Jean Baudrillard, "The System of Objects"

After visiting the Casa Bloc and the Design Museum of Barcelona, I wanted to write an article about this book that I read, treating of how society made furniture and interior design evolve in Europe after the 30’s. 

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism, he was best known for his analyses of the modes of mediation and technological communication, mostly concerned with the way technological progress affects social change.

« The system of objects » is the first major work of the sociologist. Published in 1968, this essay takes note of habitat changes in society and focuses on the furnishing of middle class housings and livings, in full shambles developing at that time.

The author questions the new direction that the objects of everyday life are taking in the context of postmodern societies. In this sense, it foreshadows the birth of the consumer society two years later.

For him, the furniture that adorn middle class homes have evolved in a way that made them lose their traditional role of supports of bourgeois morality: it no longer enshrines in solid wood and the heavy lines of tables and cabinets of old times. The materials are changing in favor of glass and colors in favor of white, especially in the bathroom, a place for the cleanliness of the body.

These observations allow Jean Baudrillard to launch a reflection on everyday objects. He observes that they no longer find meaning in their primary purpose, as had been the case for previous generations, but in their materiality, which is an innovation directly related to the modernization of the economy and society in Europe. 

Their industrial diffusion and their subjection to the versatile trends of fashion don't prevent them to form a coherent systemic set of signs from which it can develop the concept of consumption anymore.

Thus, the interiors become fundamentally flexible, to allow the householder to send a message to its guests: Its layout becomes an imperative which contributes to the quest of prestige.