Atlas of world interiors2
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Abstract
In the past five years, the globalised trend of interior design has seemingly been led by the five cities-renowned as the cities of design, including Tokyo, Paris, Milan, London and New York. At the same time, it has become a common realization of designers around the world to explore and employ the local features for each project with the advancement of economy and culture.
Related papers
Interiors Seeking a New Design Language
The International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design, 2015
Interior design is about the integration of numerous interior elements and products that are chosen to satisfy various spatial requirements. The unity of all surfaces, materials and products create an integral architectural character and language. Important architects of the modern period believed in "total work of art" and they felt responsible for the design and overseeing of the building's totality: shell, accessories, furnishings, and landscape. Even if they were industrial products, the same design language shaped them. Today, different designers design most of the components that shape the built environment. In other words, design and manufacturing phases of "space" and "spatial components" are considered as independent processes. On the other hand, space has contextual determinants and every specific interior is fed with different contextual data. Therefore, the most important requirement of today's design approaches is to create a new design language in relation with new technologies and new ways of living without neglecting the local and cultural differences that create architectural identity and sense of place. In this paper, contemporary design approaches will be discussed through examples in order to evaluate the role of spatial components in interior design.
PLACES AND THEMES OF INTERIORS| CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH WORLDWIDE
interiorsforumscotland.com
Urban Interior: interior-making in the urban environment
IDA Congress Education Conference. International Design Alliance, World Congress, 24–26 October 2011, Taiwan, 2011
Engaging interior design with questions of urbanism opens up new ways of thinking about how to address the increasing density occurring within cities globally. It is an often cited fact that for the first time in history there are more people living in cities than rural areas. This is expected to continue to increase, transforming cities and people’s lives. It is said that the twenty-first century will be known as the century of the city (Tibaijuka 2010). While interior design and urbanism may seem an unlikely connection, the idea of positioning interior design as a practice engaging with an outside as distinct from addressing the inside of a building finds connections historically and theoretically. This requires a different way of grasping the discipline of interior design from one which assumes it as a spatial discipline which happens inside built form. While ideas of the occupation of empty spaces within the built environment as urban rooms are immediate examples, there are also other potentials especially in the movement away from thinking about interior design as taking place in three-dimensional space. This paper moves to consider interior design as a spatial and temporal practice where the temporal/time is the dynamic context within which interior design practice is situated and involves a process of interior-making in relation to these forces. As an emerging practice through the twentieth century, interior design has been shaped by the forces of contemporary technologies which have challenged and transformed relations between inside and outside, interior and exterior, both spatially and temporally. Concepts of interior and interiority are encountered in contemporary critiques of the modern city. The writings of Mark Pimlott focus on the ‘interiorised territory’ of mega shopping malls and other urban developments where there is only within: ‘the antagonistic exterior disappears; one is in a potentially endless environment that offers perpetual itinerancy and an illusion of freedom from which there is no escape’ (Pimlott 2010: 46). This makes one think of the fully functioning ski slope located inside a mall situated in the desert (Emirates Mall, Dubai) and the 24-7 city where there is no night as the lights are never turned off. Pimlott and others point to the increasing individualism that pervades contemporary societies and shapes urban fabrics. Intimate Metropolis is the title of a collection of essays on the modern city where the ‘choice of the word “intimate” reinforces the extent to which the modern city is predicated on the concept of the private individual, and on the sanctity of the individuals; inmost thoughts and feelings’ (di Palma et al. 2009: 1). Interior designers are well placed to critically address the process of interiorization and conditions of interiority and individualism. Interior design as a practice addresses the relation between people and their surroundings/environment specifically as one of inhabitation which addresses both physical and mental conditions. This paper will consider what this positioning of interior design will bring to the question of urbanism through an attention to not only spatial planning but also temporal, social and aesthetic concerns. These ideas have been explored and investigated within a university interior design program working with undergraduate and postgraduate students to test these ideas through design research and scenario-based propositions. Research through design: through different scenarios, propositions and speculations which enable one to think ‘what if?’; through design studios, exhibitions and projects. This approach is critical to design as a practice positioned as an agent of change and transformation. The outcomes from an undergraduate design studio called Urban Rooms which tested different kinds of theoretical approaches to thinking about interior-making; a Masters by Research project which collected and analysed street vendors in Singapore and Taipei in relation to interior design techniques; and projects by a research group called Urban Interior will be presented. This paper will open up the potential of interior design as a critical urban practice for the twenty-first century, ‘the century of the city’.
XXIst century interior design
Środowisko Mieszkaniowe
Today's approaches to the design of modern interiors have changed significantly. This is due to such reasons and conditions as: socioeconomic terms of interiors' use and service, rapid technical progress, the development of science and information technology, growing environmental requirements in accordance with the principles of sustainable development, the introduction of new building materials and technologies, accounting accessibility and national traditions, human-centered design, etc. The purpose of the article is identification of conditions, features, principles and guidelines for the design of modern interiors. The study is based on a systematic approach that defines hierarchical levels of interior design. Methods of historical and comparative analysis were also used. The article discusses the factors and conditions of modern interiors' formation, features and principles of their functional and spatial solutions. The hierarchical levels and methodological provisions of the architectural environment design of modern interior spaces are revealed.
Elements of interior architectural design against stylish approaches
[...] it deals with interior architectural design that is a key topic in architectural practice even if it is a neglected subject in most schools of architecture nowadays as “interior design is often misunderstood as only a kind of decoration”. On the contrary, as Prof. Chen Yi states, “we believe that interior design and architectural design were indistinguishable since the beginning of the civilization”. As a matter of fact interior space is “the space enclosed by walls, wherever they are arranged or configured. It is primary and characterizing of every architectural work, it is addressed to the fruition by whom it is going through, crossing or stopping; […] it has a meaning clearly distinct from that of the other figurative arts…”. [...] this publication deals with Chinese architects from Tongji and it looks forward to deepening the cultural relationships between Chinese and Italian architectural debates that also is one of the aims of the editing this book series. Before expressing an opinion about the published projects in the book I think that it must be understood the social, economic and social context that generated them.
Exterior Interiors: The Urban Living Room and Beyond
Deborah Schneiderman and Amy Campos eds., Interiors Beyond Architecture (Routledge, 2017), 2018
Inspired by the discourse of urban interiors, this essay explores the ways in which concepts of interiority have structured the design of urban space from the mid-1960s until today. Beginning with two seemingly oppositional models - the urban living room and the urban surface – it introduces a series of contemporary examples in which concepts of interiority continue to contribute to the creative and innovative design of urban space. About the Book Published in Deborah Schneiderman and Amy Campos eds., Interiors Beyond Architecture (Routledge, 2018). Interiors Beyond Architecture proposes an expanded impact for interior design that transcends the inside of buildings, analysing significant interiors that engage space outside of the disciplinary boundaries of architecture. It presents contemporary case studies from a historically nuanced and theoretically informed perspective, presenting a series of often-radical propositions about the nature of the interior itself. Internationally renowned contributors from the UK, USA and New Zealand present ten typologically specific chapters including: Interiors Formed with Nature, Adaptively Reused Structures, Mobile Interiors, Inhabitable art, Interiors for Display and On Display, Film Sets, Infrastructural Interiors, Interiors for Extreme Environments, Interior Landscapes, and Exterior Interiors
URBAN + INTERIOR : 2015 IDEA Journal call for submissions
Academics, research students and practitioners are invited to submit design research papers and critical project works that make a contribution to the discipline of interior design/interior architecture through an engagement with the provocation of URBAN + INTERIOR for the IDEA JOURNAL 2015. Co-editors: Luciano Crespi (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) Davide Fassi (Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Tongji University, China) Elena Enrica Giunta (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) Belén Hermida (Universidad CEU San Pablo, Spain) PROVOCATION Unprecedented movements of people, growth in population density and forces of capitalism and globalism shape the twenty-first century urban environment and transform how people live in the world – spatially, temporally and subjectively. In the disciplines of interior design, interior architecture, architecture, spatial design and urban design, one encounters the coupling of the conditions of ‘urban’ and ‘interior’ with increasing frequency. Urban interior, interior urbanization, urban interiority and urban interior design are used as provocations for designing, teaching and writing – researching and thinking – in cities and cultures as diverse as Milan, Madrid, Melbourne, Jakarta, Austin, London, Stockholm, Bangkok, Singapore and Bogotá. While some might see this as the bringing together of vastly distinct conditions and scales, the conjunction – urban and interior – seeks to engage the potential of practices and techniques of disciplines concerned with interior and urbanism in new ways involving multi-scalar, multi-cultural, multi-discipline approaches. A rethinking of the concept of interior is invited where the defining characteristics of enclosure, form and structure are opened to other possibilities than an equation with the inside of a building. ‘Interior’ is introduced here in an expanded sense. A thinking differently about urbanism and the concept of ‘urban’ is also invoked. The question of, and conjunction of, urban + interior is a critical one in the contemporary context where the inhabitation of urban environments and cities has exceeded the population living in rural areas. We are keen to explore this condition through actual proposals, scenarios and solutions that address the challenges, as well as historical, anthropological, sociological and epistemological reflections. The aspiration for this forthcoming issue of the IDEA JOURNAL is to gather this emerging trajectory composed of practices, techniques, and genealogies for future practice. With our call for submissions, we have not specified research questions or positioned in advance what, how, when or why ‘urban’ and ‘interior’ are/might be connected. Our strategy is to be open to what comes in and from this make an arrangement of connections where the potential of urban + interior can be grasped, offered up and discussed. The conjunctions, conversations and debates have already begun. The editorial approach for this issue of the IDEA JOURNAL is different to the individual guest editor of previous issues. Five people from three cities are already in discussion about this emerging trajectory of urban + interior: Suzie Attiwill from Melbourne and the research group Urban Interior Laboratory; Davide Fassi, Luciano Crespi and Elena Enrica Giunta from Politecnico di Milano – Design Department and Belén Hermida from University CEU San Pablo in Madrid – who are co-directors and co-coordinators of [MUID] the International Master in Urban Interior Design, a program that is offered between POLI.Design in Milano and University CEU San Pablo in Madrid. And now we would like to invite others who are researching urban + interior – through design and projects, through historical and theoretical research, through teaching – to contribute and participate!
Published Papers about Interior Design from South East Europe in the Scopus Database (1977 - 2015)
South East European Journal of Architecture and Design, 2015
AIM: The aim of this study was to analyse current scientific impact of Published Papers about Interior Design from South East Europe in the Scopus Database (1977-2015).MATERIAL AND METHODS: Title search of the Scopus database was performed on October 02, 2015 about interior design from South East Europe in the Scopus Database (1960-2014). A total number of 5,808 documents worldwide were identified with "interior design" in the title, abstract or keywords. By limitation to South East European countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Kosovo, Moldova, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey, and Italy) only 151 documents were separated (2.6% of all documents). Selected documents were analysed by year, source, author, country/territory, document type, and subject area.RESULTS: The number of publication in the period of 1977-2005 year was very small and was increased with maximum of 19 papers in 2011 year. Three academic j...
I. Forino, F. Rapisarda, "'From the Inside': A Interior Design Studio Process", Academia Letters, 2021, Doi: 10.20935/AL191
Academia Letters, 2021
In addition to works or monumental complexes, Italy's urban heritage is characterised by a minute and dense fabric, which includes buildings of varying architectural and historical quality. While those protected by the Soprintendenze (Monuments and Fine Arts Office) require measured restoration and adaptation work, non-protected buildings can be dealt with more freely, while respecting the building regulations established by the various municipalities. And yet these "minor" buildings, even more than the monuments, identify a constant dialogue with the past: the Italian architectural culture of stratification is not only given by the coexistence of old and new works, one next to the other but also of parts built in successive periods in the same factory, according to an accumulation of different qualities, signs and materials, which characterises the final result as never really definitive. The necessity of change has subjected, and continues to subject, what was there: extensions, rebuilding, destruction and incorporation create a super stylistic unity over time, modifying the spatial distribution and adapting the uses to which it is put. It is a metahistorical continuum, often arbitrary, which, by stripping, aggregating and constructing, rectifies the previous elements in an attempt to relate them to the contemporary world: the transformation of the whole guarantees its use and survival over time, even in the frequent deprivation of original features: "The existing -Vittorio Gregotti specified concerning modification-has become heritage: beyond the passivity of the notion of reuse, every architectural operation is increasingly an act of partial transformation." (Gregotti 1984, 4). Intervention on these buildings is, moreover, the most frequent design opportunity for architects working in the national context, mostly catalogued under the uncertain term of "interior renovation," a term which, while easily emblematising what is done or transformed in architectural interiors, both historical and of current construction, lacks any real theorisation.
Related topics
Related papers
URBAN + INTERIOR : 2015 IDEA Journal
Suzie Attiwill, daniela petrillo, Barbara Di Prete, Tine Poot, Luciano Crespi, Emilio Lonardo, Carlos Martínez-Arrarás Caro, Evelyn Kwok, Gretchen Coombs, Jing Xiao
Unprecedented movements of people, growth in population density and forces of capitalism and globalism shape the twenty-first century urban environment and transform how people live in the world – spatially, temporally and subjectively. In the disciplines of interior design, interior architecture, architecture, spatial design and urban design, one encounters the coupling of the conditions of ‘urban’ and ‘interior’ with increasing frequency. Urban interior, interior urbanization, urban interiority and urban interior design are used as provocations for designing, teaching and writing – researching and thinking – in cities and cultures as diverse as Milan, Madrid, Melbourne, Jakarta, Austin, London, Stockholm, Bangkok, Singapore and Bogotá. While some might see this as the bringing together of vastly distinct conditions and scales, the conjunction – urban and interior – engages the potential of practices and techniques of disciplines concerned with interior and urbanism in new ways involving multi-scalar, multi-cultural, multi-discipline approaches. A rethinking of the concept of 'interior' is invited where the defining characteristics of enclosure, form and structure are opened to other possibilities than an equation with the inside of a building. ‘Interior’ is introduced here in an expanded sense. A thinking differently about urbanism and the concept of ‘urban’ is also invoked.
Thinking inside the Box: a Reader in Interior Design for the 21st Century
Thinking inside the Box: a Reader in Interior Design for the 21st Century, 2007
Interiors is an evolving yet slippery discipline. Whilst the interior is everywhere, it is nevertheless ephemeral and difficult to define. The interior domain is itself saturated with the everyday artefacts of consumption; it's a platform in which to project lifestyle; a place to benchmark fashionable social mores, to test patterns of behaviour and ritual; and the place of dwelling, sanctuary, memory and association. Interiors is becoming an increasingly diverse field of spatial design enquiry which - through education at least - operates without that familiar artefactual framework so common to partner disciplines of art, product and fashion. Interiors education operates within, and is limited by, paper space abstraction of visualising rather than doing. Whilst others have identifiable notions of disciplinary craft, what is the craft of interiors? Within education and practice, interiors occupy multiple identities, yet its historical, theoretical and contextual framework remains patchy, and is frequently contested and unclaimed territory in comparison to those of other disciplines. How, therefore, might we speculate about the role, validity and purpose of interiors in the twenty-first century? Thinking Inside the Box: A Reader in Interior Design for the 21st Century is an interior theory reader designed to enable students, academics, researchers and practitioners access to the broad and evolving nature of interiors thinking today. This collection of essays, by prominent thinkers, practitioners and key authors in the field from Australia, the UK, Italy, New Zealand, Turkey, Canada and the USA addresses an eclectic range of issues: the theoretical and conceptual nature of ‘doubleness’ between an interiors choreographed image and its actuality in the emergence of the interior; the slow home; textiles and feminism; branding the discipline; the relationship between the interior and the enclave in the contemporary age of terror; the regulation of the profession of interiors and deregulation of education; rereading theories of interior space; Hertzian interior space describing the lived traces of use, occupation and environment, amongst many others. This publication emerged initially from the international interiors conference and exhibition `Thinking Inside the Box: Interior Design Education in the 21st Century: New Visions, New Horizons & New Challenges' at the Lighthouse, Scotland's Centre for Architecture and Design held in March 2007, and organized by the Interiors Forum Scotland. Established in May 2005, the IFS comprise the leading Scottish interior programmes at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (University of Dundee), Edinburgh College of Art, the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow Metropolitan College (incl. City of Glasgow College) and Napier University in Edinburgh. This reader resulted from continued discussion and a shared concern and passion for the field of interior design. Like the earlier conference and exhibition, this reader is designed to provoke within the international community of interior designers and interior architects a desire to rediscover, reframe and perhaps reclaim the field of interior design; and, through the IFS, to establish an annual conference platform which places interior design / interior architecture firmly at the centre of critical debate, rather than on the margins of other design disciplines. In reading this publication one may sense that interiors, for all its diversity and indeed doubt, is re-emerging as a dynamic spatial activity with shared concerns and challenges: identity, anxiety over unregulated expansion, challenging perceptions, sharing good practice across an international interior community, advocacy, philosophy, reflecting and rethinking our discipline and issues of gender, amongst others. Very early on the IFS explored thinking inside rather than outside the metaphorical box as a vehicle for an event for the interiors community. Thus, began a number of free-ranging discussions about the nature, theory and practice of interior design, about the educational vision driving our institutions, the international dimension, the impact radical practice may have on visionary teaching, the emerging of recent interior research communities and theories, and how we might best promote, support and advocate excellence within this unique discipline. What we all shared, to some extent, was a feeling that, when compared to many design disciplines, interiors is somewhat hazily defined, perhaps undervalued and yet, as a result, full of possibilities. What has made both the IFS and Thinking Inside the Box possible is the relative intimacy of scale of the higher education interiors sector within Scotland, within which there exists a surprising diversity of programmes. At the time of writing, Scotland supported six honours degree courses in interiors, compared to some two hundred in England and Wales combined. This meant that it was relatively easy for the Interiors Forum Scotland to get started, to get talking and to get doing. However, it would be wrong to mistake small numbers for uniformity. The interiors degree courses of Scotland, situated as they are in different institutions and different cities, represent a wide range of viewpoints on the discipline. Post-industrial, style-conscious Glasgow, where interiors is driven by retail and hospitality, is a world (and fifty minutes on the train) away from staid, bourgeois Edinburgh, where museology, conservation and heritage are only now giving way to other disciplines. The Fine Art traditions of Duncan of Jordanstone, Glasgow School of Art, and Edinburgh College of Art have a very different pedigree to the more practical and professional focus of the former polytechnics. And of course, staff and students, attracted by these combinations of place and ethos, serve to reinforce and exaggerate these characteristics.
Beyond Building: Interior Designs
Interior: A State of Becoming 2012 IDEA Symposium, 2012
This paper addresses the question of becoming in relation to interior design as a practice of designing interiors both physical and mental. An understanding of ‘interior’ in a substantive way shapes current interior design practice. This is evident in the frequent use of the term ‘the interior’ which suggests some thing – a space or a subject – which exists as an independent entity. The proposition of becoming invites different ways of thinking about interior making – a shift from things to processes, from the individual to the process of individuation, from form to information, from space to time and movement. The focus of this paper is a research project conducted through undergraduate design studios and PhD research. The project addresses the environments (physical, psychological and situational) of young people living in residential care houses. The studios explore how the production of interior designs might affect, transform and/or benefit the physical and emotional wellbeing of adolescents living in these houses. Called Beyond Building, the project invites students to consider the question of interior design as a practice not confined to/contained by the inside of a building. Instead the invitation is to think about interior design as an interior-making; as a process of interiorization. Relational conditions – between people, programs, different times of day and night, schedules, colour, light, tactility, psychological and affective qualities of design and interiors – were highlighted. This also shifts design as practice from one concerned with structures and physical form to one that takes into account temporal as well as spatial conditions. Through the projects, the practice of interior design becomes apparent in relation to the production of subjectivities – from fixed subjectivities based on identity and being to ones that attempt to enable subjectivities to move, change, become. This research contributes to the growing focus of interior design in relation to wellbeing. It has the potential to offer up a different way of understanding interior design through posing the question of interior as ?interior and posing the potential ‘to inspire new modes of subjectivization’ (Deleuze 2006, 260). Key Words: interior design, interiorization, subjectivity, individuation, becoming, Deleuze, Simondon, interior-exterior, self-.
Interior design trends and implications
Grand Rapids, MI: CIDA. …, 2006
What’s in a canon? the state of interior design at the beginning of the 21st century
Thinking Inside the Box. A Reader in interiors for the 21st century (London: Middlesex University Press), 2007
A canon can be defined as a collection of works deemed significant for a particular practice at a point in time; as a repository of those works and as a transmitter of this knowledge through images and words. Writing on the architectural canon, Miriam Gusevich observes that ‘the significance and status of a building as architecture is not dependent on some pre-established set of attributes, on some essential features, but on its status as a cultural object established through critical discourse’ [1]. Are there canonical interiors; spaces that have influenced the practice of interior design more than others? Or does the nature of this multidisciplinary practice make a canon, as it is known from architecture, impossible? Undesirable, even? The focus of this paper is a forum titled What’s in a canon? The state of interior design at the beginning of the 21st century. The forum was held in Melbourne, Australia on 17 October 2006 and invited editors of Australia’s design media, academics, graduates and interior design practitioners to respond to the provocation: ‘What’s in a canon?’ The question had two potential readings in this context: to question and evaluate the value of a canon for interior design; and as an invitation to identify examples of interior design which are significant at this point in time to the practice of interior design. It should be noted that there was not an underlying assumption that there should be a canon. This paper will analyse the debates, discussion and interiors offered at the forum. In the process, it will consider the design of interiors where the concept of interior is re-posed and in so doing, pose the question of what a history and theory of interior design could be and what kind of platform for practice might be produced. It is hoped that it will provide impetus for new ways of thinking and designing interiors. Keywords: canon, interior, design history/ theory, architecture, practice [1] Gusevich, M. The Architecture of Criticism: A Question of Autonomy. In Kahn, A., ed. Drawing, Building, Text, p.11 (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1991).
TRENDS OF RESEARCH ON INTERIORS: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE INTERIORS: DESIGN, ARCHITECTURE, CULTURE JOURNAL
Contemporary Issues in Architecture Fall, 2022
The present study aimed to investigate the current state and trends of research on the interiors. A bibliometric analysis method was used in the study and accordingly the Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture, a respected journal in its field, was selected as the field of study. A total of 659 articles, including 228 articles published in the said journal between 2010-2022 and 431 articles cited those articles were analyzed within the scope of the study. Accordingly, the articles were investigated using a bibliometric analysis method, based on title, abstract, and keywords, and then classified by main themes, sub-themes, and research objects of the relevant themes. The results were indicative of the fact that the main themes of design, history, and sustainability were the most frequent research objects.
Local Wisdom in Designing Interior Design, Review of Cultural Arts and Design Style
International Humanities and Applied Science Journal
Local wisdom is a system of values and norms that are arranged, practiced, understood and applied to local communities based on the understanding and their experience in interacting with the environment, in the development of interior design, local wisdom It can also be very instrumental in the design of interior design. Can collaborate on styles of interior design can be realized, it will be very interesting interior design, as well as safe, comfortable and harmonious. Based on the above, then the exposure in this study the author wanted to examine the application of the local wisdom in designing interior design that is associated with the development of the design. The methods used in this study is a qualitative descriptive method, approach to interior design pragmatically, topologies and have that is an important element in the design. The concept of Paul Laseau how to review the achievement of the concept of local wisdom applied in the process of designing the interior design. ...
About Now? Immanent Interior Designing in the Urban Interior
Inside the City Conference, 2018
This paper discusses the potency of ‘activeness’ in urban-interior designing, as a way of re-imagining and re-inhabiting urban interiors and the potential of this as an evolving interior typology of pedagogy and practice. It will do this through a critical discussion of a recent studio taught at RMIT University, ‘Now Space’ which centred conceiving and actualising a series of ‘now’ spaces (immediate interior designs) within Melbourne. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘Body without Organs’ the studio positioned the designer as a productive part of the urban interior apparatus, and their designs a moment of temporal intensity within the rhythm of the everyday. Students approached design through the immanent possibility in sites, the potency of themselves as urban interior designers and the power structures expressed in the location of their designs. Engendering the ‘active’ at a pedagogical level allows students to develop a sense of agency with their designing, while giving them the agility to engage with an expansive forward-looking discipline. At a discipline-level an ‘active’ approach to urban interior design, has both advantages in a neoliberal-entrepreneurial context of practicing design and the contradictory notion that being ‘active’ is in and of itself, an ‘activist’ mode of practice for interior designers, and can be used as a critique of that very context. The paper will then situate ‘now spaces’ (immediate interior designing) within a broader vision of the urban interior and how this is distinct within other modes of speculative urban practice due to its intersectional potential between the actual and the imaginary through actualised (compared to proposed) outcomes and the complexities of this mode of practice moving from first-person-designer to folding into the rhythm of the everyday collective public imagination.
Urban Interiors: A Retroactive Investigation
Journal of Interior Design, 2019
In recent years, the sudden success of "tactical" modes of urbanism has begun to challenge the traditional parameters of public space design by requiring new tools and methodologies of "place-making" within cities. In this regard, interior architecture and design could provide a fundamental perspective to address this new issue if they were not constantly in need of theoretical framing to legitimize their interest in the field. In many cases, in fact, the conjunction between the terms "urban" and "interior" is still seen as a provocation, and the history of the different attempts through which interior disciplines have developed a design approach about the city, although now consolidated, is little known in its complexity. Therefore, this paper offers a critical and historical reading of the concept of "urban interiors," both from a theoretical and an operative point of view, in order to trace the evolution of this line of investigation and envision its possible future developments. In doing so, it first analyses the different concepts of "interior urbanism" and "urban interiority" and describes the emergence and the evolution of the urban interior design approach. Then, it points out some shared features that characterize contemporary practices of "interior-making" within urban situations to eventually focus on the progressive disciplinary convergence with urban planning and design. The objective is to lay the foundation of a unified theoretical framework that could highlight the methodological contribution of interior disciplines to the urban construction.
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