ABSTRACT
The chapter argues that architects have often seen interior design as inferior to architecture. Traditional perceptions of gender roles—architects as masculine professionals and interior decorators and designers as feminine service workers—often prevailed. After the Second World War, when the Bauhaus modernism of architects such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe took over American architecture schools and the mainstream practice of architecture in the United States, most interior designers continued to use historical styles and select furniture, violating the modernist minimalist dogma and further entrenching the belief among many architects that interior decorators and designers were backward, superficial, unprofessional, consumerist, and even petty and snobbish. Many architects, such as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, saw interior design as an essentially worthless occupation that diminished architecture. Sexist stereotypes often characterized female decorators as flighty and superficial and male decorators as effeminate and queer. In an era (the mid-twentieth century), when gayness and femininity were often looked on with contempt in conventional society, stereotyping designers as gay served to make interior designers and interior design itself seem frivolous and emotional, whereas architecture remained seen as important and cerebral.
