Aynsley was principal investigator for the three-year AHRC-funded research project The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture (2006–9), which was led by the RCA, in partnership with Simon Shaw-Miller and Tag Gronberg, co-investigators, at Birkbeck, University of London. The aim of the research project was to cast new light on the history of the Viennese coffeehouse through interdisciplinary scholarship, taking account of recent theoretical and methodological developments in cultural history, literary studies, visual and material culture studies, with particular reference to modernity in central Europe. The project led to an international conference and exhibition at the RCA, which Aynsley co-directed, and a number of publications.
In this study, Aynsley bridged print history, often a narrow and technical field, to histories of interior design, to explore the interaction between print culture and the coffeehouse interior from 1870 to 1914. Research was conducted in Viennese libraries to establish how various forms of printed material were experienced within the city’s coffeehouses. The essay argues that these newly designed interior spaces framed a distinctive form of public life in which print culture became a central component. Research drew on collections of works on paper to establish how advertising and posters impinged on the café; the practice of reading in these spaces; signage both inside and on the exterior, and conventions of visually representing designs of the Viennese coffeehouse.
Aynsley lectured on the wider historical interrelationship between graphic and interior design at the turn of the 20th century at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2008) and the Deutsches Museum, Munich (2008). He supervised the thesis of the AHRC-funded PhD student Diane Silverthorne, ‘New Spaces of Art, Design and Performance in Vienna 1890–1920: Alfred Roller and the Vienna Secessionists’ (RCA, 2010).
The Vienna project was subsequently graded as ‘Outstanding’ by the AHRC peer-reviewer.