T. H. Robsjohn–Gibbings: Crafting a Modern Home for Postwar America

Abstract

Terence Harold Robsjohn–Gibbings (1905–1976) was an architect, decorator, furniture designer, tastemaker, and thinker whose innovative ideas on interior design during the postwar era had a formative impact on American domestic culture. Through books, articles, lectures, interior décor, and industrial design, he advanced a singular outlook on the modern home, rooted in Greco–Roman sensibilities, classical principles, and early American domestic culture. By considering his contribution to the emergence of middle–class American style during the formative years of modernism, I propose that although hardly discussed in the literature, Robsjohn–Gibbings had occupied a significant role in steering popular taste away from Art Moderne and from the popular fashion of collecting European antiques and reproductions toward a genuine American modernism. A progressive thinker, he challenged international modernism and the postwar organic language through a scholarly understanding of ancient Greco–Roman furniture and a thorough study of American material culture.