Docomomo Journal

A Place of Infinite Possibilities

2025-08-22T10:38:04+01:00

Petite Maison dans les Environs de Castellar: this is how Eileen Gray (1878-1976), a designer active in early 20th-century France, entitled in her cahiers the architecture she built between 1931 and 1935. The villa, later named Tempe à Pailla, is an opportunity to deepen her research on that intense dialog between interior and exterior, between domestic space and natural environment, already experimented with Jean Badovici (1893-1956) in the villa E1027 (1926-1929) in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.
According to Eileen Gray’s definition, a house is not a machine à habiter but ‘the shell of man, his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation.’ The theme of spatial flexibility is approached through the design of mechanical moving components that rotate or slide, unfold, and contract, thanks to the possibilities of new materials, in a mechanical ballet that expands the narrow dimension of a maison minimum into a dwelling with a greater width. These solutions are intended to negate the facade as a frontier line between the architectural space and the close surroundings; any hierarchical relationship between furniture, interiors, architecture, and site is denied. The kinaesthetic aspect in Tempe à Pailla is absolute, since the house lives of the relationship between the movement of architectural components and the experiential dimension of the human body in domestic space, all in relation to the surrounding natural environment. This article aims to demonstrate how Eileen Gray’s innovative theoretical framework, exemplified by villa Tempe à Pailla, offers valuable lessons for addressing contemporary challenges. In this context, it highlights the design solutions adopted by the architect to ensure the well-being of inhabitants, even within minimal spaces, emphasizing the importance of transitional spaces between built and natural environments, thereby expanding the notion of the interior. At the same time, it becomes an opportunity to explore how a renewed relationship with nature can offer meaningful insights for contemporary architectural practices, which now more than ever require particular attention to environmental issues.

A Window of Opportunity

2025-08-22T10:38:09+01:00

The effects of climate change, resource depletion, and volatile economic circumstances require a reflection on current design approaches that can be gained through lessons from the original and mediated intentions of the Modern Movement. An important example can be found in South Africa before WW II, where the introduction of standardized building materials, particularly metal-framed windows, generated unique, mediated Modern Movement-inspired domestic interiors resulting from responses to a burgeoning industry, physical context, and functionalist attitudes to human activities.
The clarion call of the Modern Movement for an architecture of economy, efficiency, and health underlined Le Corbusier’s “Cinq Points de l’Architecture Moderne” (Curtis, 1996, p. 175). This dictum was transmigrated to South Africa through the work of the zerohour Group formed in 1932. Unfortunately, the starkness of the ‘foreign’ architecture did not resonate with the general public, while interiors overheated and flat roofs leaked in the summer. In 1936, Iscor, a South African company, began assembling standardized metal window frames. Architects like Norman Eaton, Hellmut Stauch, and Robert Cole Bowen, sensitive to local contexts, utilized these metal window frames to create unique architectural interiors. The windows and associated modules not only provided an economical construction and structural logic through planning efficiency but generated more contextually and climatically related interiors, healthier internal environments, and fluid internal-external relationships.
This article delves into the origins and impacts of the Modern Movement in Johannesburg and Pretoria, focusing on the transformative influence of the standard metal window. Then, the bioclimatic, technological, and spatial effects of these windows on residential interiors and their lasting legacy will be highlighted.

Domesticity in Times of Crisis

2025-08-22T10:38:12+01:00

In 1952, both the French magazine L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui and the Italian magazine Domus published a small house built by an American architect on the outskirts of Paris for his personal use. The outsider they highlighted to was Peter G. Harnden, the architect who directed the American propaganda campaigns in Europe in the postwar period.
This was not a new project but a renovation. A single house with the characteristics of the traditional houses was not sufficient for the model of domesticity practiced by the architect. Moreover, Harnden needed the house as soon as possible. Therefore, the operation consisted of joining two small vernacular buildings in the small French village of Orgeval: a house and a barn. The strategy was completed with a garden that resulted from the demolition of four other buildings.
Inside, the architect exhibits an interest in objects of everyday life and authorized designs that extend throughout the spaces of the house. Furniture from the Eames, Prouvé, or the Viennese school is mixed with African rugs, mats, wicker plates, German porcelain, and different versions of vernacular stools. This studied and photogenic accumulation of pieces and ornaments supposedly made the house a more comfortable, fun, and pleasurable experience. It was a fundamental characteristic of the American Way of Life launched to the world by the United States of America, of which Harnden was a loudspeaker in Europe for more than a decade.
Consequently, in this work, the American architect would interweave architecture and domesticity in postwar Europe through the combination of respect for a well-understood tradition and the materialistic world typical of his place of origin. This, in part, helps to understand the exoticism with which the magazines mentioned this project. The study and analysis of this hardly known case include its deliberate diffusion and propagandistic impact, in which the design of the interior space is crucial in a context of crisis and emergency in devastated Europe.

Oscillating Modernism

2025-08-22T10:38:03+01:00

In the second half of the 20th century, significant modern residential buildings were built in several Brazilian cities. However, regarding the middle-class examples, the layout of most of these apartments was very similar to the 19th-century bourgeois houses. Furthermore, despite using a reinforced concrete structure—always hidden—there was no greater spatial or visual integration. This collection of buildings, neglected by the real estate market in the 1980s, was rediscovered in the early 2000s by new buyers. The former owners gave way to people who admired the qualities of modern architecture, even though they knew they would probably face several difficulties arising from significant renovation. The most common adaptations made in the second occupation included modifying layouts and modernizing facilities and finishes. Besides, the internal spaces became more fluid and integrated than the original version, encouraging conviviality. The number of internal partitions decreased, as did the decorative elements and furniture. More recently, it was possible to recognize a third episode in this history. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, when entire families were locked in their homes in a forced and unprecedented coexistence, there was a need for yet another adaptation process. This time, the actions aimed to recover private environments that better support life in confinement, where different non-domestic activities started to happen inside the homes. A process of ‘demodernization’ seems to have taken place, rehearsing a return to pre-modern layouts of compartmentalized spaces. Through the observation and analysis of the changes in three study cases in the city of São Paulo, this work aims to reflect more broadly on the transformations in the way of living in modern apartments. In addition to bibliographical research and analysis of the projects’ graphic material, this research included reports from residents and access to their personal files.

Questioning the Wet Space

2025-08-22T10:38:07+01:00

While the modernist discourses of the 20th century pretended to solve all the problems of daily life through the acts of standardization, unification, and scientific progress, the modernist practice incorporates its advancements and conflicts within the same built environment. One such discourse is on domestic health and hygiene, which proposes to integrate various functions of bathing, cleaning, washing, and defecation within the so-called volume ‘wet space’, equipped with modern utilities. It is questionable how healthy and hygienic such a spatial model is compared to traditional domestic life, in which most of these functions have been segregated and/or performed according to cultural norms. This neglected problem has become evident with long-term lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in apartment blocks where all inhabitants have to share a single wet space throughout the day. This paper questions whether the modernist discourses of health and hygiene function properly in modern domestic architecture and how the conflicts of wet space can be read. Accordingly, we concentrate on selected apartments in Turkey that were built between 1950 and 1970 and are still in use today: Ataköy Housing Estate, Phase I-II, and Yeşiltepe Blocks, developed and built by the Emlak Kredi Bank. Through scholars’ and architects’ discourses and practices on domestic hygiene derived from articles and architectural drawings in national archives, the paper provides a comparative analysis of wet spaces in these apartments in terms of their location within the spatial layout, the utilities and materials applied, as well as their privacy level. The analysis shows that the limitations of the wet space in these modern apartment interiors reveal the possible risks to domestic health and hygiene, particularly in times of pandemic.

Interior Hygiene

2025-08-22T10:38:11+01:00

The focus of this paper is the significance of the modern bathroom in Turkey, its meaning in the modernization of interiors, in terms of hygiene as a precaution for crises, as well as sanitary ware, and Turkish company VitrA’s role in continuously emphasizing the modern bathroom and challenging behavioral habits through design competitions, from the 1940s onwards.
Among one of the most important spaces of hygiene, the bathroom was instrumental in bringing Western habits into the modern Turkish house. Hygiene was a matter of modern national identity emphasized in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the century, even before the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923.
The Western ideals of comfort and hygiene, bodily practices, and lavatory fixtures all contributed to the understanding of the modernization process of Turkish interiors. Moreover, a bathroom that combined the Western and today’s internationally accepted alla franga lavatory, a sink and a bath, thus combining these activities became a household application and a reflection of modern life. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the average urban Turkish family life moved to apartments that often housed governmental civil servants, the modern bathroom became a standard household space. Meanwhile, the alla turca lavatory, a lavatory on which one has to crouch, and that is still used in certain parts of Turkey and Asia, represented the uncivilized and unhygienic.
With the modernization of the domestic interior, a transformation of wet allocation spaces took place, leading to the questioning of the domestic and public. Moreover, new materials and bathroom equipment were introduced, and bathroom equipment competitions were established, leading to inventions that synthesized habits of the East and the West, reaching a new hygienic standard regarding relevant potential crises. Both the company history of VitrA Eczacıbaşı and the competing designs are showcased in the paper, aiming to support an understanding of social and spatial change in the modern Turkish domestic interior that has redefined identity with proactive lessons for the future.

Migrating Modernist Interiors

2025-08-22T10:38:06+01:00

After World War II, Finland and Poland needed swift housing reconstruction. In Finland, the solution was prefabricated, wooden detached houses, which soon were exported globally. In 1947-48, Poland imported around 4,000 Finnish houses to the mining areas in Silesia. The architecture was based on domestic Finnish models developed from modernist housing ideals. The division of the interiors focused on rational usage of space, labor, and hygiene. Today, most of the buildings are preserved, and it is possible to track the adaptations of the architecture from foreign temporary structures to local homes and heritage to provide data for developing future reconstruction architecture.
This article analyzes how Finnish modernist ideals on home and housing were circulated internationally by exporting prefabricated wooden housing to reconstruction areas in Upper Silesia. The main questions relate to how the Finnish ideology on modernist housing and interior planning was adapted to the local culture of home and housing in Silesia and what can be learned from the reception and adaption of the interiors when designing housing for reconstruction after crises today. The article is based on archival material from Finland and Poland, such as architectural drawings, maps, and documentation on trade and export. The main methodologies are architectural and design analysis combined with historiographic reading of archival data and literature. The article shows how architecture with interiors planned for Finnish domestic use became integrated into the Silesian home culture, transforming temporary housing into permanent homes.

Body and Distance

2025-08-22T10:38:00+01:00

The boundaries between the private, shared, and public spheres are challenged in completely new ways in times of pandemics, and we need new strategies to redefine them. During pandemics, prevailing requests for physical distancing in the urban space eliminated the programs from everyday lives that all have included social interaction, exchange, and connectedness. So, the request for physical distance caused actual social distance, which further brought new problems of solitude and isolation to the individual in the urban environment. How can architecture and design help to provide physical distance while maintaining social closeness, empathy, and solidarity in cities?
Modern Movement heritage, especially in the countries that were under socialist political regimes, teaches us that shared spaces, collective spaces as part of public spaces, are places in which community is being formed and strengthened, where new forms of affiliation and belonging arise. The socialist paradigm emphasizes the importance of open public spaces within the residential zone as places for maintaining physical activity and health, as well as social interaction. By examining the modernist development of New Belgrade through a comparative analysis of two case studies focusing on the same area—specifically, the blocks known as Blok 22—we can reinvigorate the concept of the connection between the interior and shared spaces.
The specific values of open spaces within the residential modernist block have proven to be particularly important during times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, especially regarding the degree of connectedness or separation between private and public spaces. During the pandemic, a student workshop was organized, resulting in projects that offered new architectural scenarios and models for using shared spaces in a residential block. These models allowed for the preservation of physical distance among individuals while enabling social interactions and even the emergence of new programs as an extension of housing. The workshop highlighted the importance of this concept not only during crises but also in contemporary living conditions in large cities, which struggle with issues of alienation and loneliness.

Emigration Point in Gdynia

2025-08-22T10:38:01+01:00

Traveling during an epidemic can be challenging both for people and for the design of suitable infrastructures. In the late 19th century, as knowledge about infectious diseases spread, hygienic conditions and inspections became mandatory, especially in places of passenger traffic. This led to the need for specific adaptations in the existing infrastructure of such places. However, the port of Gdynia, which the Republic of Poland decided to build in 1922 on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea shortly after the country regained independence, was an entirely different case. During the 1920s and 1930s, Gdynia served as a significant travel hub for passengers traveling between Central Europe and America. This period also witnessed the rise of modern design methods in the development of the city and its port. The entire port infrastructure was built from the ground up, allowing for the implementation of the latest and most advanced solutions. The article presents research on a building complex in Gdynia called the Emigration Point. The study aims to analyze the design guidelines for the modern interior and the design itself to recreate the path a guest of the Emigration Point would take, from arrival to leaving the complex. The complex was designed to minimize the risk of infection and the development of potential diseases among emigrants. The research involved detailed historical analyses using primary source studies, such as project drawings and original documentation. This method was complemented with digital tools to reconstruct buildings or architectural spaces that have been significantly altered or no longer exist. The study also investigates the impact of the Modern Movement’s assumptions on the project’s conditions, including the complex layout, pavilion designs, functional and spatial principles, materials, the interior, and equipment. Additionally, it raises questions about the validity of the solutions proposed at the time, how they relate to current threats, and what we can learn from them.

Learning from the Tuberculosis Crisis in Turkey

2025-08-22T10:38:10+01:00

Yaşamak Yolu [A Way of Living], the journal of the Istanbul Tuberculosis Association, played a pedagogical and propagandistic role in building a healthy nation after the establishment of the Turkish state. The journal is a valuable archive incorporating the spaces of tuberculosis combat during the 20th century, encompassing social, cultural, and political information. It reveals how tuberculosis was a crisis that influenced Turkey’s Modern Movement in architecture and modern interiors. The discourse on the contagious nature of tuberculosis and the healthy way of living in Yaşamak Yolu impacted ideas about modern interior design in different building typologies. After scanning the 1929-1972 Yaşamak Yolu issues from the Izmir National Library’s archives, this study categorized, analyzed, and evaluated the data at the intersection of tuberculosis and modern interiors, focusing on national and international sanatoria, housing, alternative interiors, and everyday items. Despite the journal’s broad coverage of architectural typologies, this study, among others, focused on the 20th-century Turkish sanatoria as conventional interiors. The notion that the sanatorium movement shaped the Modern Movement in architecture served as the foundation for this study. To reveal the journal’s vast breadth from urban to industrial scale, portable structures, everyday objects, and/or tuberculosis paraphernalia covered in the journal were evaluated as alternate treatment interiors, furniture, and objects. The extensive content and contextual information, along with the publication’s span from 1929 to 1972, made the analysis challenging. Therefore, and to overcome the constraints in selecting specific built environment typologies, this study set the framework to include the timeframe from the journal’s inaugural issue to the point at which the journal’s published doctors/authors recognized the effectiveness of Streptomycin. This marked a turning point in the spatiality of tuberculosis and thus limited the scope of this study to the years 1929-1950. Due to its focus on the interiors of tuberculosis combat facilities, this study revealed that the journal proved to be a significant archive for the field of architectural historiography and design.

Retrotopia. Design for Socialist Interior Spaces

2025-04-17T11:01:46+01:00

This exhibition review, in the format of a visual essay, presents a selection of projects shown in the exhibition Retrotopia. Design for Socialist Spaces. Initiated and organized by the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum in 2023, Retrotopia was a comprehensive, cooperative project focusing on the role and impact of design in the countries belonging to the former Eastern Bloc and ex-Yugoslavia. Never before have these countries been represented together in one exhibition with their attendant material that helps to outline and raise awareness and understanding of the region’s design activities between the 1950s and the 1980s. Eleven design capsules were created, each highlighting two projects: one representing the public space and one the private sphere and the interior. The spectrum of interior projects and objects on display ranged from experimental housing exhibitions and cybernetic living machines to new furniture concepts, modular kitchen furniture, tableware, household tools, and toys for children.

The Modern Aesthetics of Pavilions

2025-08-22T10:37:57+01:00

The Great Fire of Izmir in 1922 caused a great loss of life and property, and the historic city center was destroyed in a few days. However, this tragedy led to the realization of one of the most important modernization projects of the Early Republican Period in Turkey. The modern city plan for the burned area was prepared between 1924 and 1925 by Réné and Raymond Dangér under the consultancy of Henri Prost. It was as a typical example of the French urbanism school and, together with the buildings designed in the style of the modern Turkish architecture movement, ensured the production of spaces that would support the new lifestyle of modern society. One of the achievements of this plan was that Izmir Culturepark strengthened the image of the contemporary city with the green areas in the city center. Moreover, the International Izmir Fair, held in Culturepark every year starting in 1936, was also an important event in the socio-cultural and economic life of the city.
Some of the most attractive structures of the International Izmir Fair were pavilions built for the new institutions and provinces of the Republic of Turkey, foreign countries, and local and foreign companies. They have become exhibition objects as well as the promotion of commercial products, provinces, or countries. The pavilions carried symbolic significance for various reasons, including the presentation of innovations and advancements in building materials and technologies and the reflection of evolving architectural paradigms over time. They have also contributed to the development of the interior architecture profession as well as collaborations between other art disciplines.
This paper focuses on the interior designs of the pavilions designed and built for the International Izmir Fair between 1936 and 1970, despite the constraints faced by both the country and the city of Izmir following the 1922 fire. The scope of the study documents the existing data about the pavilions and evaluates them in terms of modern interior design history in Turkey.

Interiors Between Privacy and Togetherness

2025-08-22T10:37:55+01:00

Docomomo International is proud to present the second issue of the Docomomo Journal co-edited with the International Specialist Committee on Interior Design (ISC/ID), represented by guest editors Zsuzsanna Böröcz and Deniz Hasirci. Established at the Council Meeting during the 16th International Docomomo Conference in Lisbon in 2016, the ISC/ID has since grown and evolved, as evidenced by significant activities, including seminars, discussions, and publications. Already before the establishment of the ISC/ID, interior design and modern living have been explicit themes in two Docomomo Journal issues: no. 46 Designing for Modern Life and no. 47 Global Design, both published in 2012, extended beyond the architectural scale to encompass the qualities of interior space and the constituent elements and materialities of daily life.

Modern Interiors in Times of Crisis

2025-08-22T10:37:54+01:00

The idea for this special issue stemmed from a time of crisis in the world, aiming to search for lessons from related modern interiors to shed light on the future. Crises vary in scale and dimension, and the realization that the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022 was not a contained crisis but one of many that bound the past, present, and future led to the broadened framework for the call for papers in April 2023.
There were many submissions from around the world, and the aim regarding paper selection was to ensure a varied outlook on the topic, focusing strictly on the modern interior while practicing a generous definition of what constitutes a crisis. The papers included in this special issue encapsulate these aspects as well as an emphasis on the spatial composition, the relationship between inside and outside, furniture, art, and the processes by which these features define the interior.

In Memory of Bernard Bauchet 1955-2025

2025-08-22T08:32:38+01:00

In February, Bernard Bauchet, a pioneer restoration architect of French Modern Movement buildings, passed away. In him we lose a knowledgeable and amiable person. He was involved, in one or another way, in all important projects of the rich French Moden Movement legacy.
He restored la Maison de Verre by Chareau and Bijvoet, and published the book “la Maison de Verre” (GA publishers). He was responsible for the restoration and renovation of la Maison du Brésil by le Corbusier, Lucio Costa’s work in the Cité Universitaire in Paris, the Unité d’Habitation (first tranche) by le Corbusier in Brieu en Foret, and several other buildings by le Corbusier, Robert Mallet Stevens, Jean Lurçat and Auguste Peret.
For the haute couture house of Azzedine Alaïa he did the transformation and renovation of the old warehouses by Victor Baltard in Paris 4th.
I had the pleasure to cooperate with Bernard on the restoration of la Maison de Theo van Doesburg in Meudon, and together we participated in the scientific committee of the restoration and renovation of le Collège Néerlandais by Willem Dudok in the Cité Universitaire in Paris.
Bernard was a member of other commitees as well, such as the Commission Nationale des Monuments Historiques (collège Mouvement Moderne), the expert committee of the Fondation le Corbusier, the scientific committee of la Maison E1027 by Eileen Gray in Roquebrune, and la Maison du Peuple by Beaudouin-Lods and Jean Prouvé in Clichy.
He published various articles and participated in the international Docomomo conferences in New York and Ankara. Bernard’s curiosity and enthusiasm to learn and understand the motivation of the original architect he was dealing with, together with his knowledge of materials and implementation techniques made him extraordinary in the orbit of the Modern Movement.
As the representative of la Maison Azzedine Alaïa wrote: “Bernard Bauchet était un architect exceptional, un homme d’un talent et d’une humaité rare.”

In Memory of Bertold Burkhardt 1941-2025

2025-08-22T08:38:33+01:00

In June, Berthold Burkhardt, one of the supporters of the first hours of Docomomo, passed away. He was involved in the organization of the International Docomomo Conference at Bauhaus Dessau (1992), and actively participating in the “restart” of Docomomo Germany in 2006.
He studied architecture and civil engineering in Stuttgart (1960-1965). As an architect and engineer in Frei Otto’s office, he was involved in iconic buildings such as the German Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal and the roof structures for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. As a staff member of Institute for Lightweight Structures at the University (ILEK) in Stuttgart and in research projects, he devoted himself scientifically to the topic that occupied him throughout his entire professional life: lightweight structures.
In 1984 he was appointed as professor and Head of the Institute for Structural Design at TU Braunschweig. He was able to combine his research with architectural teaching and his work as an independent architect, from 1993 together with Martin Schumacher in the Burkhardt + Schumacher office. Conservation and renovation projects became increasingly important, e.g. the employment agengy in Dessau by Walter Gropius and the Chancellor’s Bungalow in Bonn by Sep Ruf.
Next to his active involvement in Docomomo, he was a member of ICOMOS, Europa Nostra, the Alvar Aalto Society, the Koldewey Society for Historical Building Research and the Society for the History of Building Technology, and served several years as head of the monitoring group for the German World Heritage Sites. As an expert and advisor, he supported the Wüstenrot Foundation and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, and played a key role in setting the course for the general refurbishment of the Bauhaus building from 1996 onwards.
We will miss him as an architect, engineer, scientist, mentor and friend.