doors, gypsum drywall was "returned" to make a recess for the opening that made wood trim unnecessary. Not only was the result very minimalistic but it was faster to build and less expensive, traits that appealed to post-war builders.

Atomic Age Doors – From Panel to Slab

Until the last half of the 20^th century, doors were made of boards usually in some form of panel door in which one or more central panels are held in a frame. This configuration produced a very stable door that did not expand and contract seasonally.

Better technology made frame-and-panel doors obsolete almost overnight. New and more powerful adhesives made possible the durable slab door, fabricated from pressure-laminated wood.

These were direct inheritors of the stressed-panel technologies used to build plywood PT boats and lightweight aircraft for the war effort.

A honeycomb of wood (later cardboard) strips supported two thin plywood panels. Wood blocks strategically located to support hinges and latches made the doors as strong and reliable as panel doors.

Doors were pre-hung in their frames at the factory, making them faster to install using only semi-skilled labor. In the 1930s a skilled carpenter was expected to hang four interior doors in an eight-hour day. By 1950 a team of two "trimmers" was expected to set four prehung doors every hour – 32 doors in an eight-hour day.

While the panel-look door still survives, these are often not actual panel doors. They are pressure laminated plywood or plastic shells over a honeycomb mesh – essentially slab doors with an embossed design.

The same process is used to make exterior doors using steel or fiberglass shells shaped to look like panel doors with an interior of insulating foam – far more energy-efficient than even the best panel door.

Retro Colors, Paint, and Wallpaper

Exuberance characterized the immediate post-war years.

America was thriving and the post-war economy was booming. The excitement was reflected in the bold color palette of post-war interiors.

The muted earth tones of the Arts & Crafts period were replaced with vibrant pastels and electric darker colors to create a palette unique to the time.

Pastels such as pink, turquoise, mint green, pale yellow, and robin's egg blue were daringly comingled with "sunny day" yellow, electric blue, very orange, and fire-engine red to produce color combinations never before seen in interior decoration.

Only at the very end of the period did more muted colors influenced by nature regain their popularity. These included brown, cream, gray, and green, leading to the mid-1960s in which Harvest Gold and Avocado Green became the must-have colors for kitchen appliances.

Although this vibrant color palette is indelibly associated with mid-century modern de­cor, it actually originated in the middle to late Arts & Crafts era.

As early as the 1920s was showing many of these same colors in its bathroom advertisements. And, while Arts & Crafts houses usually featured muted colors taken from nature, kitchens were often an exception – brightly painted with colorful wallpaper very similar to that found in post-war kitchens decades later.

Wallpaper, deemphasized during the Arts & Crafts period, was resurrected in colors and patterns that better reflected an optimistic post-war America.

Colorful and richly figured wallpaper was considered the main feature of a room's de­cor rather than the backdrop against which the room's de­cor was displayed. It was common to use wallpaper on just one "accent wall" of a room with coordinating paint everywhere else.

Pastels combined with large, bold botanical prints were particularly favored as were small geometric patterns in vibrant colors. Even where the colors were somewhat muted, the patterns were bold and distinct.

Post-War Mid-Century Flooring

The Levitts, the most prolific builders of the mid-century period, preferred resilient asphalt tile flooring for their Levittown houses, set directly onto the concrete slab floor over radiant heat. Unfortunately, the asphalt tile of the time contained asbestos and over time became brittle. By the mid-1950s the Levitts has transitioned to vinyl tile.

Natural and Engineered Wood Flooring

Outside of Levitt communities, especially where the house was set over a basement, the favored material was stained and varnished oak often in the form of parquet tiles or herringbone patterns rather than parallel strips or planks more common both before and after the mid-century period.

Parquet and herringbone patterns made more efficient use of increasingly scarce lumber by making effective use of even very short strips.

But, it was also more time-consuming to install, and the words "time" and "consuming" were an anathema to Post-War homebuilders.

Wood flooring manufacturers solved the labor problem by combining strips into engineered flooring tiles or blocks that installed very quickly.

Typically a two-person flooring team could install, sand, and varnish the flooring for an entire house in two or three days, then return and apply the final varnish coat a few days later. Pre-finished flooring made this process even faster.

Ceramic Tile Flooring

Ceramic tile flooring was favored for wet areas such as bathrooms and entries. In warmer climates, ceramic tile was commonly used in living areas. This was particularly the case in Southern California and the Southwest where the Spanish influence is dominant. Eichler homes, in particular, made extensive use of ceramic tile throughout the house, often with radiant heating underneath.

Tile in Post-War bathrooms was particularly colorful. In entries and living areas, however, it was likely to be more muted, with neutrals and earth colors dominating – a tendency that grew as the period wore on. By the end of the era around 1965, almost all ceramic tile was steadfastly neutral.

Vinyl Flooring

Early resilient tile made from asphalt and asbestos was popular from the 1920s. It was low-cost, easy to install, and resisted abrasion and moisture, but grew brittle over time. Its range of colors was limited and tended to be dark due to the inherent limitations of the material.

It was replaced during the mid-century with vinyl tile which was brighter and retained its flexibility over time.

Polyvinyl chloride was not a new material. It had been discovered in the 19th century by a French physician. But it was not until 1926 that an American research chemist named Waldo Semon invented a plasticized version that was flexible, but not adhesive. Stickiness was a serious limitation of earlier formulations.

As flooring, it was introduced to the public at the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago in 1933 but received only modest attention during a period in which most homeowners preferred natural materials such as linoleum, cork, or wood.

The World War accelerated its development to replace materials made scarce by the war, primarily rubber. It blossomed in the 1950s once it began to be manufactured in Europe and North America on an industrial scale, and in the 1960s largely supplanted asphalt tiles as well as true linoleum.

Mid-century decorators took full advantage of its design potential. Vinyl could be brightly colored and mid-century colors were bold and varied and commonly set in patterns that were even bolder and more varied – often in contrasting color combinations seldom seen since.

Wall-To-Wall Carpeting

By 1960 wall-to-wall carpeting was the sought-after flooring and by 1965 was almost universal in new housing.

In the early post-war period, wall-to-wall carpeting was an option in new housing. If the homeowner selected carpet, it was commonly laid over a brand-new, never-walked-on wood floor. We have been often pleasantly surprised to find an almost pristine wood floor under the old, shaggy carpet we remove in post-war housing renovations.

By most accounts, wall-to-wall carpeting became popular only after some way of keeping it clean became available.

Loose rugs and carpets could be removed for cleaning by hanging them on a clothesline and vigorously beating to remove all dirt and dust. But wall-to-wall carpeting, fixed to the floor, had to be cleaned in situ.

The device needed to maintain wall-to-wall carpeting was the vacuum cleaner which had become small and affordable by 1940 when it first appeared in an upright configuration.

The Hoover "beats as it sweeps as it cleans" beater bar (introduced in 1926) duplicated rug beating to loosen and then vacuum up any debris embedded in the carpet (and scare the bejeezus out of the cat).

The problem with the carpet, however, is that even with regular vacuuming and occasional steam cleaning, it is never really clean, harboring whole colonies of pathogens as well as dust mites, pet dander, cockroach droppings, and mold spores, to name just a few.

The American Lung Association recommends against its installation for just those health concerns.

It has fallen out of favor but it had a good run. It was the dominant floor covering until the 1990s when prefinished natural and engineered wood floors and laminated plank flooring made installing a wood or wood-look strip floor a lot easier and much less messy.

Atomic Age Furnishings

Furniture design borrowed heavily from the Bauhaus school of the 1920s bypassing much of the intervening design motifs favored in Art Deco forms of the immediate pre-war years.

The Bauhaus Effect

The Staatliches Bauhaus (literally: "state building house") universally known as the Bauhaus was arguably the most influential design and architecture school of the 20^th century. Its outsized impact still underscores much of modern product design even into the 21st century.

Under the guidance of architect Walter Gropius, teachers and students embarked on a voyage of design discovery that lasted just 14 years but that would change forever the face of modern architecture, furniture design and, interior de­cor.

The curriculum stressed the merging of design with industrial arts. Students were taught to create designs that could easily be mass-produced. Prag­ma­tism with an emphasis on simplicity and austerity was the core of its design philosophy the credo of which was "form follows function". Applied ornamentation was shunned as was anything else that did not contribute to an object's essential purpose.

Bauhaus had only a modest impact on early 20^th-century design, especially outside of Germany, before the school was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis for being "un-German".

After its closing, the school's faculty dispersed throughout Europe and the U.S. – the Bauhaus diaspora – taking with it the Bauhaus ideals which became the cornerstone of post-war modernist design.

Had the school's associates stayed in Germ­any, it is doubtful that Bauhaus design would have had nearly the influence on post-war design that it ultimately exerted.

Walter Gropius emigrated to Eng­land, then to the U.S. where he joined the faculty at Harvard University. Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus School's last director, became the dean of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the first institution in the U.S. to offer a Ph.D. in product and industrial design.

Bauhaus artist Josef Albers became the head of the department of design at Yale University. His work became the basis of modern art education programs in the U.S.

László Moholy-Nagy briefly settled in the U.K. before moving to the U.S. where he established the School of Design in Chicago which later became part of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian-born architect and industrial designer followed Walt­er Gro­pius to Harv­ard. He opened an office in New York in 1946 and became one of the most sought-after architects at the peak of 20th century design.

Particleboard

Particleboard or pressed board, considered an inferior material today, was a designer material in the 1950s, and designers pushed its potential to the limit.

Invented by German engineer and Luftwaffe pilot Max Himmelheber in 1932, it was first mass produced in Germany where wood had become scarce during the World War.

Torfit Werke AG in Bremen, Germany, was the first factory to produce the material (as "pressed wood" Ger: Pek-Pressholz). It reportedly manufactured 10 tons per day in the early 1940s, including formed moldings as well as flat panels.

After the war, the technology migrated to th U.S. and Canada, but was not in wide use until the 1960s when it became the mainstary of cheap, mass-produced furniture and lost much of its earlier alure among designers of upscale furniture.

He was responsible for two of the most enduring chair designs of the mid-century, the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair, recognized as "among the 10 most important chairs of the 20^th century."

New Materials

New materials, notably plastics and laminated wood panels, many developed during the World War for military use, made sweeping curves possible through industrial molding rather than labor intensive and time-consuming craft-shop carving and shaping.

Furniture, especially chairs, were reimagined by designers such as Charles & Ray Eames, Arne Jacobsen^[1], and Eero Saarinen using shapes that better fit the human body.

Where earlier chairs demanded an upright, formal posture, chair designs of the 1940s and '50s encouraged lounging in a relaxed posture, often in a semi-reclining position.

Traditional materials declined in influence, but did not go away.

Wood remained the first choice for case-making, although often in the form of an engineered product such as plywood or particleboard rather than lumber in its natural state.

Engineered panels encouraged period designers to adopt rectangular pastterns for casework such as chests, dressers, desks, sideboards, and to a lesser extent, for tables.

Rectangular panels were easier and cheaper to fabricate in a factory setting than curved or rounded elements that require extra processing. IF turned elements were use – table legs, for example – they were very plain and simple to produce using semi-automated lathes.

Teak was favored by the Scandi­nav­ian school of design, so much so that most Asian teak forests were depleted by the 1980s. Today's teak is primarily plant­a­tion-grown in As­ia and South Amer­ica.

Other species also featured. Rosewood, mahogany, and walnut were favored furniture woods in the 1950s. Birch, although in widespread use for doors and moldings, did not migrate to furnishings in any significant way.

Finishes were light and airy. In part this was a reflection of the light-hearted mood of Post-War buyers, but it was also a reaction to the dark-hued wood finishes of the prior Arts & Crafts and Victorian periods.

Arts & Crafts furnishings, in particular, tended to be dark and somber. The oak furniture manufactured by Gus­taf Stick­ley was often so dark as to be almost black.

Other designers such as Charles Lim­bert, Charles Ren­nie Mac­kint­osh, and Charles & Hen­ry Greene likewise favored well-figured wood richly finished in somber hues.

For more information on Arts & Crafts furnishings, see Arts & Crafts Interiors The First Comfortable House.

Designers of the mid-century swung to the other end of the spectrum. Light, airy, cheerful was the mood of the period, well-reflected in its finish choices.

The wood was rarely stained except to emphasize grain. It was left its natural color. Lighter-hued woods were preferred to traditional darker species: white oak over red oak and walnut sapwood over darker heartwood for their lighter hues. Rosewood from Honduras was preferred over its Brazilian cousin due to its lighter tone. Teak from Myanmar and Indonesia was favored for its pale and even coloration.

Interior Styles

Some of the more faddish post-war decorating trends came and went quickly.

Remember Campaign furniture and the (best forgotten) Mediterranean style? Both appeared and disappeared in about five years, leaving virtually no trace that they ever were – thank you gods of good taste.

But, the nice thing about mid-century houses is that they can adapt to just about any interior styling. They are extremely basic and, therefore, flexible.

While fussy Victorian may look out of place, any of what are termed the "modernist" styles can be used: art nouveau, art deco, industrial, and Scandi­nav­ian.

Colonial houses lend themselves well to Colonial styles. cape cods can adopt any of these as well as a toned-down Arts and Crafts look.

Art Nouveau & Art Deco Influences

Art Nouveau ("New Art" in English) originated in the late 19th century as the French version of the Arts & Crafts movement. It was the first widely popular design movement of the 20^th century, conceived as a "new style for a new century," With a focus on decorative and applied arts.

It was, like most Arts & Crafts motifs, inspired by nature and minimalism. Its goal was less clutter and cleaner lines in a direct rejection of the busy fussiness of late Victorian-age design. Its primary characteristic was the extensive use of curves and free-flowing lines, particularly evident in furnishings.

Art Nouveau greatly influenced architecture but never became an architectural type in its own right. It was more an interior design motif with some fairly characteristic features including a preference for hardwood flooring and a palette of soft colors: grays, soft yellows, browns, olives, and lilacs.

By the 1930s Art Nouveau had morphed into the Art Deco movement that lasted in somewhat muted form until the 1970s.

Art Deco was very popular in the 1930s, not so much for homes as for public and commercial buildings. The style gave period movie theaters their characteristic look.

It was the overarching style of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings and Rockefeller Center. The Golden Gate Bridge is an Art Deco-inspired structure as is the Nebraska State Capitol building, the only Art Deco state capitol.

Art Deco never became a true architectural style. It was a style of decoration.

Unlike Art Nouveau which favored curves and free-flowing lines, Art Deco emphasized precise geometric shapes and forms using parallel straight lines, zigzags, chevrons, and stylized floral motifs. It represented industrialism, technology, and speed. The first "streamlined" locomotives and automobiles were, in fact, Art Deco motifs.

It also had a largely unacknowledged debt to the traditional motifs of Native American art.

The style made extensive use of novel Post-War materials including aluminum, stainless steel, and plastics while continuing the use of some Art Nouveau materials, such as glass in both interior detail and furnishings. It favored bold use of color in carpets and accessories.

Both Art Nouveau and Art Deco, although often somewhat muted, fit well inside post-war houses.

Interior walls are typically mono­chrom­attic and light to keep the look clean and crisp.

The tone of a room is often conveyed through its rugs and furnishings rather than its architectural elements which were deliberately kept bland as a neutral backdrop.

Furnishings usually contained rich colors and strong stylized shapes. A comfortable sofa, at least one club or lounge chair, and a coffee table are almost required elements of the Art Nouveau or Art Deco living room.

Scandi­nav­ian Modernism

Called by many names, the most common being "Danish Modern", no style captured the post-war spirit quite like Scandi­nav­ian Modernism, a celebration of simple, uncomplicated designs, minimalism, and functionality.

The style was an extension of the Euro­pean Arts & Crafts movement developed by Scandi­nav­ian designers such as Kaare Klint, Her­man Gesel­lius, and Armas Lind­gren but was also fertilized by ideas from other countries.

Designers such as the Amer­icans, Charles and Ray Eames, Charles Le Cor­bus­ier of France and the Ger­man Bau­haus School made full use of the possibilities of new materials such as bendable plywoods and moldable plastics to design furnishings with sweeping curves.

Kaare Klint, in particular, was very influential in stamping a Danish look and feel to the Norse version of Arts & Crafts.

His special interest was seating, and he designed a great many chairs from 1914 to 1936, most of which are still available. Klint's carefully researched designs were based on the positions and functions of the human body, careful craftsmanship, and the use of high-quality materials.

All of these traits carried over into the design school he founded in Copenhagen in 1924, and to his students whose works popularized Modernist design throughout Europe and the Americas.

In full flower by the 1930s, the movement was refined during the austerity of the World War of the 1940s, a time when most imported and man-made materials became unavailable and Scan­dina­vian designers were forced to return to local, native materials such as oak, birch, rush, clay, and linen cloth.

After the War a few exotics slipped in, notably teak and rosewood but the designs generally remained faithful to their wartime roots in native, natural materials and simple finishes. Designed always with an eye toward low-cost mass production, Scandi­nav­ian furniture was not just beautiful and functional, it was also affordable, and often well within the means of a typical suburban family.

Taking hold in New York City soon after the 2nd World War, the Scandi­nav­ian Modern look quickly swept all across the country, becoming the defining furniture and interior design style of the period.

Young American families found it affordable and the ideal expression of the new, informal, suburban lifestyle. The simplified lines were geometric, clean, and unpretentious and the scale was well-suited to the smaller rooms of the post-war period.

Increasing its appeal was its affordability. It was mass-produced, not hand-crafted. The designers of the period, influenced by Bauhaus design, were schooled to create designs that were not just elegant and functional but also easily factory-produced in large quantities.

Much of it was made in Europe, a continent just recovering from the World War, where wages were half those paid factory workers in the U.S.

Young Americans furnishing new suburban homes found the furniture affordable as well as attractive and well-constructed.

"Hand-rubbed" oil-and-wax finishes on wood furnishings meant freedom from worry about the interaction between young children and fine furnishings. If a table got damaged, it could easily be repaired.

Framed seating with removable, slip cushions meant that a new look could be had at any time with some simple reupholstery.

The Mid-Century Kitchen

The mid-century kitchen was in all respects a modern kitchen. It contained every feature of a contemporary kitchen: gas or electric range, electric refrigeration, modern plumbing, and fitted cabinetry with recesses into which appliances were neatly tucked.

Later kitchens even had early microwave ovens and automatic dishwashers – appliances not yet invented when the period began and which would not become common until the 1970s. It was sanitary and efficient .... (Continues)

Footnotes

1. Arne Jacobsen considered himeself to be an architect, not a product or industrial designer. Almost all of the products he designed were specific to one of his buildings.
2. His three-legged Ant Chair which he created in 1951 for his addition to the Novo Nordisk factory in Cop­ha­gen is very likely the most successful chair design of all time.Intended to be light, stable, easy to stack, and inexpensive to mass-produce, it contains just two parts, a tubular steel frame and a springy plywood seat and back. Visual interest is added by the vivid colors in which the chair is often painted.
3. The elegant Egg and Swan chairs (1958) were also site-specific, created for the SAS Air Terminal and the Royal Hotel respectively, both in Cop­ha­gen, for which he designed nearly every element including lighting and textiles, right down to the ash trays and silverware.
4. His wall-mounted Vola 777 faucet designed for the Danish National Bank building in Cop­ha­gen, hides its working parts inside the wall. It was the first design of its kind and is one of the most widely copied of all faucet designs. The original JacobsenVola 777 faucet is still being manufactured by in Denmark.

Rev. 03/16/23