The Interior Architecture Theory Reader

The Interior Architecture Theory Reader presents a global compilation that

collectively and specifically defines interior architecture. Diverse views and
comparative resources for interior architecture students, educators, scholars,
and practitioners are needed to develop a proper canon for this young
discipline. As a theoretical survey of interior architecture, the book examines
theory, history, and production to embrace a full range of interior identities
in architecture, interior design, digital fabrication, and spatial installation.
Authored by leading educators, theorists, and practitioners, fifty chapters
refine and expand the discourse surrounding interior architecture.

Gregory Marinic, PhD, is a designer, theorist, scholar, and educator whose

research and practice are focused on the intersection of architecture,
interiority, obsolescence, adaptive reuse, and geography. His New York-
based multidisciplinary design practice, Arquipelago, has been awarded by
the Seoul Metropolitan Government, American Institute of Architects, and
the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture; as well as exhibited in
the AIA Center for Architecture in New York, Estonian Architecture
Museum in Tallinn, Seoul Dongdaemun Design Plaza, TSMD Architecture
Center in Ankara, National Building Museum in Washington, D. C., and
elsewhere. His critical essays have been published in AD Journal, Journal of
Architectural Education, Design Issues, Journal of Interior Design, AIA
Forward Journal, International Journal of Architectural Research, and IntAR
Journal of Interventions and Adaptive Reuse. Dr. Marinic is an associate
professor at the University of Kentucky College of Design and Director of
Graduate Studies in the School of Interiors. He previously served as
founding director of the Interior Architecture program at the University of
Houston College of Architecture and Design.
The Interior Architecture Theory
Reader

Edited by

Gregory Marinic
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Gregory Marinic; individual chapters,

the contributors
The right of Gregory Marinic to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
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known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
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from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Marinic, Gregory, editor.
Title: The interior architecture theory reader / edited by Gregory Marinic.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017027053 | ISBN 9781138911079 (hb : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781138911086 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315693002 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Interior architecture—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC NA2850 .I565 2017 | DDC 729—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027053
ISBN: 978-1-138-91107-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-91108-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-69300-2 (ebk)

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by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Tito, Xavier, and Giovanni
Contents

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part one: Histories

 1 (Re)constructing histories: a brief historiography of interior architecture

Edward Hollis

 2 A history of style and the modern interior: from Alois Riegl to Colin
Rowe
Sarah Deyong

 3 Quadrature: the joining of truth and illusion in the interior architecture

of Andrea Pozzo
Jodi La Coe

 4 Spatial therapies: interior architecture as a tool for the past, present, and
future
Ziad Qureshi

 5 Inside out
 Michael Webb

Part two: Territories

 6 Symbiotic spaces: decolonizing identity in the spatial design of the

Museum of Macau
Emily Stokes-Rees

 7 Shape shifting: interior architecture and dynamic design

Mark Taylor

 8 Politicizing the interior

Liz Teston

 9 Fabricating interiority
Marc Manack

10 Territory and inhabitation

Amy Campos

11 Swimming upstream: repositioning authorship and expanding the

agency of the architect
Blair Satterfield and Marc Swackhamer

Part three: Spatialities

12 Inside looking in: the prospect of the aspect

Ursula Emery McClure and Michael A. McClure

13 The waiting room: transitional space and transitional drawing

 Susan Hedges

14 Spatial seductions: the everyday interiorities of Marcel Duchamp,

Edward Kienholz, and Pepón Osorio
Pablo Meninato

15 Inside the prefab house

Deborah Schneiderman

16 Oceanic interiorities
Sarah Treadwell

17 Technologies: the spatial agency of digital praxis

Erin Carraher

18 Transforming interior volumes: volume + surface + mass

Jonathon R. Anderson and Laura Lovell-Anderson

Part four: Sensorialities

19 Sensorial interior landscapes

Laura Garófalo-Khan

20 From ambient environments to sentient spaces

Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly Johnson

21 Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology

Ross T. Smith

22 Lines of Enquiry: drawing out Sigmund Freud’s study and consulting

room
 Ro Spankie

23 On technological limits

Clare Olsen

24 Salvador Dalí’s interiors with Heraclitus’s concealment

Simon Weir

25 Touch, taste, smell: fostering museum visitor engagement with

multisensory spaces
Kirsten Brown

Part five: Temporalities

26 A pirouette on the orthographic hinge

Lois Weinthal

27 Toward the immaterial interior

Frank Jacobus

28 Time travel: interior architecture and the exhibition space

Anne Massey

29 Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects

Clay Odom

Part six: Materialities

30 “Living” rooms: the hypernaturalization of the interior

Blaine Brownell
31 Internal disconnect: material memory in the John Portman originals
Gregory Marinic

32 Inside-out and outside-in: the envelope and the search for a

heterogeneous interiority
Marco Vanucci

33 Measuring the human dimension: domestic space, materiality, and

making in Japan
Zeke Leonard

Part seven: Occupancies

34 To dwell means to leave traces: modernism, mastery, and meaning in the
house museums of Gaudí and Le Corbusier
Georgina Downey

35 Event-space: a performance model for spatial design

Dorita Hannah

36 Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration

Marian Macken

37 Topology and interiority: folding space inside

Johan Voordouw

38 Architectural purgatory: the car, the garage, and the house

Anthony Morey and Volkan Alkanoglu

39 Spacing and forming: a performative account of a design studio

Jan Smitheram
Part eight: Appropriations

40 Death of the architect: appropriation and interior architecture

Markus Berger

41 The dialectics of appropriation

Graeme Brooker

42 Puzzle
Rachel Carley

43 Metropolitan hybrids: programming for a thriving urbanity

Rafael Luna

44 Design activism: commingling ethics of care and aesthetics

Lorella Di Cintio

45 Beyond the visible: skillsets for future interior architecture practice

Caryn Brause

Part nine: Geographies

46 Interiors as global constructs: framing culture and design discourses in a

world of movement
Tasoulla Hadjiyanni

47 Hearts and minds and dishwashers

Jodi Larson

48 Public spheres: Hong Kong’s interior urbanism

Jonathan D. Solomon
49 Altered (e)states: architecture and its interiority
David Erdman

Part ten: Epilogue

50 Why this, why now? The case for interior architecture

Gregory Marinic

Index
Contributors

Volkan Alkanoglu is the founding principal of Volkan Alkanoglu Design.

He is a registered architect with the Architektenkammer in Germany and a
LEED Accredited Professional in the United States. His work has been
exhibited at international institutions and featured in international design
publications. Alkanoglu taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology after
having served as Director of Professional Studies. He previously served as
the TVS Design Distinguished Critic at Georgia Tech and held a faculty
position at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles.

Jonathon R. Anderson is an assistant professor of interior design at

Ryerson University in Toronto. His research explores how industrial
manufacturing and CNC technologies influence the design and making
processes. His work is characterized by innovative and explorative methods
that result in interconnected design, fine art, and technology solutions. From
this nontraditional process emerges a provocative, complex design language
that visually communicates at various scales by emphasizing corporeal and
phenomenological experiences. Anderson holds a Master of Fine Arts in
Furniture Design from Savannah College of Art and Design and a BS in
Architecture from Southern Illinois University.

Markus Berger is an associate professor and the graduate program director

in the Department of Interior Architecture at the Rhode Island School of
Design. He holds a Diplomingenieur für Architektur from the Technische
Universität Wien, Austria, and is a registered architect (SBA) in the
Netherlands. Prior to coming to the United States, he practiced as an artist
and architect; taught in Austria, India, and Pakistan; and worked with UN
Studio in the Netherlands. He co-founded and serves as co-editor of Int|AR
Journal of Interventions and Adaptive Reuse, an interdisciplinary
publication that encompasses issues of preservation, conservation, alteration,
and intervention. The work in his research, writing, and InsideOut Design
studio focuses on change and design interventions in the built environment.

Caryn Brause is an assistant professor and the graduate program director in

the Department of Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
She is a registered architect, a member of the American Institute of
Architects, and principal of SITELAB Architecture + Design. Her practice
explores the reuse of abundant resources, including existing building stock,
underutilized landscapes, and repurposed materials. Her design work for
EcoBuilding Bargains, the largest material reuse store in New England, won
a 2013 AIA New England Citation Award. Her teaching investigates critical
skills for contemporary practice, both technological and interpersonal.
Brause received a 2016 AIA/ACSA Practice + Leadership Award and a 2013
NCARB Award for her project “Voices from the Field: From Design Concept
to Reality,” which spans design, materials, methods, and professional
practice. She is author of The Designer’s Field Guide to Collaboration,
published by Routledge in 2017.

Graeme Brooker is the head of interiors at The Royal College of Art,

London. He has published widely on many aspects of the interior, in
particular, the reuse of existing buildings. His recent publications include
Adaptations (2016) and Key Interiors Since 1900 (2013). He has co-edited
(with Sally Stone) seven books on the interior including the highly
acclaimed Re-readings (2005). He edited (with Lois Weinthal) The Handbook
of Interior Architecture + Design (2013). Brooker is a member of the editorial
advisory board of the journals Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture (Taylor
& Francis) and IDEA Journal. He is the series editor of Designing Interiors
for Lund Humphreys. He is the founder and director of Interior Educators
(IE), the national association for interior education in the United Kingdom.
Kirsten Brown is a New York–based design scholar and museum studies
specialist who focuses on developing emerging ways to engage audiences
and their communities with the evolving museum environment and the role
of museums in contemporary society. She holds an MA in Museum Studies
and a CAS in Cultural Heritage Preservation from the Syracuse University
School of Design. She has curated, co-curated, and contributed to exhibitions
at the National Steinbeck Center, the Everson Museum of Art, and Syracuse
University Art Gallery. Brown served as content coordinator and copy editor
for The Interior Architecture Theory Reader.

Blaine Brownell is an associate professor and the director of graduate

studies at the University of Minnesota School of Architecture and principal
of the design and research practice Transstudio. Brownell authored the
Transmaterial series, as well as the books Matter in the Floating World and
Material Strategies with Princeton Architectural Press. He writes the “Mind
& Matter” column for Architect magazine. Considered a preeminent scholar
on advanced materials for architecture and design, Brownell has been
published in over forty design, business, and science journals including The
New York Times, The London Times, The Wall Street Journal, New Scientist,
and Discover. He has lectured widely in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Brownell’s latest book, with co-author Marc Swackhamer, is titled
Hypernatural: Architecture’s New Relationship with Nature.

Amy Campos is an associate professor at California College of the Arts. Her

work focuses on critical issues of durability and design with a special
interest in the impermanent, migratory potentials of the interior. Her work
spans a variety of scales and platforms from urban and architectural to
interiors, object, and furniture design. Campos’ book, Interiors Beyond
Architecture, is co-edited with Deborah Schneiderman and published by
Routledge in 2018. Her essays include “Interior Migrations,” published in the
International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design (2013), and
“Optimistic Projections on the Cultures of Mass Consumption and Waste:
Embracing Hygiene Paranoia, Product Addiction, and Nomadic Lifestyles in
Sustainable Building Design,” published in the journal Forward (2011). Her
work has been discussed in the book Architecture Live Projects: Pedagogy
into Practice (2014). Recent press includes Interior Design, Dwell, Contract,
Icon, Perspective, and Architecture Australia magazines.

Rachel Carley is discipline leader of Spatial Design at AUT University. She

holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Auckland. Her thesis,
Whiteread’s Soundings of Architecture, constructs a series of contours
between British artist Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures and broader
architectural discourse. Soundings are taken in order to explore the complex
ways in which the artist enlists architectural drawing and modelling
practices to shed light on the frequently overlooked yet rich interior lives of
quotidian spaces and typological structures. Current post-doctoral research
critically examines the use of constraint as a pedagogical tool in the interior
design studio.

Erin Carraher is an assistant professor at the University of Utah School of

Architecture, where she coordinates the pre-major and junior-level studios,
and is a senior researcher at the Integrated Technology in Architecture
Center (ITAC). She is a licensed architect who practiced in New York before
moving into academia full time. Her current research focuses on emergent
models of collaborative practice, which she applies in academic and
professional projects. Carraher has won several regional and national
honors, including the ACSA Diversity Achievement Award, ACSA
Collaborative Practice Award, AIA Utah Young Architect Award, and
Building Technology Educators’ Society Emerging Faculty Award. She is the
co-author of Forefront: Architects as Leaders in Collaborative Practice (2016).

Sarah Deyong, PhD, is an associate professor at the Texas A&M University

College of Architecture and Coordinator of the PhD track in History, Theory,
and Design. She writes on the history of ideas in architecture, with a focus
on postwar and contemporary topics. With grants from the Graham
Foundation and the Glasscock Center of the Humanities, Deyong has
published her research in venues such as the Journal of Architectural
Education, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Praxis, Journal
of Architecture, A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture(Ashgate),
and the MoMA exhibition catalogue, The Changing of the Avant-Garde. She
garnered the ACSA/JAE Best Scholarship of Design Award in 2015 and is
currently working on two books: The Reinvention of Modern Architecture at
Mid-Century and Five Steps Toward a Critical Architecture. Deyong received
her PhD at Princeton University and her Bachelor of Architecture at the
University of Toronto.

Lorella Di Cintio, PhD, is an associate professor at Ryerson University

School of Interior Design in Toronto. Her research agenda focuses primarily
on design activism and the social and political positions undertaken by
designers and design educators. She is the founder of The Design Activism =
Change Initiative. In 2014, she guest edited Design Activism: Developing
Models, Modes, and Methodologies of Practice for IDEA Journal. In 2014, she
was awarded the IDEC Community Service Award from the Interior Design
Educators Council. In 2015, Professor Di Cintio won the Equity, Diversity,
and Inclusion Award at Ryerson University.

Georgina Downey, PhD, is a visiting research fellow in Art History at the

University of Adelaide. Her PhD research in the School of Art, Architecture,
and Design at the University of South Australia focused on the work of
expatriate Australian woman artists in Paris during the modern period. She
has published widely on the domestic interior in art, which was awarded an
Australian Academy of the Humanities Travel Grant (2006) and University
of Adelaide research grants. Her most recent books include Domestic
Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns (2013),
which won the AAANZ Anthology of the Year Award (2014), and Designing
the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (2015) with Anca
Lasc and Mark Taylor. She is a member of the Art Association of Australia
and New Zealand, Museums Australia, and the networks of the Centre for
Studies of Home, and Edwardian Culture.
Ursula Emery McClure is the A. Hays Town professor and graduate
coordinator in the School of Architecture at Louisiana State University.
Emery McClure is a registered architect, member of the American Institute
of Architects, and a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. She is a
founding partner of emerymcclure architecture whose work and writing
have been published widely in venues including Places, 306090–05,
Architecture Record Online, Journal of Architectural Education, Dwell, and
Southern Living. The practice has won numerous awards, including
recognition by the Venice Biennale (2006 and 2010) and AIA, and was
awarded the Rome Prize in Architecture (2008).

David Erdman is the chair of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design

(GAUD) at Pratt Institute. He is a co-founding director of the award-
winning design firm davidclovers (davidclovers changed ownership and
since 2016 is plusClover), which has been listed among Architectural
Digest’s AD100 list of top architecture and design firms in Asia. The practice
has exhibited work at the Venice Biennale, Beijing Biennale, Hong
Kong/Shenzhen Biennale, Art Institute of Chicago, M+ Hong Kong, and the
Southern California Institute of Architecture. Erdman is a co-founder of
servo, a design collaborative whose work has been shown at the Centre
Pompidou, MoMA, and the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
Erdman received the Design Vanguard Award, Young Architects Award
with servo, and the Rome Prize from The American Academy in Rome
(2008–2009).

Laura Garófalo-Khan in an associate professor in the University at Buffalo

School of Architecture and Planning. Her research focuses on the role of
architecture as an active environmental steward, hierologically centered
buildings, and ecocentric architectural ceramic systems. She has received
design awards for 13th International Garden Festival/Jardins de Métis,
Charleston Transit Hub Competition by Architecture for Humanity, and the
What if? New York City Post-Disaster Housing Competition. Her practice,
co-founded with Omar Khan, was selected by the Architectural League of
New York as Notable Young Architects. Garófalo-Khan has been published
in Matter: Material Processes in Architectural Production and Vegetecture.
Her work has been exhibited at multiple venues, including the Architectural
League of New York and the National Building Museum.

Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly Johnson are founding partners of Future
Cities Lab, an interdisciplinary design and research collaborative that has
developed a range of award-winning projects exploring the intersection of
design with advanced fabrication technologies, responsive building systems,
and public space. FCL’s work has been widely published and exhibited most
recently at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art. Prior to teaching architecture at the California
College of the Arts, Gattegno and Johnson taught at the University of
Michigan, UC Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, and University of
Virginia.

Tasoulla Hadjiyanni, PhD, is a professor in the Interior Design program of

the University of Minnesota. A native of Cyprus, she holds a Bachelor of
Architecture and Master of Science in Urban Development and Management
from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD from the University of
Minnesota. Her doctoral work in Housing Studies at the University of
Minnesota, presented in her book The Making of a Refugee – Children
Adopting Refugee Identity in Cyprus (Praeger, 2002), began her
interdisciplinary scholarship on the role of design in the construction of
culture, identity, marginalization, and difference. Hadjiyanni’s research
findings and teaching pedagogies have appeared in journals including Space
and Culture, Home Cultures, Journal of Interior Design, Design Studies, and
the International Journal of Consumer Studies. She served as editor of EDRA
Connections and guest editor of a special issue on Design+Culture for the
Journal of Interior Design.

Dorita Hannah, PhD, explores the intersection between performance and

architecture and publishes on practices that negotiate the spatial, visual, and
performing arts. Her design work incorporates scenography, exhibition,
installation design, and theater architecture. Focusing on ‘event-space’, she
investigates how the built environment housing an event is itself an event
and driver of experience. An active contributor to the Prague Quadrennial
(PQ) and World Stage Design (WSD), Hannah sits on several international
editorial and executive boards. Her publications include Performance
Design, as well as the guest editorship of journals themed on
performance/architecture and sceno-architecture. She is currently
completing a book for publication by Routledge titled Event-Space: Theatre
Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde.

Susan Hedges is senior lecturer in Spatial Design in the School of Art and
Design, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Her research and
publication interests embrace an interest for architectural drawing, interior
architecture, notation, dance, film, and critical theory regarding drawing and
visual culture. These seemingly divergent fields are connected by an interest
in the relationship that exists between the body condition, surface, pattern,
architectural notation, and visual images.

Edward Hollis studied architecture at Cambridge and Edinburgh

universities. For the subsequent six years, he practiced with Geoffrey Bawa
in Sri Lanka and Richard Murphy in Edinburgh. In 1999, he began teaching
interior architecture at Napier University in Edinburgh. In 2004, he joined
the Edinburgh College of Art where he serves as director of research in the
School of Design. Working with follies and ruins in Sri Lanka, modern
interventions to historic buildings in Scotland, and within the slippery
discipline of interiors, his research focuses on time, storytelling, and
building. Hollis is author of the book The Secret Lives of Buildings (2010) and
The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors (2013).

Frank Jacobus is a registered architect and faculty member in the Fay Jones
School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas. After graduating from
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1998, he
earned a post-professional master’s degree in Architecture with a Design-
Theory focus from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. His research
centers on the impacts of emerging technologies on architectural practice
and production. His work has been exhibited and published widely in
conference proceedings and journals. Jacobus is the author of Archi-Graphic:
An Infographic Look at Architecture (2015) and Discovering Architecture:
Built Form as Cultural Reflection (2014).

Jodi La Coe is an architect currently pursuing a PhD in Architecture and

Design Research at Virginia Tech. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture
from Penn State and a Master of Architecture from McGill University in the
History and Theory of Architecture program. In 2008, she was awarded the
New Faculty Teaching Award by the Association of Collegiate Schools of
Architecture and American Institute for Architecture Students. She publishes
on architectural representation and design, including “Memento Mori and
the Primacy of Recollection in Architectural Meaning” (Int|AR Journal of
Interventions and Adaptive Reuse, 2013), “Building the Imagination”
(NCBDS 30, 2014), Design Guide for the Borough of State College,
Pennsylvania (2014), and Perimeter Protection Streetscape Handbook (2014).

Jodi Larson is a historian of American culture and politics educated at Tufts

University and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her writing on
politics and culture includes “American Tune: Postwar Campaign Songs in a
Changing Nation” (Journal of Popular Culture, 2009) and “The Story of the
Suburbs” (Anoka County Historical Society, 2011). Her exhibit design work
includes historical, arts, and theatrical exhibitions at local and regional
museums and art centers. She designs curriculum, teaches, and lectures in
museums and historical societies, including Space Center Houston, the
Minnesota Historical Society, and the National Park Service.

Zeke Leonard is an assistant professor in the Syracuse University School of

Design, member of the Environmental and Interior Design faculty, and
coordinator of the first-year curriculum. His research involves the role of
social responsibility and environmental stewardship in contextually relevant
design and fabrication practices. Zeke partners with community groups and
organizations to find ways to mobilize local resources toward better uses. He
previously taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and New York
University, and is a visiting instructor at institutions including the Haystack
Mountain School of Craft and the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts.
Zeke holds an MFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of
Design and a BFA in Set Design from the University of North Carolina
School of the Arts.

Laura Lovell-Anderson, PhD, specializes in design for sustainability and

industrial design. Her research interests are an amalgam of systems theory,
biomimicry, and applied science to advocate for sustainable development.
Lovell-Anderson holds bachelor and master degrees in industrial and
sustainable design from Savannah College of Art and Design, an MS in Law
from Wake Forest University, and a PhD in Design (Sustainability + Energy
Technology concentration) from North Carolina State University.

Rafael Luna is an adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.

He is principal and co-founder of Boston-based PRAUD, a practice focused
on studying topology and typology in architecture and urbanism. Luna’s
work has been published and exhibited internationally and recognized with
the Architectural League Prize. His current teaching focuses on hybrid
architecture as an adaptive reuse programming strategy for interior
urbanism. His most recent essay on interior architecture, “Life of a Shell and
the Collective Memory of a City,” is featured in Int|AR Journal of
Interventions and Adaptive Reuse.

Marian Macken, PhD, is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and

Planning at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research
examines temporal aspects of architecture and the role of artists’ books as
documentation of architecture, with particular interest in the implications
and possibilities for architectural drawing and exhibition as design outcome.
Her most recent writing has been published in IDEA Journal, Architecture &
Culture, and The Routledge Companion to Design Research. Her work has
been acquired by various international public collections of artists’ books,
including Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Urawa Art
Museum, Japan. Marian was awarded a PhD, by thesis and creative work,
from the University of Sydney in 2012.

Marc Manack is an assistant professor of Building Design at the UNC

Charlotte School of Architecture, and founding principal of the architecture
and design practice SILO AR+D. His professional design work and creative
practice have been recognized nationally and internationally by design
awards, publications, and exhibitions. In 2016, Manack was selected as an
Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York. He taught
previously at the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture,
Kent State University’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design,
and at Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture. Manack is
co-editor of the book Out of Scale (2015).

Gregory Marinic, PhD, is an associate professor in the University of

Kentucky College of Design and the director of graduate studies in the
School of Interiors. Marinic is a designer, theorist, scholar, and educator
whose research and practice are focused on the intersection of architecture,
interiority, obsolescence, adaptive reuse, and geography. His New York–
based architectural practice, Arquipelago, has been awarded by the Seoul
Metropolitan Government, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture,
and the American Institute of Architects; as well as exhibited in the AIA
Center for Architecture in New York, Estonian Architecture Museum in
Tallinn, Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, and the National Building
Museum in Washington, DC. His recent publications include AD Journal,
Journal of Architectural Education, Design Issues, International Journal of
Architectural Research, Journal of Interior Design, and Int|AR Journal of
Interventions and Adaptive Reuse. Marinic previously served as founding
director of the Interior Architecture program at the University of Houston
College of Architecture and Design.

Anne Massey, PhD, is a visiting tutor at Regents University, London. She is

an internationally renowned scholar, educator, and author best known for
her work on the Independent Group, including The Independent Group:
Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–59 (1996) and numerous
contributions to exhibition catalogues, journals, and edited collections.
Massey is founding editor (with John Turpin) of the academic journal
Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture and has written extensively on the
subject, starting with Interior Design of the Twentieth Century first
published in 1990. Her most recent publications include Pop Art & Design,
edited with Alex Seago (2017) and The Blackwell Companion to
Contemporary Design Since 1945 (2018).

Michael A. McClure is a professor of Architecture and associate dean of the

College of the Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. McClure is a
registered architect, member of the American Institute of Architects, and a
fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He is a founding partner of
emerymcclure architecture whose work and writing have been published
widely in venues including Places, 306090–05, Architecture Record Online,
Journal of Architectural Education, Dwell, and Southern Living. The practice
has won numerous awards, including recognition by the Venice Biennale
(2006 and 2010) and AIA, and was awarded the Rome Prize in Architecture
(2008).

Pablo Meninato, PhD, is a practicing architect and adjunct professor of

Architecture at Temple University. He holds a PhD from the Universidade
Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil; a Diploma of Architect
from the University of Belgrano at Buenos Aires, and a Master of
Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Meninato has taught and
practiced architecture and urban design in Buenos Aires, Monterrey, and
Philadelphia. He is principal of Philadelphia-based PM Arch. His design
work and essays have been widely published in magazines and journals in
the United States, Argentina, and Brazil. His most recent book Unexpected
Affinities: The Concept of Type in Architectural Project from Quatremère to
Duchamp (2018) examines the correspondences among notions of
architectural type, object, displacement, and readymade.

Anthony Morey is a Miami-born and Los Angeles–based designer, writer,

and artist and the co-founder of One-Night Stand LA. He is interested in the
rifts between the subconscious and conscious tensions in the creative arts
and the various tendencies within them. Morey graduated with distinction
from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) with a
Bachelor of Architecture. He was granted the Alpha Rho Chi medal and a
thesis award. His work has been exhibited in Miami, Paris, Sydney, New
York, and Los Angeles and featured in several publications. Morey is
currently a research graduate student at the Harvard Graduate School of
Design.

Clay Odom is an assistant professor in the Interior Design program at the

University of Texas School of Architecture. He is a graduate of the Texas
Tech University College of Architecture and the Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. Odom has
completed building and interiors projects across the United States and
previously worked for internationally renowned firms including SHoP
Architects and Studio Sofield. Odom is principal of StudioMODO, an Austin-
based, research-focused design office. His work leverages a background that
is both academic and practice-oriented, supporting a speculative platform
for his design-based scholarship at the UTSOA.

Clare Olsen is an assistant professor of architecture at Cal Poly San Luis

Obispo. A dedicated educator, Olsen previously taught at Tulane University,
Cornell University, and Syracuse University. She is a licensed architect and
has pursued installation and furniture design projects through her practice,
C.O.CO. Her semi-permanent installations, PROJECTions and Reflection, are
located on the Syracuse University and Cal Poly campuses. Olsen’s recent
research is focused on interdisciplinarity, computation, materials, and design
pedagogy. Her book, Collaborations in Architecture and Engineering
(Routledge, 2014), co-authored with engineer Sinead MacNamara, has
received international acclaim.

Ziad Qureshi is an assistant professor in the College of Architecture and

Design at the University of Houston where he teaches interior architecture
studios and seminars on the history and theory of design. His current
research and work focus on the architecture and urbanism of transnational
geographies, spatial obsolescence, interior adaptive reuse, and post-industrial
landscapes. He is co-editor of the International Journal of Interior
Architecture and Spatial Design and coordinator of the Advanced Spatial
Design Research Group. His recent publications include the essay “Rural
Post-Industrial Landscapes: The Perceptual Practice of the Generative Site
Plan” (2015), the exhibition “Apocalyptic Architecture: Designing within
Resilient Detroit” (University of Edinburgh, 2013), and the book chapter “The
Museum” in Discovering Architecture: Built Form as Cultural Reflection
(2014).

Blair Satterfield and Marc Swackhamer are co-founding principals of

HouMinn Practice. Satterfield is an assistant professor of architecture at the
University of British Columbia and director of UBC SALA-based HiLo Lab.
Swackhamer is a professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota
where he serves as head of the School of Architecture. HouMinn is a design
collaborative that studies the relationship between performance, ornament,
and applied tool-making through the lenses of digital production and
fabrication technologies. Their work has been extensively published and
internationally exhibited. HouMinn’s research has garnered such honors as
the 2014 and 2008 R&D Award from Architect magazine and the “Best in
Environments” award from ID magazine. Satterfield holds degrees from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Rice University.
Swackhamer received degrees from the University of Cincinnati and Rice
University.

Deborah Schneiderman is a professor of Interior Design at Pratt Institute

and a registered architect. She is principal and founder of deSc:
architecture/design/research, a Brooklyn-based research practice.
Schneiderman’s scholarship and teaching explore the emerging fabricated
interior environment and its materiality. Her research has been widely
published and includes the books Inside Prefab: the Ready-Made Interior
(2012); The Prefab Bathroom: An Architectural History (2014), an
architectural graphic novel–style history (illustrated by Bishakh Som); and
the edited volumes Textile, Technology and Design: From Interior Space to
Outer Space (co-edited with Alexa Griffith Winton, 2016) and Interiors
Beyond Architecture (co-edited with Amy Campos, Routledge, 2018). She has
published several book chapters in edited volumes, including The Handbook
of Design for Sustainability (2013), as well as articles in academic journals
including Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture, Journal of Interior Design,
and Home Cultures.

Ross T. Smith, PhD, is an associate professor of Architectural Design at

Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. His teaching and
research focus on architecture design studio with theoretical concerns of
phenomenology, embodiment, material culture, and experiential learning.
Smith is a photographic artist who has been exhibiting internationally for
over twenty years. His practice enhances the poetic and cross-disciplinary
influences he cultivates in studio teaching. Smith’s research has been
published in IDEA Journal, Charrette, Journal of the Association of
Architectural Educators, The Cambridge Architecture Journal, and two
edited books, Live/Work and Sub Rosa, featuring work from students in the
Master of Architecture design studios at the University of Melbourne.

Jan Smitheram is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture at Victoria

University of Wellington. She has taught both theory and design courses at
undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her teaching and research engage
the relationship between the body and space at different scales and how
space can prompt or regulate the body. Recent publications include a co-
edited book (with Jules Moloney and Simon Twose) Architectural Design
Research (Spurbuch, 2015) and a chapter (with Jules Moloney and Simon
Twose) in Studio Futures (Uro, 2015). Her published essays include
“Regulation and Transformation: A Content Analysis of the Representation
of Women in Architecture New Zealand, 1998–2008” in Architectural Theory
Review (2012) and “Affective Territories” (with Ian Woodcock) in IDEA
Journal (2009).

Jonathan D. Solomon is a researcher with a long interest in the role of

architecture in the contemporary city. His book, Cities Without Ground
(2012), explores the unique three-dimensional urbanism of Hong Kong. He
has edited the series 306090 books for over a decade and served as curator of
the United States Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. Solomon
is the director of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He holds a BA from Columbia
University and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. Solomon
is a licensed architect in the State of Illinois.

Ro Spankie is a principal lecturer and course leader for Interior Architecture

at the University of Westminster. Fascinated by the role of drawing in the
design process, she has exhibited and published work related to the interior
both in the UK and abroad. Recent publications include Basics Interiors 03:
Drawing Out the Interior (2009), “Drawing Out the Censors Room” (2012),
“The Art of Borrowing” in The Handbook of Interior Architecture and
Design (2013), and An Anecdotal Guide to Sigmund Freud’s Desk (2015). She
is associate editor of the international journal: Interiors: Design,
Architecture, Culture (Taylor & Francis).

Emily Stokes-Rees, PhD, is an assistant professor of museum studies in the

Syracuse University School of Design. She is a material anthropologist
whose research centers on evolving ideas around cultural citizenship and
representation in postcolonial Asia. After receiving a doctorate from Oxford
University in 2007, Stokes-Rees spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at
Brown University, where she spent much of her time hidden away in the
collections of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. From 2012 to 2014,
she was based at Harvard as an academic dean at Cabot House and lecturer
in the anthropology department. Her recent publications include Making
Sense of a Mélange: Representing Cultural Citizenship in Singapore’s Asian
Civilizations Museum (2013), “Getting Everyone to Think with Things: New
Approaches to Teaching and Learning in the Haffenreffer Museum of
Anthropology, Brown University” in Academic Museums: Beyond
Exhibitions and Education (2012), and “Recounting History: Constructing a
National Narrative in the Hong Kong Museum of History” in National
Museums: New Studies from Around the World (Routledge, 2011).

Mark Taylor, PhD, is a professor of Architecture at Swinburne University,

Australia. His research on the interior has been widely published in journals
and books, and he has taught both theory and design studio courses. He has
held several nationally competitive grants and currently holds an Australian
Research Council Discovery Grant to investigate Place and Parametricism.
Taylor co-edited (with Julieanna Preston) the seminal publication Intimus:
Interior Design Theory Reader (2006), edited the four-volume anthology
Interior Design and Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources (2013), and
more recently, with Georgina Downey and Anca Lasc, co-edited Designing
the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (2015).

Liz Teston is an assistant professor of interior architecture at the University

of Tennessee School of Interior Architecture. She teaches courses that focus
on community engagement, design theory, and design communication.
Teston has presented her research on conditions of interiority, design
politics, and the everyday at several conferences and symposia. Teston was
recently named the College of Architecture and Design’s James Johnson
Dudley Faculty Scholar and will be a Fulbright Scholar in Bucharest,
Romania, in 2018. She was co-editor for Jennifer Bonner’s A Guide to the
Dirty South: Atlanta (2013). Her most recent publications are a visual essay
“Reclaim the City” in the International Journal of Interior Architecture +
Spatial Design and “… And Though She be but Little, She is Fierce!” in
MONU #27 Small Urbanism (2017).

Sarah Treadwell is an associate professor in the School of Architecture and

Planning at The University of Auckland. Her research investigates the
representation of architecture in colonial and contemporary images and
proceeds with both writing and image-making. Treadwell has a long-
standing interest in gender-related issues in architecture and has written on
the work of contemporary artists and on representations of motels, suburbs,
interiority, and volcanic conditions of ground. She has published in various
books and journals, including Space and Culture, Architectural Theory
Review, and Interstices. Her visual work addressing oceanic conditions has
been exhibited at Te Tuhi, Pakuranga; the Gus Fisher Gallery, University of
Auckland; and the Adam Art Gallery – Te Pa¯taka Toi in Wellington, New
Zealand.

Marco Vanucci Marco Vanucci is the founding director of OPENSYSTEMS

Architecture, an architecture and design practice based in London. His work
has been exhibited internationally and it was featured in several
international design publications. He has taken part in several conferences
and symposia and has lectured worldwide. Vanucci taught architectural
technology at KTH in Stockholm and is currently Unit Master at the
Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.

Johan Voordouw is an assistant professor at the Azrieli School of

Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University and a registered architect
(ARB, UK). He has taught and practiced in the United Kingdom, Canada,
and the Netherlands. Johan completed his graduate studies at the Bartlett
School of Architecture (Unit 20) and his undergraduate degree at the
University of Manitoba. Currently, his research interests are digital design
and emerging fabrication. More specifically, his work seeks to reconfigure
digital practice with historic/vernacular knowledge in developing new
architectural hybrids. This research extends from the initial stages of
architectural representation through the design process to construction.

Michael Webb studied architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic School

of Architecture. In 1963, he was invited by Peter Cook to join a group of
young architects who referred to themselves as Archigram. Using a
magazine format, Archigram promoted a radical rethinking of the concept of
architecture using inflatable structures, clothing-like environments, bright
colors, and cartoon-like drawing techniques that pioneered contemporary
graphic visualization and technological trends. Since moving to United
States in 1965, Webb has taught architecture at the Rhode Island School of
Design, Columbia University, Barnard College, Cooper Union, New Jersey
Institute of Technology, University at Buffalo, Virginia Tech, Pratt Institute,
and Princeton University. Webb currently teaches at the Cooper Union in
New York. His work has been internationally acclaimed, extensively
published, and broadly exhibited.

Lois Weinthal is the chair of the School of Interior Design at Ryerson

University in Toronto. Her research and practice investigate the
interrelationship of architecture, interiors, clothing, and objects, resulting in
works that take on an experimental nature. Weinthal has internationally
exhibited and lectured. Publications include Toward a New Interior: An
Anthology of Interior Design Theory (2011) and After Taste: Expanded
Practice in Interior Design, co-edited with Kent Kleinman and Joanna
Merwood-Salisbury (2011). She has received grants from the Graham
Foundation, Fulbright, and DAAD. Weinthal previously taught at The
University of Texas at Austin and Parsons The New School for Design. She
studied architecture at Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Rhode Island
School of Design.
Simon Weir, PhD, is a lecturer in Architecture at the University of Sydney.
His theoretical research focuses on Salvador Dali’s theories of Surrealism,
Classical art and architecture from the Athenian and Roman eras, and the
foundational mythologies of architectural culture. His writing on interiors
range from deployments of Surrealist methods in “Paranoiac Critical
Interiorisations: Odysseus in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and
Buckminster Fuller’s Domes,” in IDEA Journal (2012), and “On the Edibility
of Theatres,” in Youtopia – A Passion for the Dark (2012), to an exploration
of the political significance of domestic interior ornamentation in “Xenia in
Vitruvius’ Greek House: andron, ξείνία and xenia from Homer to Augustus,”
in The Journal of Architecture.
Acknowledgements

It has been an honor to collect the scholarship of my talented friends and

colleagues for The Interior Architecture Theory Reader. This book has
benefited from their shared commitment to stewardship, as well as their
mutual generosity. Special thanks to the chapter authors for contributing
their expertise to this important project. Our growing network of worldwide
collaborators has undeniably enriched my own scholarly pursuits. At
Routledge, I found enthusiastic supporters of this project in Fran Ford and
Trudy Varcianna, whose mentorship has been extraordinary. Sincere thanks
to my graduate assistant Kirsten Brown who served as content coordinator
and copy editor for this book. Her level of care and dedication to this project
have been exceptional.
I must also acknowledge the academics and practitioners who
have influenced my growth as a designer, design scholar, and educator. My
years of doctoral study at the Texas A&M University College of Architecture
were a transformative experience that significantly contributed to the
conceptual development of The Interior Architecture Theory Reader. I would
like to thank my PhD committee chair, Dr. Sarah Deyong, and committee
members, Dr. Koichiro Aitani, Dr. Cecilia Giusti, and Dr. Peter Lang, for
their guidance and support throughout the course of my research and
editorship of this book. Sarah has been an exceptional mentor and advocate
for my scholarship. Sincere appreciation to architectural historian Dr.
Isabelle Gournay, who shaped my interests in architectural history and
theory as a graduate student at the University of Maryland, and to Dr.
Nancy Bain, who nurtured my early curiosities in cultural geography and
urbanism as an undergraduate student at Ohio University. Furthermore, my
professional growth in practice was fundamentally transformed by New
York–based architects and professional mentors Rafael Viñoly, Sandra
McKee, and Barbara Skarbinski. It was an honor, pleasure, and privilege to
work for and on behalf of them.
Most sincere appreciation to my parents – Thomas and Diane
Marinic – who nurtured my earliest interests in architecture, design, culture,
geography, and the built environment. To our forebears – paternal
grandparents Edward Marinic and Helen Jansa Marinic, maternal
grandparents James Vadavacio and Doralisa Riccione Vadavacio, paternal
great grandparents Ignatz Marinc ˇ ic ˇ and Anna Jarnayc ˇ ic ˇ Marinc ˇ ic ˇ ,
maternal great grandparents Angelo Vadavacio and Domenica Gaetano
Vadavacio – the lives of your descendants in the United States have been
undeniably enriched by your humanist perspectives on the world. And
finally, the very highest respect and appreciation to my partner, Tito Mesias,
for his ongoing and boundless support of my professional, academic, and
scholarly pursuits for nearly twenty years.
Introduction

Interior architecture began to gain recognition in the 1970s as an

independent discipline shaped primarily by the architectural principles,
histories, and theories surrounding spatial design. Today, the increasing
relevance of interior architecture responds to widespread misunderstandings
of interior design – a broad territory ranging from architectural interiors to
stylistic considerations – as well as new scholarship that bridges boundaries.
Some of this discourse reframes the interior as within the realm of
architecture, rather than apart from it, by focusing on the overlooked
interiors of architecture. Although “interiority” undeniably exists at the core
of interior design, the “interior” in architecture seems to live at the
periphery. Embodying a trans-territorial lens that fits neither entirely within
architecture nor interior design, advocates of interior architecture must
continually negotiate and promote awareness within established frameworks
that are at times unknowingly biased, ill-fitting, and unresponsive. At the
same time, contemporary modes of theorizing, practicing, teaching, and
disseminating spatial scholarship have grown increasingly demanding,
blurry – and at times – contentious.
In response to such issues, interior architecture has grown into a
specialization focusing primarily on the architectural provenance of interiors
advanced by adaptation, performance, technology, and social agency.
Contrasted to the largely autonomous field of interior design and its
historical association with the decorative arts, interior architecture
represents a notable shift in spatial practice and the academy. Merging
aspects of architecture, interior design, adaptive reuse, installation art, and
digital fabrication – interior architecture blends these influences into a
sophisticated interrogation of conventions critiqued through alternative
practices. The Interior Architecture Theory Reader promotes such awareness
while offering an impetus for emerging interiorities and the future queries
that will examine them. In this book, the nomenclature interior architecture
frames a specifically architectural lens on interiors advanced through
intersectional practices. The talents of architects, interior architects, interior
designers, industrial designers, installation artists, and academics converge
to shape new frameworks for interdisciplinary reassessment. Reflecting on
the past while pondering emerging potentialities for spatial design, leading
educators, historians, and theorists investigate speculative themes to define
interior architecture.
Although connected to and respectful of both architecture and
interior design, this book embodies one of the few resources identifying
interior architecture as a specific discipline with a unique call to action.
Chapters authored by leading voices in the field respond to concerns that the
interior specificities of architecture must be more effectively examined and
rigorously theorized. Here, authors ponder how students, scholars,
educators, and practitioners of interior architecture might shape a unique
canon for this young discipline. They survey a diverse range of global
insights that collectively construct a defined territory for interior
architecture. To achieve this, The Interior Architecture Theory Reader has
been catalogued into nine thematic areas – “Histories,” “Territories,”
“Spatialities,” “Sensorialities,” “Temporalities,” “Materialities,” “Occupancies,”
“Appropriations,” and “Geographies” – that have been further delineated by
individual chapters.
In “Histories,” authors examine how the interior has been a
contentious territory of conflicting interpretations, intentions, and desires.
Marginalized by the larger discipline of architecture throughout the
twentieth century, interior design grew incrementally as an allied and
complex yet distinct field with roots in the decorative arts. As such, interior
practitioners were often generally viewed as tastemakers who primarily
embraced intuition and style. During the formative years, spatial designers
of various identities collectively contributed to an emerging territory that
later developed into interior architecture. Chapters examine conflicting
claims to the interior alongside deeper investigations into the architectural
foundations of interiority.
In “Territories,” authors engage the cultural, urban, and
disciplinary boundaries of interior architecture. As our most populous and
desirable cities become more dense, and base-building opportunities
increasingly rare, contemporary designers have embraced higher
performance through adaptive interventions. Shifting scales, interior
practitioners have developed a greater awareness of complex projects
focused on experimentation in digital fabrication and materials research that
interrogates contemporary conventions. Expanding on such considerations,
authors in “Spatialities” examine how interiority operates within highly
variant existing conditions to re-semanticize buildings as a consequence of
dynamic processes. Contingency enhances the need for designers to view
their craft as an opportunity for stewardship. Like a form of urban
acupuncture, small-scale interior manipulations contribute to broader
ecologies within established urban forms and existing buildings.
In “Sensorialities,” authors explore the emotive parameters of
interiors in scholarship that explores the sensory conditions of color, sound,
light, mood, and atmosphere. Authors present installations, performance-
based architectures, robotics, and material innovations addressing a broad
range of theory-based interior architectural investigations connected to the
senses. In a similar manner, authors in “Temporalities” consider
phenomenology and processes of change in building interiors and
occupancies. Spatial installations, performances, and light-mobile
architectures offer a critical view across scales. Mobilizing a
transdisciplinary platform supporting provocative innovations, spatial
temporality exists at the intersection of conservation and ecologies at
various scales. These chapters advocate for critical design practices that
appropriate and renew.
In “Materialities,” authors reconsider the role of materials and
their agency in the process of making, as well as the social, ethical, and
aesthetic presence of materiality in interior architecture. Guided by bold
ideas and supported by experimentation, interior architecture offers a
natural home for materials research, while contributing to and advancing
the challenges that confront the larger practice of architecture. The
investigative and speculative nature of innovative interior architecture
curriculum allows us to rethink the stereotypical conventions associated
with interiors-related practice and conventions of interior design. Chapters
in this section address various material conditions from the standpoint of
historical influences and current technologies. Durability, weathering,
resilience, and sustainability are reconsidered via materiality.
In “Occupancies,” authors address inhabitation. What do we gain –
ethically, socially, politically, environmentally, and otherwise – by framing
interiority as the most opportunistic territory to address social justice?
Topics range in scope from the human body to conditions at the urban scale.
Here, the human body serves as a generative force for interiors – its
representation and contextualization are discussed with regard to individual
and communal occupancies. Furthermore, a transnational context considers
occupancies from cultural to national perspectives, gender, politics, and
territorialization.
Similarly, chapters in “Appropriations” analyze changing needs
and expectations for building interiors, as well as outside forces that subject
their contents to continual reassessment. Interiors frame human occupancies
and address economic, social, and political needs. As encapsulated worlds,
interior spaces speak to the undeniably humanist nature of architecture –
evoking the interconnected agencies of both time and place, while conveying
compelling aspects of who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.
They transmit our personal desires, collective anxieties, collective aspirations
– revealing temporality and ephemeral qualities that physically document
cultural values and impermanence. More specifically, interior architecture
privileges the phenomenological parameters of design by emphasizing time
and inhabitation. Chapters in this section engage cultural practices, gender
identities, and political influences transmitted substantively and expansively
at various scales within the built environment.
 In “Geographies,” authors discuss cultural themes and
globalization lensed via shifting imperatives of interiority. The relationship
of interiors to diminishing resources, sociopolitical change, and advancing
technologies has placed transformative demands on both academia and
professional practice. Responding to the need for sustainable alternatives, a
new discourse recasts existing buildings and their interiors as an
increasingly critical territory. Tethering interior architecture to adaptive
reuse commits the practice to a sustainable dimension nurturing alternative
futures. Rapid urbanization, environmental imperatives, natural disasters,
and continuing inequities between nations require enlightened design
solutions – at the scale of the interior – which have become increasingly
central in contemporary practice. These concerns assume the need to create
flexible organizational structures and collaborative models, repositioning
interiors discourse at a global scale. Confronting issues of resilience,
adaptive practices engage more responsive and regenerative actions in the
larger built environment. Building interiors, and specifically the repurposed
potential of existing and undervalued buildings, systematize a bottom-up
framework for rebuilding cities from the inside out.
Together, the topical themes and fifty chapter-essays of The
Interior Architecture Theory Reader curate a transnational perspective on
interiority that encourages experimentation and debate. Revealing
multiplicity and continuity, singularity and variance – stewarding a social
and technological dimension nurturing progressive futures – this book
celebrates a non-hierarchical and inclusive discourse surrounding the field.
As a designer, theorist, scholar, educator, and advocate of interior
architecture, I am often asked, “What is interior architecture?” Shaped by a
diverse range of global voices, The Interior Architecture Theory Reader
represents my collaborative attempt to answer that question.
Part one

Histories
Chapter 1

(Re)constructing histories
A brief historiography of interior architecture

Edward Hollis

I began my academic career in 1999 as a lecturer in what was, at the time, a

relatively new subject: interior architecture. There was little for students, or
for me, to read about interior architecture. The only comprehensive work of
which I knew was John Kurtich’s Interior Architecture published in 1995.
Since that time, however, there has been something of a publishing
explosion around the subject.1
This chapter critiques some of this literature and charts the
theorization of the subject since the late 1990s. In addition to Kurtich’s
foundational text, this chapter discusses John Pile’s History of Interior
Design (2000), Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone’s Re-readings (2004), Fred
Scott’s On Altering Architecture (2008), Penny Sparke’s The Modern Interior
(2008), and Charles Rice’s The Emergence of the Interior (2007).2 Not all of
these books are explicitly about interior architecture. Scott, Brooker, and
Stone, for example, addressed an audience of architects and interior
designers (Re-readings being published by RIBA). Pile, Rice, and Sparke
focused on interior design and a more academic audience. All of them
contributed significantly to discussions surrounding the new discipline.
While books by Pile, Sparke, and Rice are strictly histories, Scott offers a
theoretical disquisition; Brooker, Stone, and Kurtich deliver compendia of
case studies. In each, however, a sense of history informs understandings
about what interior architecture was, is, and could become.
How, then, were these histories of interior architecture
constructed? What were their roots and precedents? Why were these books
written when they were written? What did they conceive themselves as
being histories of? What evidence did they use, and how was it welded into
narratives? This chapter will specifically address these historical and
historicized understandings of the discipline. It provides a lens through
which the identity of interior architecture was constructed during this
period. It attempts to show how history is not merely the record of things
past, but, like interior architecture itself, a (re)construction of preexisting
structures.

Why were these books written?

The turn of the twenty-first century was a time when one important aspect
of interior architecture – the reuse of existing buildings – emerged in the
form of Grands Projets like the Tate Modern (Herzog and De Meuron, 2000)
and Berlin Reichstag (Norman Foster, 1999) to occupy the center ground in
architecture. John Kurtich put it somewhat messianically:

The emergence of interior architecture as a new profession is an

idea whose time has come. It is the link between art, architecture,
and interior design. The professionals in this area have created this
term to express a humanistic approach toward the completion of
interior spaces. This approach, shared by many design
professionals, has begun to produce a definition that is distinct
from current practice.3
Fred Scott was more modest, commenting, “That theory follows in the wake
of the expedient.”4 There were, however, other agendas at work. Scott
continued:

This book began from a partisan argument for the contribution of

art school designers to be recognized as being valid in the
alteration of the built environment as the more celebrated work of
architects in making new buildings. It was, in the beginning, an
argument against a widely assumed hegemony.5

The works under discussion here were not written by architects but by
studio teachers in art schools, such as Scott or Graeme Brooker, and
theoreticians and historians of design, such as Sparke, Rice, and Pile. There
was a political and professional dimension to their efforts. “Designers
disdained the elitist architects for their compulsion for purity and
maintenance of concept. Architects generally considered designers to be
frivolous with no philosophical base of knowledge to guide their work,”
explained Kurtich, but as Scott hinted, architecture was perceived to have a
hegemony that design did not possess.6
Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone’s Re-readings connected the
emergence of interior architecture to postmodernism, though not the
stylistic postmodernism of the 1980s. “The rise in the number of buildings
being remodeled, and the gradual acceptance and respectability of the
practice, is based on the reaction to what is perceived as the detrimental
erosion of the city and its contents by modern architecture.”7 The very title
of their book suggested a nod to literary postmodernism. “Many examples of
modernist architecture,” they wrote, “were the product of a formal system
that was essentially self-sufficient,” while the alteration of buildings offered
opportunities to explore the aesthetics of the incomplete, the incoherent, and
the layered.8 Books about interior architecture arose, their authors claimed,
in response to three main stimuli: the increasing volume of the practice on
the ground, a long-standing political conflict taking place between the
professions of interior design and architecture, and a “second wave” of
postmodern practice and theory.

What were these books about?

Having identified the existence of a new practice, Kurtich divided it into
three practices:

First, it can be the entire building designed as an external shell

containing integrated and finished interiors. Second, interior
architecture can be the completion of space within an existing
architectural enclosure. Finally, it can be the preservation,
renovation, or adaptive reuse of buildings, historic or otherwise.9

His book addressed itself to “architectural masterpieces from various

historical periods,” including “well known modern examples,” and he felt the
need to point out, “the examples presented are not limited to interiors.”10
Pile’s history was conceived as a primer – a sort of Pevsner or
Bannister Fletcher for interior design. “Professional interior designers,” he
wrote, “are expected … [to] know the practices of the past in terms of
‘styles’ … the purpose of this book is to deliver in one volume of reasonable
size, a basic survey of 60,000 years of personal and public space.”11 The word
space is key, for while Pile’s history is ostensibly a history of interior design,
it takes an architectural approach to its subject:

interior design is inextricably linked to architecture and can only

be studied within an architectural context … Enclosed spaces such
as ruins, ancient sites, and open courtyards are given due
consideration even though the sky may be their only ceiling and
they are, therefore, not strictly interiors12

At the same time, references to the other elements that comprise

the interior – furniture, textiles, and so on – were limited to edited
highlights.13
Penny Sparke contributes to the discussion from a different
perspective. Her starting point was Walter Benjamin’s famous comment on
Paris of the nineteenth century:

for the private individual, the place of dwelling is for the first time
opposed to the place of work. The former constitutes itself as the
interior. Its complement is the office. The private individual, who
in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to
sustain him in his illusions.14

Sparke continues to suggest that the modern interior has been formed out of
the opposition between “two spheres”: the domestic interior, characterized
by femininity, soft textiles, practices of decoration, and so on, and the public
interior, characterized by hard surfaces and materials, male occupations, and
architecture. “The boundaries between the ‘separate spheres’ were
fundamentally unstable, and it was that instability, rather than the
separation per se, that, I will suggest, defined modernity, and by extension
the modern interior.” Her history documents episodes in this long-running
boundary war: in the domestication of the public spaces of the hotel and
café in the nineteenth century, for example, or the victory of the
architectural interior in the Gesamtkunstwerk homes of the early twentieth
century. “Art School” interior design – a sort of soft modernism was, she
concluded, a sort of resolution between the two spheres that proved
temporary by the current rise of interior architecture.
Figure 1.1 The modern interior as architecture: the cover of John Pile’s History of Interior Design
(2009 Edition)
Image credit: Wiley
Figure 1.2 The modern interior as domestic occupation: the cover of Penny Sparke’s The Modern
Interior (2008)
Image credit: Reaktion Books

What evidence did they use?

Sparke identified the interior as an unstable category, and even Pile, whose
history of the interior is the most “architectural” discussed here, was forced
to admit,

Interiors do not exist in isolation in the way that a painting or a

sculpture does, but within some kind of shell … they are also
crammed with a great range of objects and artifacts … this means
that interior design is a field with unclear boundaries.”15
Those boundaries are temporal, as well as spatial. “Interiors,” Sparke argued,
“are rendered even harder to discuss by the fact that they are constantly
being modified as life goes on within them.”16 Sparke was referring to
domestic interiors, but the comment has implications for any understanding
of the history of interior architecture. An altered building is only ever in a
temporary state, destined to be obliterated by history just like the decorative
schemes of ephemeral homes. Nevertheless, Pile’s history presents interiors
as if they possessed such clear boundaries. Interiors are predominantly
depicted through photographs, as objects (albeit inside-out ones) largely
denuded of that “great range of objects”17 he mentions in his introduction.
The construction of these images is not discussed, as if they were transparent
evidence of the interiors depicted.
In The Emergence of the Interior, Charles Rice disagreed with this
approach: “Visual representations of interiors are not simply transparent to
spatial referents, even if such spatial referents exist; representations
construct interiors on a two-dimensional surface as much as practices of
decoration and furnishing construct interiors spatially.”18 Furthermore, he
argued the lens through which such images are constructed is in itself a
temporary phenomenon:

The Oxford English dictionary records the “interior” had come

into use from the late fifteenth century to mean inside as divided
from outside, and to describe the spiritual and inner nature of the
self and the soul. From the early eighteenth century, “interiority”
was used to designate interior character and a sense of individual
subjectivity, and from the idle of the eighteenth century the
interior came to designate the domestic affairs of a state, as well as
the territory that belongs to a country or region. It was only from
the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, that the interior
came to mean “the inside of a building or room.”19

To compound the problem, the term “interior architecture” itself did not
widely come into existence until, as Kurtich wrote, “some progressive design
firms began using the term interior architecture in the early 1970s.”20
Historians of the domestic interior addressed this problem by writing
histories of a phenomenon created since the “separation of the spheres.” In
his critique of earlier “traditional” histories, which trace interiors from
ancient origins, Rice writes:

The traditional history … does not subject its conceptual and

organizational structures to historical analysis. Each of these
histories, in their desire for comprehensiveness, seeks to establish
a domain of study wherein one can recognize the continually
present themes of privacy and domesticity in relation to the stable
categories of the interior and its inhabiting subject. These
categories provide reference points against which representations,
treated as transparent visual evidence, can be verified to changes
in decorative style, and in understanding how the practices of
inhabitation can be perceived as timeless, but also progressive.21

He might have been referring to Pile’s survey, which contains images of

Minoan throne rooms, medieval cathedrals, and baroque libraries, none of
which were designed by people who would have described themselves as
interior designers. In the same way, for example, Kurtich, Brooker, and Stone
might write about the ad hoc occupation of the Theater of Marcellus, or
Michelangelo’s conversion of the Baths of Diocletian into the church of
Santa Maria Degli Angeli as “interior architecture,” and present them as
equivalent to works which, like Foster’s Reichstag or Herzog and Meuron’s
Tate Modern, were conceived in an age in which the term was current. It is
unlikely like that rapacious medieval nobility or Michelangelo himself would
have agreed.
Rice’s own study, like Sparke’s, limits itself to that period in which
the interior had been, or was being, conceptualized – the nineteenth century.
His title addresses itself explicitly to the notion that the very concept of the
interior is a time-bound one. This, however, is not necessarily an adequate
approach for a historian of interior architecture, which addresses itself not
just to the ephemeral practices of interior occupation, but also the eternal
verities of architecture. A comprehensive history of the alteration and
occupation of buildings, if it is to be useful in practice, will have to deal with
structures and practices that reach back well beyond the birth of “interior
architecture” as it is currently conceived.

How did they tell their stories?

The problem of evidence leads us to the issue of narrative structure. Pile’s
chronological catalogue of masterpieces in terms of “styles” describing “the
nature of the contributions of those individuals who generated the most
interesting and influential approaches to design”22 was primarily an
authorial vision of both design and the interior. Scott identified two
problems with this approach in respect to the practice of altering buildings.
The first relates to narrative structure. To illustrate his point, he referred to a
classic work of architectural history, Sir John Summerson’s Architecture in
Britain 1530–1830, and to a very well-known building, Hampton Court
Palace:

Firstly, the palace appears as the joint creation of Cardinal Wolsey

and King Henry VIII, and secondly, two hundred pages later as the
creation of Sir Christopher Wren. The consideration of
architectural styles requires this ersatz purity of vision, a
perceptual requirement to see buildings as discrete entities and
complete unto themselves even when, as is the case with Hampton
Court, the whole is a composite affair.23

This sets an interesting challenge for the writer of a “survey” of

the history of interior architecture, or architectural alteration. If history is to
be presented as a sequence of “styles” (as the uses of history by practitioners
– and a long tradition – might suggest it should), then what sequence should
it follow?
 One option is to present such a history as a sequence of individual
alterations, in which case, Hampton Court would appear twice, as in
Summerson’s work. Another would be to adopt a case study model, tracing
Hampton Court through the many centuries of its development, which
would allow what Brooker and Stone call “the inherent qualities of the place
and its surroundings” to emerge through the repeated retellings of a singular
place. Any sense of a general or comprehensive history would be lost by this
second approach.
Scott also poses another problem, arguing the practice of altering
architecture struck at the very heart of authorial aesthetics: “the work of
intervention and alteration,” he wrote, “is … collective, across generations,
whereas the work of architecture may often be considered to be
individual.”24 If a building has been redesigned many times over centuries, to
whom may we ascribe its authorship, and how? This returns us to the
problem of representation, for architecture and the interior are themselves
systems of representation, bound up in all those other systems of
representation, both literary and visual. Interior architecture exists as much
in its own histories as in built artefacts. Should, therefore, the history of
interior architecture, like its products, be discontinuous, multiple, layered,
and collaborative taking place across generations?
The idea of interior architecture emerged in response to new
practices in the building industry and a new iteration of the old professional
turf war between interiors and architecture. It also reflected a “postmodern
turn” in both architecture and history: an interest in the intertextual, the
relative and the denial of linear heroic narratives. The works under
discussion here helped to define understandings of interior architecture that
ranged from Pile’s or Kurtich’s conception of the interior as a quasi-
architectural artefact, to Brooker and Stone’s or Scott’s understanding of the
practice of alteration – and the consequent incompleteness of the interior as
an ever-changing “open work.” Within interior histories, interior architecture
was seen as another iteration of the unstable relationship between the
private and public spheres. These understandings shaped the evidence and
the narratives that were used to tell the story of interior architecture, from
the fixed and supposedly transparent “architectural” view of the photograph
and the survey history, to a view of the interior itself as ephemeral space
and image bound up in its own representation. Both approaches leave us
with problems – of conceptual rigor in the former and narrative coherence
in the latter.

Figure 1.3 A composite building: Jan Kip and Leonard Knijff, “Hampton Court” (1708)
Image credit: Wikimedia commons

These are conditions shared with all those “herstories” that

emerged alongside interior architecture itself in the late twentieth century.
All of them share an interest in “deviant” practices or identities that
challenge traditional heroic narratives. All of them rise in conjunction with
“liberation” movements and assist in their self-identification. All of them,
however, share the problem of evidence and narrative, for the very
suppression and oppression of the suppressed and oppressed lay in the
denial of their voices. These are problems shared by all historians. In
Memory, History, and Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur describes history as the
construction of images of the past, which he identifies with Plato’s
problematic of the “eikon”: “The eikon offers itself as the presence of an
absent thing stamped with the seal of the anterior,” but it is also a thing in its
own right, in possession of a life of its own. Such a paradox should trouble
all historians. History is not just storytelling, nor the creation of images.
“The final referent of memory remains the past,” writes Ricoeur, “whatever
the pastness of the past may signify,” and in history, “the representation of
the past is found to be exposed to the dangers of forgetting, but is also
entrusted to its protection.”25 26
If there are solutions to these problems, they will perhaps be found
in the practice of interior architecture itself. The practice of altering existing
buildings, after all, is in itself a historical practice, involving, like history, the
reinterpretation of fragmentary pasts to give them utility in the present.
Conversely, then, one might be able to say that interior architecture is
constructed as much by its own history as recorded by it. If interior
architecture is a process through which we represent the past, and its history
is an analogous practice of representation, then how can we, in both spheres,
acknowledge the pastness of the past, and be worthy of the protective trust
that is placed in us as its interpreters?

Notes
1 John Kurtich, Interior Architecture (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995).
2 John Pile, A History of Interior Design (New York: Wiley, 2000); Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone,
Re-readings: Interior Architecture and the Design Principles of Remodeling Existing Buildings

(London: RIBA, 2004); Fred Scott, On Altering Architecture (London: Routledge, 2008); Penny
Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion, 2008); Charles Rice, The Emergence of the

Interior (London: Routledge, 2007).

3 Kurtich, Interior Architecture, p. vi.
4 Scott, On Altering Architecture, p. xv.
5 Ibid., p. xv.
6 Kurtich, Interior Architecture, p. vii.
 7 Brooker and Stone, Re-Readings, p. 10.
8 Ibid., p. 9.
9 Kurtich, Interior Architecture, p. vii.
10 Ibid., p. vii.
11 Pile, A History of Interior Design, p. 8.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 9.
14 Quoted in Sparke, The Modern Interior, p. 22.
15 Ibid., p. 11.
16 Pile, A History of Interior Design, p. 8.
17 Sparke, The Modern Interior, p. 12.
18 Pile, A History of Interior Design, p. 8.
19 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, p. 19.
20 Ibid., p. 2.
21 Kurtich, Interior Architecture, p. vii.
22 Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, p. 29.
23 Pile, A History of Interior Design, p. 8.
24 Scott, On Altering Architecture, p. 12.
25 Ibid., pp. xv–xvi.
26 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, and Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. xvi, 7, xvii.
Chapter 2

A history of style and the modern

interior
From Alois Riegl to Colin Rowe

Sarah Deyong

From a historical perspective, the idea of modern architecture may be seen

to coincide with the invention of modern art, and the same may be said of
the modern interior. In fact, art, architecture, and interiors have histories
that are intertwined, in part, because they bear on the question of style.
Since style pertains to an aesthetic sensibility that we tend to associate with
a given cultural period, rather than a discipline, the historical provenance of
the modern interior cannot be easily separated from the history of its sister
fields insofar as it constitutes a predominantly visual, tactile, and
phenomenological mode of expression.

Two modern definitions of style

Behind the modern avant-garde’s attempt to define a new style unique to its
time, one can find two opposing theories underwriting this effort: Gottfried
Semper’s Der Stil (1861) and Alois Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry (1903). In
their respective books, Semper traced the origins of architecture to craft,
technique, and performance, while Riegl identified style with the psychology
of form. The focus of Riegl’s study is, therefore, not any purposeful object, as
it was for Semper, who understood the shape of an amphora as an index of
how the ancient Greeks collected water from the roofs of their houses.
Rather, his study focuses on ornament, which he defined as the visible
expression of an inner desire (Wollen) to transform the world via our
interaction with it.1 He stated,

man is not just a being perceiving exclusively with his sense

(passive), but also a longing (active) being. Consequently, man
wants to interpret the world as it can most easily be done in
accordance with his inner drive (which may change with nation,
location, and time).2

Riegl further identified two modes of perception alternating

throughout history, optic and haptic, and associated different artistic styles
with the dominance of one perception or the other. While optic perception
refers to a kind of long-range vision, characteristic of perspective and
ancient Greek art, haptic refers to a kind of close-range vision and tactile
perception characteristic of flat reliefs and late Roman art. This schema
parallels that of other art historian-theorists, notably Wilhelm Worringer,
who, in his 1907 doctoral thesis, defined art in terms of two similar
categories: abstraction, an inner sensation, and empathy, a joyous affinity
with the material world.
Semper’s definition of style must have presaged the modernist
dictum form follows function, but in this regard, it is a definition that
applies mainly to the building’s structure and exterior. With the modern
interior, on the other hand, it is Riegl’s and Worringer’s notion of style that
would prove influential. A good illustration of this influence is the well-
known Werkbund debate between architect Hermann Muthesius and artist
Henry van de Velde in 1914. Whereas Muthesius, following Semper, believed
that a new style must emerge from standardization and the techniques of
mass production, van de Velde, following Riegl, asserted the primacy of
aesthetic expression above standardization.3
This debate would play out in early Werkbund projects and
manifest itself in the schism between the exterior and interior. Peter
Behrens’s AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin (1908), for instance, illustrates the
ambiguous adaptation of old and new building technologies. While its iron
frame and large expanses of glazing anticipate curtain-wall construction, the
language of its façade is nevertheless compromised by the fact that the
brick-corner masses are not load bearing. Such semantic confusion is also
evident in the schism between interior and exterior with respect to another
Werkbund member, Adolf Loos, a critic of the Viennese Secessionist
movement. While Loos’s exteriors are austere and minimal, his interiors are
tactile and luxurious: the bedroom he designed for his wife, Lina Loos, is
made out of fur. As such, his interiors may seem to contradict his own
writings condemning ornament, but it could also be argued that they follow
a different attitude toward dress and decorum.4 Indeed, for Loos, the
domestic life of the individual was an intensely private affair reserved for
the interior, but for commercial projects and public figures, this logic of
privacy did not apply, for Loos did, in fact, adorn his exteriors. These latter
projects include the American Bar (1908), the tailor shop for Goldman &
Salatch (1909–11), and the unbuilt house for Josephine Baker, an African
American entertainer and one of the most celebrated women of her time
(1928).5 Baker was an avid swimmer, and the house’s striking pattern of
black and white stripes may have been inspired by the nautical pattern on
women’s bathing suits.6 Although Loos infamously condemned ornament in
his essay, “Ornament and Crime,” he also distanced himself from “the purists
who pushed the [logic of function] to the absurd, [in claiming] that
ornament should be systematically abolished.”7 Indeed, it might be even said
that Loos’s architecture is fundamentally about the interior, as evidenced by
his concept of the Raumplan (space plan).
 The schism between interior and exterior can be seen in other
early examples of modern architecture, including Gropius’s Fagus Factory
(1911, with Adolf Meyer), and in the history of the Bauhaus itself. By the
time Gropius stepped down as the school’s director in 1928, he had purged
its curriculum of its formative experiments with Expressionism in favor of a
strict functional approach to style. But if the functionalist argument
constitutes the canonical version of the history of modern architecture, the
opposing argument on style, offered by Riegl, Worringer, van de Velde, and
Loos, points to an alternate history centered on the modern interior.

Abstraction and the space-time continuum

Riegl’s definition of style in terms of haptic perception, as well as
Worringer’s category of abstraction, may have given unprecedented
direction to the ideas of the modern avant-garde. If so then the driver must
not have been architecture, but the fine arts, especially painting. In their
search for a new style, many modern artists rejected realism, and this
accorded well with the theories of Riegl and Worringer. Since perspectival
construction reduces time to a static moment, it followed that classical
painting was predicated on a drawing convention that presents a false
picture of reality.
Indeed, in confronting the conventions of classical painting, Paul
Cézanne radically reframed the problem of representation at the turn of the
twentieth century, and painted not what the eye sees in a kind of optical
illusion, but what the mind-body complex perceives in time. His paintings
register temporal “distortions” like a tabletop stretched downwards or a wall
bent sideways. In other words, they depict reality not as it is experienced in
a static moment but in the duration of days, weeks, and months (Cézanne
sometimes took months to complete his paintings, and even then, he
considered them unfinished). According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, such
distortions stem from the artist’s desire to depict reality in the process of
becoming. He wrote,
 it is Cézanne’s genius that when the overall composition of the
picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer
visible in their own right, but rather, contribute, as they do in
natural vision, to [the] impression of an emerging order, an object
in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.8

Cézanne is generally considered the father of Cubism, which, in

turn, inspired other avant-garde movements from Suprematism to De Stijl.
But in the case of De Stijl, we find not only the manifestation of a space-
time continuum, but also greater experimentation with abstraction. To this
end, the Dutch De Stijl movement strove to eliminate all traces of
naturalistic representation, reducing the elements of painting to the
minimum abstract essentials: three primary colors (blue, red, and yellow),
and horizontal and vertical lines.
This distillation, as Yves-Alain Bois has observed in “The De Stijl
Idea,” did not come readily, but was determined after much struggle and
debate. It evolved as slowly in painting as it did in sculpture and
architecture. While the architect J.J.P. Oud took his cue from sculpture and
reduced the essential elements of architecture to cubic masses, Theo van
Doesburg took his cue from painting and distilled the essential elements to
planes. In his interior design of the Café Aubette (1927), he rotated
Mondrian’s abstract grid on the diagonal, possibly to neutralize the
horizontal and vertical lines of the existing architecture (in one photograph,
van Doesburg aimed his camera so that the vanishing point appeared to
dissolve in the diagonal composition of the mural).9 However, his real
breakthrough did not come until his famous Counter Constructions for the
Hôtel Particulier (1923) with architect Cornelis van Eesteren. From van
Eesteren, van Doesburg had learned how to draw in axonometric, a drawing
convention that shows the plan and section simultaneously; and using this
technique, he drew counter constructions of the hotel’s cubic masses, using
horizontal and vertical planes exploded apart and suspended in space. The
counter constructions, therefore, mark an important shift in De Stijl’s
thinking about the generative elements of architecture, here distilled to
horizontal and vertical planes rather than lines or masses. This idea,
moreover, may also have been the source of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona
Pavilion (1929).10 For it too is a counter composition of planes and volumes;
although, instead of the three primary colors, Mies has substituted marble,
chrome, and glass (Figure 2.1). As a composition, Mies’s design is dynamic,
changing in time as the visitor zigzags through an enfilade of open spaces.

Figure 2.1 Interior of Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe

Image credit: Sarah Deyong

Form and counter-form

De Stijl’s space-time concept parallels that of other architectural
developments related to modern painting. In the first years of the Bauhaus,
Gropius recruited artists from the German Expressionist movement – a
movement that is often associated with Riegl’s and Worringer’s theories.
Following in their footsteps, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who joined the school in
1923, proposed a new space-time vision. His student Gyorgy Kepes
expanded on this concept and further defined the new vision in terms of
transparency; that is, the simultaneous perception of multiple spatial
locations “without optical destruction of each other.”11
In the 1950s, the term was famously resurrected by architectural
historian Colin Rowe and artist Robert Slutzky. In their essay,
“Transparency: Phenomenal and Literal,” the authors made an important
distinction between the literal transparency of a material like glass and the
complex visual effects of composition.12 Analyzing Fernand Léger’s painting,
Three Faces, they explained how the overlapping composition creates an
ambiguous tension, where shapes and colors are simultaneously seen both in
front and behind each other.
The originality of their analysis, however, lies not with painting,
but with interior architecture conceived as an interplay between solid and
void. Here, the authors’ primary example is Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein at
Garches, where solid elements like walls and columns create implied spatial
figures like slits and slots. They described how the openings of the vertical
windows along the exterior end walls line up with an interior row of
columns to form an implied slot running parallel to the front façade. This
slot, they wrote, is mirrored by a second parallel slot; it runs behind the
garden façade and is implied not only by the vertical side windows, but also
by the penthouse terrace that projects beyond the ends of the lateral side
walls. Perpendicular to these slots is a central space whose contour can be
discerned by a second row of interior columns, intersecting the first. This
implied spatial figure is traversed by an irregularly shaped slot, configured
by a low, curved wall (forming a bookshelf and railing to the opening
below), and by the outline of the two stairways that flank it.
While these implied figures work as three-dimensional extrusions
of the plan, there are other implied spatial figures that are best represented
in section. Elements like the main garden terrace, the third-floor balcony,
and the penthouse terrace form a composition of objects and their counter
forms. The parapet on the third-floor balcony, for example, forms a
bounding surface to the implied volumes of both the main garden terrace
below and the penthouse level above. Furthermore, the canopy, whose
underside is painted blue, forms a bounding surface not only to the implied
figure of the garden terrace, but also extends the interior of the sitting room
on the third floor (Figure 2.2). In the Villa Garches, therefore, we find not
only a composition of solid elements but also a counter-composition of
implied spatial volumes.
This doubling of the solid-void (or figure-ground) relation is
reminiscent of De Stijl’s counter constructions and constitutes a design
strategy that is still relevant today. Conceivably, its most recent
manifestation is what UN Studio has called the “blob-to-box” model, where
the shape of the void has a presence equal to the object-ness of the blob
(Figure 2.3).13 But as I have been tracing here, this modernist strategy owes
its provenance to a particular definition of style in art and architectural
history – a provenance that goes back to the likes of Riegl and Worringer. If
Semper represents the trajectory of functionalism relegated to structure and
the exterior, then Riegl and Worringer form an alternate trajectory relegated
to painting and the interior. This alternate history relates not to engineering
and technical performance, but to the philosophy of aesthetic experience and
the psychology of perception, in a word, a cultural sensibility. Just as the
split between form and function is ultimately an artificial one, so too is the
dichotomy between architecture’s interior and exterior.
Figure 2.2 Interior of Villa Stein at Garches by Le Corbusier
Figure 2.3 UN Studio, “blob-to-box” model

Notes
1 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry
Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2004).
2 Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (1901; Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider,
1985), p. 231.
3 For van de Velde, “The desire to see a standard type come into being before the establishment of
a style is exactly like wanting to see the effect before the cause. It would be to destroy the
embryo in the egg”. See “Werkbund Theses and Antitheses”, in Programs and Manifestoes on

20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (London: Lund Humphries, 1970), p. 30.
4 This point has been argued by Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1994), p. 23.
5 Commissioned by the owners of Goldman & Salatch tailors, the Looshaus in Michalerplatz,
situated directly across from the Imperial Palace, was designed as an apartment complex with
retail on the ground floor. While the tailor shop was embellished with Doric columns and marble,
the façade of the apartments above was quite austere. In fact, it was so austere that Loos was
ordered to adorn the apartment windows with flower boxes.
6 For this and other references to gender and fashion, see Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin:

Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 81–82.
7 “Ornament and Education” (1924), Spoken Into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897–1900 (Chicago:
Graham Foundation; New York: IAUS, 1987).
8 Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty noted, “The lived object is not rediscovered or constructed on the
basis of the contributions of the senses; rather, it presents itself to us from the start as the center
from which these contributions radiate. We see the depth, the smoothness, softness, the hardness
of objects; Cézanne even claimed that we see the odor. If the painter is to express the world, the
arrangement of his colors must bear within this indivisible whole, or else his painting will only
hint at things and will not give them in the imperious unity, the presence, the unsurpassable
plenitude which is for us the definition of the real.” See “Cézanne’s Doubt” in Sense and Non-

Sense (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 14–15. I am grateful to Yehuda
Safran for showing me this essay.
9 Van Doesburg’s influence on Mies van der Rohe is well documented. See, for example, Franz
Schulz, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p.
117.
10 Van Doesburg’s influence on Mies van der Rohe is well documented. See, for example, Schulz,
Mies van der Rohe, p. 117.
11 Kepes writes: “Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations.
Space not only recedes but fluctuates in continuous activity. The position of the transparent
figures has equivocal meaning as one sees each figure now as the closer, now as the further one.”
Kepes, Language of Vision (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1944), p. 77.
12 The essay was written in 1955–56. It was published in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and

Other Essays (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1976), pp. 159–183.

13 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, UN Studio: Design Models, Architecture, Urbanism,

Infrastructure (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008).

Chapter 3

Quadrature
The joining of truth and illusion in the
interior architecture of Andrea Pozzo

Jodi La Coe

In 1693, Andrea Pozzo published the first volume of his treatise, Perspectiva
pictorum et architectorum, a pedagogical demonstration of his perspective
drawing method and projection techniques employed in creating interior
spatial illusions, quadrature.1 Pozzo, as both theorist and practitioner,
realized many of his immersive quadrature designs throughout Italy and
Austria, mainly in churches and convents of the Jesuit order to which he also
belonged.2 Unlike many perspective theorists who merely represented the
image of a person within a section through the cone of vision, Pozzo
positioned an embodied observer within the constructed illusion, extending
interior space through the joining of the real and the fictitious.3
In perspective theory, space was conceived as a homogenous
system in which vision was subject to mathematical laws. At the beginning
of the seventeenth century, Rene Descartes, who is credited with this shift in
spatial understanding, wrote in his Discours de la méthode pour bien
conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences:

I took the subject matter of geometry, which I conceived to be a

continuous body or a space indefinitely extended in length,
breadth, and height or depth, divisible into distinct parts, which
may have distinct shapes and sizes and may be moved or
transposed in all sorts of ways.4

The coordination of three axes – length, height, and depth – determined

Cartesian space, in which depth and height are equivalent mathematical
positions without hierarchy and, therefore, homogenous. However, the
positioning of an embodied observer within mathematical space allowed
Pozzo to re-center man within a system of meaning, both spatial and
spiritual. Baroque perspectival illusions sought to recreate the center of the
universe within uniform space. It achieved this effect by physically
inhabiting the position from which the illusion converged with the physical
to produce a transcendental interior experience.

Truth and falsehood

The positivistic quest initiated by the Scientific Revolution sought to reduce
all phenomena to a few all-encompassing rational truths based in
mathematics. Reason replaced metaphor as an explanation for the
phenomena of the physical world. In both the arts and sciences, popular
debate concentrated on the distinction between truth and illusion.5 A
deception of the senses approached the ethical question of the ability of the
intellect to distinguish truth in the physical world.
For Descartes, visual illusions were a sensual obstacle to the
pursuit of truth; the separating of the “true” from the “false” occupied the
main intellectual problems of the seventeenth century.6 As Alexandre Koyré
explained, Descartes’s quest to determine what is true was an effort to judge
the world properly.7 Descartes phrased it as follows:
 And I always had an extreme desire to learn to distinguish truth
from falsehood in order to have a clear insight into my actions
and proceed in this life with assurance.8

While Descartes was opposed to illusion in its many forms, perspective

treatises by the end of the seventeenth century included the creation of
fantastic illusions on a variety of surfaces. For example, in his book, La
perspective curieuse, ou magie artificielle des effets merveilleux, de l’optique
par la vision directe,Jean François Niceron disclosed his method of creating
anamorphic projections. While these images were created on flat or irregular
surfaces, they were to be viewed at an angle or on mirrored surfaces of
cones, cylinders, and spheres. In the Convent of Trinitá dei Monti in Rome,
Emmanuel Maignan, with the assistance of Niceron, produced two
anamorphic illusions along the walls of narrow corridors. While one of the
paintings was destroyed in an uprising shortly after the French Revolution,
the remaining illusion, viewed frontally, is a representation of the landscape
of the Straits of Messina in Calabria. When viewed from an angle along the
wall, the hidden image of San Francesco di Paola sitting under a tree lifts
away from the scene of his homeland. Many anamorphic illusions disguised
hidden images with erotic, or even heretical, content.

Deception of the senses

For Descartes, sense perception, and vision in particular, were to be doubted
and were, therefore, undermined in his model for rational thought. Although
vision was privileged among the senses, Descartes was suspicious of the
profound mental exercise necessary to overcome sensory deceptions.9 He
wrote of the eye as the passive receptor of light, declaring that the “first
opaque structure in the eye receives the figure impressed upon it by the
light.”10 Descartes suggested to his readers to place a dissected human eye, or
kindred animal eye, in a shutter through which to view the images formed
on a piece of paper held to the back of the eye.11 Similar to the images
produced by the camera obscura, the retinal image is transposed vertically
through the passive, ocular lens, requiring mental interpretation of the
sensory data. Descartes clarified his theory of the transmission of light,
stating:

I would have you conceive of light in a “luminous” body as being

simply a certain very rapid and lively movement or activity,
transmitted to our eyes though air and other transparent bodies,
just as the movement or resistance of the bodies a blind man
encounters is transmitted to his hand through his stick.12

In The World, also known as his Treatise on Light, Descartes differentiated

between the sensation of light and its cause using the analogy of language:
the relationship between what is represented to the thing itself.13 As the eye
truly becomes the passive receptor, retinal images acquire an objectivity, a
truth. In this sense, the passive lens requires the mind to interpret the
arrangement of light rays to understand the shape and position of objects
within the Cartesian system. Reflections and illusions, however, appear to be
the real things because they affect the eye in the same ordered
correspondence of light rays.14 Perspective illusions deceive the eye itself
through the presentation of light rays that appear to depict a three-
dimensional object. Additionally, in La Dioptrique, Descartes concluded that
the mind was also capable of producing a type of sensory deception, as in
dreams or an ecstatic state. According to Descartes, the mind was
susceptible to delusions of all sorts including hallucinations, lunatic
cravings, and dreams. In these cases, sensual perception seems so evidently
true yet is not real.15 Although he was surrounded by a proliferation of
treatises on and examples of perspective illusions, Descartes opposed any art
form that sought to confuse the senses, especially anamorphosis. Descartes
philosophically objected to the disjunction between the apparent image and
its disguised reconstruction.
Descartes employed many analogies of light and vision to describe
reason and rational thought. In 1628, he wrote in his Regulae ad directionem
ingenii (Rules for the direction of the mind) that a lack of reason is virtually
equal to blindness.

For it is very certain that unregulated inquiries and confused

reflections of this kind only confound the natural light and blind
our mental powers. Those who so become accustomed to walk in
darkness weaken their eyesight so much that afterwards they
cannot bear the light of day.16

In Descartes’s view, indulging in illusions and deceptions dulled

the intellect and impeded the recognition of truth:

I suppose, therefore, that whatever things I see are illusions; I

believe that none of the things my lying memory represents to
have happened really did so; I have no senses; body, shape,
extension, motion, place are chimeras. What then is true? Perhaps
only this one thing, that nothing is certain.17

After Descartes, only the mathematically ordered gaze of the geometer could
objectively analyze natural phenomena fixed by coordinates within
Cartesian space.18 Perspective represented the world from a fixed monocular
viewpoint at a static moment in time, and as such, drastically simplified
visual experience.

Joining truth and fiction

Descartes’s critique of illusion extended to the visible in general. All forms
of artifice, including quadrature, were obstacles in the search for objective
truth.19 In contradiction to his intentions, Descartes’s philosophies led to the
reduction of the sensual experience of Nature to a theater of illusions,
mathematically determined, according to Dalia Judovitz, “an effect of
human artifice.”20 Similarly, perspective transformed an embodied
understanding of reality into appearance. To paraphrase Vittorio de Feo in
Andrea Pozzo: architettura e illusione, “more than performing mathematical
perspective with precision, Pozzo recognized a possibility of reality where
perspective translates the virtuality of the real with the help of the
imagination.”21 However, it was the incorporation of the viewer in his works
that opened the narrative possibilities of perspective illusions.
In the thirtieth figure of the first volume of his treatise, Pozzo
wrote, “Optica projectio ædifici IONICI; ubi de modo jugendi fictum cum
vero.”
22 In the first English translation, John James of Greenwich liberally

interpreted this passage as “An IONICK Work in Perspective; with the

Manner of reconciling the fictitious to the solid Architecture.” Clearly, the
second half of the statement did not follow the original text. One might
argue that James chose to depict what Pozzo was proposing, rather than to
awaken the debate over truth and sensual deception. The accompanying
figure depicts just that sentiment, the dividing line between the solid or
three-dimensional building, and his two-dimensional painted surface
extending the solid into the fictitious architecture. However, in the sixty-
second figure, Pozzo used the phrase “ædificia solida” when he wanted to
signify “solid architecture.” Given the centrality of the Roman Jesuit College
in contemporary scientific debates, Pozzo would have supported a closer
translation of the original Latin phrase as “the manner of joining the
fictitious to the real (or true).”
Unlike contemporary artists, Pozzo was not creating perspectival
interior views within a frame. He was concerned with the embodied
experience of illusion, with a seamless transition between the real and the
fictitious, a joining of truth and illusion at a fixed point within Cartesian
space. At this single point, marked in the paving pattern with a marble or
bronze disk, and in the right light, the illusion appears to be real, the senses
are deceived. When one moves away from the given vantage point, the
architecture, ornaments, and figures appear to grow distorted. At the end of
the first volume of Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, Pozzo included his
response to those who advocated the use of multiple viewpoints within a
large perspective illusion attempting to expand the area from which the
illusion is effective. Pozzo believed that the distortion of figures that occurs
when viewed from other angles lends itself to illusion by increasing the
dramatic effect when properly positioned.

Flesh and stone

Thirteen years prior to the publication of his advocation of a single point of
view, Pozzo created the hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius in the Casa
Professa in Rome, in which he experimented with overlapping perspective
illusions combined with frontal presentations of framed images. The result is
a combination of painterly effects and a layering of illusionistic techniques.
More than in any of his other quadrature, perspective illusions also known
in French as trompe l’oeil, or “trick of the eye,” Pozzo played with the joining
of truth and illusion in this small, unassuming space. The entry to the
hallway is immediately off the landing of a wide stair, suggesting that these
spaces are tucked between the main levels of the Jesuit convent. When
approaching the room, the entry wall begins the illusion with the
appearance of sculptural niches containing life-like statues of Jesuits
Aloysius Gonzaga and Stanislaus Kostka surmounted by gray, stone-like
putti (small, chubby, often winged, male cherubs) over the cornice. In the
stairway, the color palette is subdued in grays, browns, and muted flesh
tones joining in the surrounding surfaces of plaster and gray marble. In
contrast, the interior of the hallway erupts in color and glittering gold. The
two saintly visages in the landing also oppose the numerous, voluptuous,
fleshy figures in the hallway.
Upon entering the hallway, a few steps place the viewer above a
marble disk, which marks the proper point of view on the floor. From this
point, Pozzo corrected the architecture of the space in his illusion. The far
wall, which is crudely angled, was painted to appear farther away and
perpendicular to the side walls. A pair of angels playing musical instruments
are sitting under an archway supported by ornate columns framing the view
beyond to a domed space terminated by a simple altar for St. Ignatius. In
contrast, the hallway, which is a plain, barrel-vaulted space, appears to have
ornate pink marble columns with gold composite capitals supporting
voluptuous brackets, also highlighted in gold, spanning a flat ceiling. The
space of the brackets extends the height of the small room. Just as the
subdued palette and features of the landing contrast with the Baroque
ornament of the hallway, the altar of St. Ignatius and his rooms are
undecorated, reflecting the humility of a devoted life.
The space contains four large windows and a recessed doorway in
the wall to the right. Opposite the window wall is the door and window into
the rooms of St. Ignatius, which are a few steps higher than the level of the
hallway. The window is duplicated in the painted illusion in order to carry
the symmetry in the arcade along the side wall. The stairs and the door
leading to the rooms present the most difficult piece to incorporate into the
illusion. Although Pozzo varied the thickness of the marble door frame, the
stairs and their railings do not conform to the perspective. Within the ornate
gold-leafed beams of the illusionistic ceiling are a variety of figures and
framed images. Larger, adult angels are painted as fleshy winged beings
carrying framed monochromatic profiles of important Jesuit brothers. All
framed images with the illusion are presented undistorted by the forced
perspective viewpoint and are, therefore, meant to be viewed frontally.
Continuing with the juxtaposition of contrasts, there are two versions of
putti, rosy-fleshed babes and gray stone statues. These cherubs are at
approximately the same scale, lending to the interplay between flesh and
painted stone. Also framed in the ceiling are monochromatic scenes from the
life of St. Ignatius in vibrant hues.
Figure 3.1 Three principal views of the hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius by Andrea Pozzo (1618)
Image credit: author

The side walls contain seven bays which alternate between four
window bays and the three interstices. On the wall opposing the windows,
the bays corresponding to each window appear to be deeper than the others,
with two adult angels standing below a framed scene from the life of Christ
in each. The interstitial bays are less wide, accommodating a longer frame,
each containing a miraculous scene from the life of St. Ignatius. Under these
frames, fleshy putti are shown with vases of flowers, while above, many
fleshy putti with tiny wings occupy spaces within the ornate brackets
adjacent to painted stone putti. Some of the fleshy babes look down at the
viewer, while others display additional monochromatic profile portraits of
important Jesuits.
Figure 3.2 Ceiling of the hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius depicting fleshy and stone putti
Image credit: author
Figure 3.3 Overlapping brackets in the corner of the ceiling of the hallway to the rooms of St.
Ignatius
Image credit: author

Walking toward the center of the hallway, one experiences an

elongation of the architectural interior and figures. These appear to grow, to
stretch the farther away one moves from the marble disk. In contrast, the
framed images attract the eye away from the distortion as they are viewed
frontally.
 Turning around completely, one faces the entry wall. Looking in
this direction, one can see the stairs to the rooms of St. Ignatius that were
previously unnoticed in the periphery. The entry wall is also in perspective
illusion when viewed from a point designated by a marble disk in the floor
pattern symmetrically opposite the first marble disk. Here, Pozzo employed a
second point of view; the perspective illusion is divided at the midpoint of
the room. In the corners of the room, the distortions cause the brackets to
appear to overlap each other, while in the center of the room the figures are
nearly frontal.
In the hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius, Pozzo invited the
viewer to participate in the room, to walk around the space in order to view
the layers of the illusion and counter-illusion. This process simultaneously
reveals and destroys the illusionistic effect. In keeping with the
contemporary debate, Pozzo redefined perspective as a “Counterfeiting of
the Truth.”23 Joining truth with illusion, the layering of illusion and artifice
in this hallway reveals his playful manipulation of the visual experience of
interior architecture.

Notes
1 Volumes one and two of Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum were originally published by
Giovanni Giacomo Komarek in Rome in 1693 and 1700, respectively, and included both Latin and
Italian text. Only the first volume was translated and distributed widely. Komarek published two
translations of the first volume: Italian/German and Italian/French versions, both in 1700.
Another German translation paired with the original Latin text was published in Vienna in 1706
by Jeanne Boxbarth and Conrado Bodenter. A Latin/English version, entitled Perspective for

Architecture and Painting, was published by John James of Greenwich (London, 1707). Giuseppe
Castiglione published a French/Flemish translation in Brussels, 1708. The Jesuits even translated a
copy into Chinese, 1737 (see Marina Carta and Anna Menichella, “Il successo editoriale del
Trattato”, in Andrea Pozzo, ed. Vittorio de Feo and Valentino Martinelli [Milan: Electa, 1996], p.
230).
2 From 1676 to 1680, Pozzo travelled to Torino, Milan, and Como completing a number of works.
Afterwards, he settled in Rome to paint his celebrated masterpieces from 1681 to 1702. These
 included the nave, dome, and altar of the Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio, the Cappella della Vigna, the
refectory of Trinitá dei Monti, and the hallway to the rooms of St. Ignatius in the Casa Professa
adjacent to Il Gesú. While in Rome, Pozzo also painted several canvases and illusionistic side
chapels, an altar, and a false dome for the Chiesa del Gesú in Frascati. In 1702, Leopold I called
Pozzo from Rome to Vienna. As he travelled for two years, Pozzo made many more perspective
illusions in churches and palazzi in Florence, Trento, and Montepulciano. In Belluno, he designed
the architecture for a Jesuit college. Pozzo spent the final years of his life in Vienna designing
illusions in the Universitätskirche, Franziskanerkirche, and the palazzo Lichtenstein. In addition
to the college of Belluno, Pozzo witnessed the construction of his architectural designs in Ragusa,
Lubiana, Trieste, Montepulciano, and Trento. From his numerous designs for altars, he executed
the elaborate altar constructions for both Il Gesú and Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio in Rome (see
Vittorio de Feo, Andrea Pozzo: Architettura e illusione [Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1988] and
Roberta Maria Dal Mas, “La opere architettoniche a Ragusa, Lubiana, Trieste, Montepulciano,
Belluno e Trento”, in Andrea Pozzo, ed. Vittorio de Feo and Valentino Martinelli [Milan: Electa,
1996], pp. 184–203).
3 For contemporary perspective treatises, see Abraham Bosse, La manière universelle de M. des

Argues Lyonnois pour poser l’essieu & placer les heures & autres choses aux cadrans au Soleil

(Paris: Petreius, 1643); Jean Dubreuil, La Perspective pratique nécessaire à tous peintres, graveurs,
sculpteurs . . . (Paris: Melchior Tavernier and Franc̜ois L'Anglois dit Chartres, 1642); and
Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena, L’Architetture civile . . . (Parma: Paolo Monti, 1711).
4 Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking

Truth in the Sciences original edition, Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et

chercher la vérité dans les sciences, Leiden, Netherlands: Ian Maire, 1637; translation:
Philosophical Writings, trans. Elizabeth Ascombe and Peter Thomas Geach (New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1971), p. 34.
5 Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art From Brunelleschi to Seurat

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

6 This statement was recorded in Howard Hubbard, Bernini (London: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 19,
according to Basil Willey, The Seventeenth-Century Background (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1977), pp. 9ff, passim.
7 Alexandre Koyré, “Introduction”, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Rene Descartes, trans. Elizabeth
Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. xxi.
 8 Rene Descartes, Philosophical Writings, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 13.
9 Ibid., pp. 244–245.
10 Ibid., p. 241.
11 Dalia Judovitz, “Vision, Representation and Technology in Descartes”, in Modernity and the

Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1993), p. 75.
12 Op. cit., p. 71.
13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological

Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, trans. James M. Edie (Chicago, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 170.
14 Descartes, Philosophical Writings, p. 242.
15 Rene Descartes, “Meditations on the First Philosophy Wherein Are Demonstrated the Existence
of God and the Distinction of the Soul From Body”, in Philosophical Writings, trans. Elizabeth
Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach (1642) (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1971),
pp. 61–62.
16 Rene Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Rules for the direction of the mind)
(unpublished manuscript, 1626–1628); translation found in Judovitz, “Vision, Representation and
Technology in Descartes” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 67.
17 Descartes, Philosophical Writings, p. 66.
18 Op. cit., p. 178.
19 Dalia Judovitz, “Vision, Representation and Technology in Descartes”, and Hans Blumenberg,
“Light as a Metaphor for the Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept
Formation”, in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 63 and 53, respectively.
20 Ibid. (Judovitz), p. 65.
21 de Feo, Andrea Pozzo, pp. 14–15.
22 Andrea Pozzo, Perspective in Architecture and Painting: An Unabridged Reprint of the English-

Latin Edition of the 1693 “Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum” (a reprinting of the London
1707 edition), trans. John James of Greenwich (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1989), p.
73.
23 Ibid., p. 221.
Chapter 4

Spatial therapies
Interior architecture as a tool for the past,
present, and future

Ziad Qureshi

Profound change is driven by technological and social developments

impacting a multitude of conditions and mixed feelings in the present:
trepidation about an uncertain future versus nostalgia for the past. Current
technological and social changes represent potential for advancement and
fundamental disruptions to our traditional way of living and functioning in
social, economic, and spatial realms. This is not an entirely new
phenomenon, however, as the disruptive effects of sociotechnological change
have been a consistent theme throughout modern history. In earlier eras,
understanding the relationship between past and present was essential to
navigating a path to the future. This strategy offers a valuable historical
reference for addressing the dynamic conditions of today.
The emerging field of interior architecture represents a unique and
valuable opportunity to apply an historical strategy. Through its
motivations, interior architecture inherently reconciles the engagement of
the existing with the new – a critical amalgamation of the past and present
through spatial design to enable the future. Distinct from the notion of the
tabula rasa architecture, this discipline establishes how space within
existing buildings can serve as a means of addressing and stabilizing our
contemporary conditions. It achieves this by literally combining the existing
physical past with the new interior installation of the present. Thus, interior
architecture is a spatial therapy for critically understanding and
connecting the past, present, and future through design actions responding
to profound changes. This chapter examines contemporary opportunities for
interior architecture to illustrate the critical potential of this emerging
discipline. It demonstrates how interior architecture is among the most
relevant design tools of today – where history, theory, and design unite to
address the most imperative issues in an era of disruptive change.

Future beginnings
Attitudes toward the future have varied throughout history, with a
consistent connection between these perceptions and resultant design
perspectives. Interior architectural design is an inherently productive and
constructive activity. During the transformative era of the Industrial
Revolution, mechanized society produced capital, manufactured goods, and
leisure time for the masses that directly impacted the built environment.
Social and environmental transformations were experienced on an
unprecedented scale, resulting in variant attitudes about the future direction
of design. Industrialization, technological development, urbanization, and
social change resulted in fundamental questions on how to reconcile mass
production with human culture. Designers’ reactions ranged from nuanced
romanticism, to traumatized post-war expressionism, to unabashed
futurism. While the romantics of the nineteenth century proposed the
sublime landscape as a counterpoint to mechanized rationalism and
scientific understandings, illustrated by luminous works such as Pugin’s
Contrasts and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Italian futurists such as architect
Antonio Sant’Elia violently resisted the limits of the past. Sant’Elia
celebrated the potential of the machine alongside revolutionary change,
restlessness, and the ephemeral conditions of a modernity.
Contemporary discourse has once again echoed this historical
precedent, with design working as before to express varied philosophies
reacting to fundamental social changes in technology, production,
consumption, and connectivity. The recurrent theme of structural economic
and social change via technology was discussed by theorists such as
sociologist Daniel Bell in the 1970s. In his seminal essay, “Teletext and
Technology,” Bell makes the case that structural change is inevitable and
relevant to the past, present, and future. He posits that lessons may be
learned from history that can be applied to the future. Bell claims that
human society has consistently adapted through “creativity and surprise” in
face of great challenges.1 Supplemental to this perspective, optimistic
contemporary futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at
Google, have embraced a social vision of human needs satisfied by
unprecedented abundance, enabled by innovative new technologies from
cognizant computing to driverless vehicles and cloud-based data analysis.2
Figure 4.1 Burning Studios: Bloom Installation (2009) in Temple Works Mill (Bonomi Brothers –
1840), Leeds, UK
Image credit: Jim Moran

Alternately, traditionalist conservatives have maintained that in

order to navigate the uncertainties of the future amidst change, we must
respect our past and build on its rich layers. The recent exponential growth
of Waldorf Schools globally over the last decade attests to similar
motivations. Their early education philosophy is based on theories of mystic
and architect Rudolf Steiner that privilege spirituality, empathy, and social
adaptivity through traditional means, while deemphasizing the early use of
technology. Although not without controversy, these schools have grown in
response to perceptions of the relative alienation of contemporary society,
preferring to reconnect with traditional arts to build the future.3 Radical and
cautionary examples further guide design toward alternatives. Famously
rendered devoid of the preexisting, spatial context, and human occupation,
the architecture of Sant’Elia presents a referential vision of tabula rasa
design and its imposed results. More recently, technological and social
caution and balance have become recurrent themes. For example, prominent
thinkers Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Noam Chomsky, and Steven Hawking
have pondered the potential existential danger of unlimited artificial
intelligence and autonomous weapons in military applications.4
Responsive to this broader historical and theoretical context, the
discipline of interior architecture philosophically and spatially represents a
critical path between the hindrance of stagnant nostalgia and the brazen
aggression of the naked future. In an era of increasingly extremist
sociopolitical and spatial realities, interior architecture is uniquely poised to
offer an alternative perspective of balance between past, present, and future
aligned with the dichotomy of traditional vs. progressive. The design tactics
of sustainable adaptive reuse, an embrace of the contextually preexistent,
intervention by interior spatial installation, and technological innovation
through fabrication and material combine the physical past with the newly
introduced present. This modus operandi enables the discipline to manifest
its philosophy and relevance to realities, while offering various emergent
opportunities as our society and environment experience profound change.

Productive shifts and infrastructural opportunism

As the inevitable inverse of industrialization, deindustrialization provides
extensive opportunities for interior architecture and its allied design
disciplines to respond to the increasing availability of post-industrial space.
Beginning in the 1960s, the fundamental shift in Western societies from a
production to a service-based economy simultaneously created social and
environmental trauma, as well as spatial obsolescence. With a current
estimate of over 500,000 brownfield sites in the United States alone, at a
variety of spatial scales, the adaptive reuse of post-industrial spaces is an
acute design issue of the contemporary era. As urban environments continue
to densify and greenfield sites become increasingly scarce or undesirable
from socioeconomic and environmentalist perspectives, vast potentialities
present themselves for responsive therapeutic design. The means and
methods of interior architecture balance these needs, while capitalizing on
industrial, historical, and cultural inheritance. Landscape architect Richard
Haag provides support to the idea of spatial therapy in the face of traumatic
change, stating in 1982 with regard to his innovative Seattle Gas Works Park
project (1975), “I accepted these gifts, and decided to absolve the
community’s vindictive feeling toward the gas plant. This vanishing species
of the Industrial Revolution was saved from extinction through adaptive
reuse.”5
As spatially oriented disciplines, both landscape architecture and
interior architecture demonstrate the potential of engaging postindustrial
environments to enable a nuanced approach that embraces existent tradition
and progressive innovation. From the “urban archaeology” of James Corner’s
High Line (2009) to Vienna’s massive Gasometer City (2001), post-industrial
environments have represented valuable opportunities to creatively and
innovatively engage the existing. The rehabilitation and retention of the
existing context, both physical and spiritual, are the hallmarks of design
disciplines that balance a variety of interests and temporalities, while
undergoing deep-seated and often traumatic social change.

Consumptive crossroads
The continual restructuring of contemporary consumptive patterns
represents a profound challenge to society, the economy, and space.
Fundamental changes in retailing have occurred inclusive of a shift of
consumers to shopping online, declining overall consumption levels, and a
shift from physical to digital goods inclusive of 3-D printing at home. These
conditions have created a large supply of underutilized commercial space in
our urban landscape, embodied by the closure of countless major and minor
retailers in the last decade. These activities reveal the emergence of a
potential “post-retail” reality. An estimated one billion square feet of
retail/commercial space is currently vacant in the United States alone,
evidenced by environments marked by obsolete malls, big box stores, and
strip shopping centers. Traditional retail environments in the context of the
United States have been and will continue to be in steep decline.6 The
inherent strategies of interior architecture enable potential responses to this
crisis. Simultaneous to its decline, this unfolding “post-retail” era has opened
up a variety of new design opportunities for spatial reuse and reinvention by
means of interior architectural practices.
The reinvigoration of obsolete retail and commercial spaces
through adaptive reuse has the potential to bring these environments back to
social and economic relevancy, reconnecting the preexisting and historical
with new purposes. Architect and social theorist Victor Gruen envisioned
the essential importance that retail space would achieve in the post-war
American (and eventually global) consciousness, with the regional shopping
mall described by him as “the Heart of the City.”7 Building on Gruen’s
innovative designs, for post-war America the mall became a social center
and cultural icon deeply ensconced in national identity via spatial form.
Invoking Gruen’s original ideas, Rem Koolhaas chose to engage shopping as
the essential means to understand urbanity in his Projects for the City series.
He proposes that retail spaces remain profoundly important to the city
despite the emergence of the “dead mall” condition.8
In the midst of a profound and critical change, the reinvigoration
of obsolete retail space is an interior architectural exercise that can
transcend simple adaptive reuse and inspire critical perspectives on social
history and heritage. The reinvention of post-retail space is a vibrant
contemporary issue that remains grounded in the shared history of the past,
considering new needs with retrospective meaning. Underutilized retail sites
have already been transformed into civic, municipal service, healthcare,
education, and other spaces. An example of the direct expression of the
ongoing change from physical retail to digital activity is the proposed
adaptive reuse of Sears Auto Centers, discrete retail pad sites often located
next to “dead malls” that are spatially and infrastructurally ideal for interior
redevelopment, by Ubiquity Critical Environments, as internet data centers.9
The adaptive agency of interior architecture allows for a more nuanced
response that enables economical, sustainable, and historically contiguous
environments for potential futures.

Digital directions
As we proceed further into the twenty-first century, newly emergent digital
technologies are transforming the spatial expectations of our environments.
Beyond the post-industrial developments at the end of the previous century,
further shifts illuminate the dichotomy between the physical and the digital,
with the increasing presence of a “post-analog” reality. In a world that
prioritizes time as a premium, fundamental changes in consumptive and
productive patterns are leading to a deprioritization of the physical –
profoundly changing social conventions and representing an existential
crisis for architecture. New technologies, such as consumer level 3-D
printing, geospatial mapping with GPS, autonomous aerial drones, and
virtual reality, have already begun to impart a profound shift in perceived
necessities and the role of the physical, as well as a general reassessment
regarding need for physical space. New generations that identify with
internet-based identities demonstrate a growing preference for online
personas that are both spatially and perceptively virtual – fundamentally
redefining the very idea of “space” and buildings. Mobility, efficiency, and
transportability enable the search for increasingly fleeting economic
opportunities, further distancing the connection with the physical. In this
current environment, designers are being presented with a challenging
reality that raises fundamental questions about the role of physical space.
This new charge provides for innovation and fresh opportunities that interior
architecture is naturally poised to envision and mobilize.

Figure 4.2 Victor Gruen – Brookdale Center, Minneapolis MN USA, 1965 (Demolished 2011)
Image credit: author (2009)
 As critical questions emerge about the nature of the exclusively
physical, interior architecture again uniquely offers potential design
strategies for response. Inherent to interior architecture is its application of
technological innovation, particularly through digitally produced fabrication
of interior installations and the application of advanced material specificity
at a level which is often not realized in other design disciplines. Building on
the ideas of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, architect and materials
expert Blaine Brownell discusses the idea of “disruptive application,” where
conventional solutions are unexpectedly replaced by new ones leading to
innovative and advantageous developments.10 The contemporary shift from
the physical to the digital, as well as the critical interface of interior
architecture with fabrication and material design strategies, represents this
disruptive potentiality. As we transition toward an increasingly digital
future from the physical past, in both occupancy and
fabrication/construction, the blended coexistence in both realms has become
typical. Interior architecture presents a perspective where other forms of
spatial hybridization have been the norm, and it is ripe for the disruptive
application of digital technologies fomenting innovation and advantage.
The translation of spatial installation and material innovation by
digital means has begun to manifest itself on a larger scale with the
development of consumer-level augmented reality. Currently utilized by
first-generation prototype products such as Microsoft’s HoloLens and
Google’s Glass, augmented reality projects hybridize and amalgamate the
preexisting context with new spatial installation. Unprecedented
applications of hybridized digital/analog space, no longer solely defined as
adaptive reuse by existing context and new installation in the solely physical
sense, reveal an emergent potentiality in augmented reality and interior
architecture that is neither alien nor outside the normative practices of the
discipline. The vision of augmented reality to hybridize imposed digital and
existent analog space, and even the past/present/future via their dynamic
combination, can be enabled with strategies of interior architecture as a
bridge between these worlds. As technologies and the discipline move
toward the future, augmented reality represents a realm of possibility and
potential offering solutions to ongoing change.

Interior architecture as therapy

Current technological and social changes represent both powerful
possibilities for innovation and fundamental disruptions of our traditional
means of living. They are deeply impacting the social, economic, and spatial
realms. As a means of navigating this profound change, the historical
strategy of connected relationships between past and present was essential
in discovering a successful path to the future. The critical amalgamation of
past, present, and future by means of interior architecture holds the potential
to establish how space can serve as a means of addressing and stabilizing
our contemporary conditions.
Through a discussion of three varied contemporary
crises/opportunities of the post-industrial, post-retail, and post-analog, this
chapter proposes how interior architecture and its strategies and philosophy
of spatial therapy demonstrate a critical potential to respond to some of the
greatest current challenges facing society via design. Interior architecture
represents a path of balance between stagnant historicism and brazenly
radical futures. Extending beyond just space, the ideas of interior
architecture are an inherently social act that enable meaning and resilience.
Interior architecture is a unique and powerful philosophy where history,
theory, and design unite to position it among the most relevant design tools
in a time of profound and disruptive change.
Figure 4.3 Microsoft HoloLens Minecraft Augmented Reality
Image credit: Microsoft Sweden (2015)

Notes
1 Daniel Bell, “Ch 2: Teletext and Technology: New Networks of Knowledge and Information in
Postindustrial Society” (1977), in Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage: Sociological Essays and

Journeys (London: Transaction Publishers, 1991).

2 Ray Kurzweil, “This Is Your Future”, CNN, www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/business/ray-kurzweil-
future-of-human-life/ (last modified 26 December 2013).
3 Emily Chertoff, “Is This Grade School a Cult? (And Do Parents Care?)”, The Atlantic,

www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/is-this-grade-school-a-cult-and-do-parents-
care/265620/ (last modified 30 November 2012).
4 Michael Rundle, “Musk, Hawking Warn of ‘Inevitable’ Arms Race”, Wired Magazine,

www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/27/musk-hawking-ai-arms-race (last modified 27 July

2015).
5 Peter Reed, “Beyond Before and After: Designing Contemporary Landscape”, in Peter Reed,
Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
 2008), p. 25.
6 Richard Reep, “The Future of the Shopping Mall”, New Geography,

www.newgeography.com/content/00501-the-future-shopping-mall (last modified 31 December

2008).
7 Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities – the Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1965).
8 Rem Koolhaas, ed., Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping: Project on the City Volume 2 (New
York: Taschen, 2002), p. 202.
9 Shane McGlaun, “Report: Sears May Convert Some Auto Centers Into Data Centers”, DailyTech,
www.dailytech.com/Report+Sears+May+Convert+Some+Auto+Centers+into+Data+Centers/artic
le33760.htm (last modified 15 November 2013).
10 Blaine Brownell, Material Strategies: Innovative Applications in Architecture (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), p. 9.
Chapter 5

Inside out

Michael Webb

It is quite evident in most buildings that the surfaces should be considered as

belonging to both the interior and exterior. In some of modern architecture’s
weirder moments, however, this distinction is not quite so evident. Take the
early design sketch that Le Corbusier made for the villa at Garches: it
purports to show a large double-height interior space. But is it? What is that
little squiggle in the middle of the ceiling that looks like a bird? If it is a bird,
it’s a somewhat inept representation of one. But if we are looking at the sky
and not the ceiling, does that make it an exterior space? Was this little sketch
a progenitor of James Tyrrell’s famous ceiling at PS1 in Queens NY, a grand
illusion shattered not by a bird but by UA 3245 making its final approach
into LaGuardia Airport flying well below 35,000 ft.?1 Is that not a manicured
lawn in Monsieur de Bestegui’s Parisian roof garden? If so, it must surely be
an exterior view. Or is it a carpet, in which case it must be an interior view?
In one of the projects that SITE did for Best Products, the enclosed volume
of the big box store shifted sideways off its base, so that many of the items
for sale displayed in the sales area find themselves out in the open. SITE’s
work represented the ne plus ultra of architecture for disaster movies.
 With regard to the notion of interior architecture, let me now take
another breath and describe two examples of my own work so that the
above quoted masters and I are not mentioned at once. First, an unfinished
oil painting of the Henley regatta: The landscape depicted in the painting
(Figure 5.1) is that of the regatta course at Henley-on-Thames; namely, the
volume of air, land, and water enclosed by a perspectival cone of vision,
whose axis is parallel to the rowing lanes of the course, and whose apex is in
the Cyclopean eye of the beholder.2 Nearby, in 1862, during “a leisurely glide
on the river all in the dreamy weather of a golden afternoon” did the Rev.
C.L. Dodgson, accompanied by Robinson Duckworth, first tell the Liddell
girls of the Cheshire cat, et al.?3 I have allowed myself the notion that the air
within the cone has magically solidified. It can thus be removed from the
overall landscape and examined independently like an ice core. By this
move, though, the contents of the cone become components of an interior
space and the wall of the cone a window to the nothingness beyond. My
easel is in a location other than that of the beholder. Depicted in the
painting, however, is only what the beholder can see, meaning that only
objects within his or her purview are rendered. What lies behind those
objects (behind in terms of the view from my easel) will appear as negative
“shadows” radiating from the beholder’s eye, voids slashing through the ice
core and breaking through the exterior wall of the cone. If the beholder were
to move, the voids would begin rotating like movie gala searchlights to
create new gashes in the wall.
Figure 5.1 Michael Webb, Orthographic combined/compressed roof plan and elevation of the
solidified. Henley-on-Thames regatta course. Oil on prepared board. (2008–present)

The drive-in house

Some background material might be helpful before getting to the gist of the
project that just about merits its inclusion. And that’s what some of us in the
UK felt upon reading Reyner Banham’s 1965 Letter from America, his new
land. To the folks back home, Banham praised not the sort of corporate
modern architecture purveyed by the likes of Paul Rudolph, SOM, and I.M.
Pei. No, he wanted to bring to our attention the automobile-induced
vernacular of mobile homes and drive-ins that represented a radical change
in the basic programming of a building. His book was quintessentially
American in its seeming response to the needs of the restlessly mobile
society that we had all heard so much about. Of the drive-in movie house,
Banham writes:

Only the word house (theater surely?) is a manifest misnomer …

just a flat piece of ground where the operating company provides
visual images and piped sound, and the rest of the situation comes
on wheels. You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the
car. You also bring Coke, cookies, Kleenex, Chesterfields, spare
clothes, shoes, the Pill, and god wot [sic] else they don’t provide at
Radio City.4

Or, “the smoochy couple dancing to the music of the radio in their parked
convertible have created a ballroom in the wilderness (dance floor courtesy
of the highway department).” This latter vision of rapture in the wilderness
presumably dissolves when the couple return to their car and the dance floor
turns back into a length of highway … and silence replaces the sound of
music. We now know what a drive-in movie theater or dance hall looks like
… a flat piece of ground, etc., but what might a drive-in house look or
behave like? Maybe this is a drive-in house (Figure 5.2).
Figure 5.2 illustrates a horizontal section cut through a house
(shown here by its sectioned spherical roof with rudimentary floor beneath).
The purpose of the drawing was solely to explore the mechanics of how a
car might be rotated into the house (via an intake tube) while at the same
time maintaining seals that would prevent hot or cold external air from
entering the house. At the time of the drawing’s execution, the design of the
house itself had not been considered and is therefore depicted in
rudimentary form. Solid material cut through is shown in grayscale. The
house is nestled into the side of a hill.
The drawing is tripartite, comprising sequential images numbered
one, two, and three – in dutiful compliance with that convention of
architectural representation which requires placing the main entry of a
building along the bottom edge so that our eyes can enter “up” into the
drawing. Here, our eyes must be usurped by the driver’s Cyclopean line of
sight, his center of vision, which is likewise “up” in all three phases, meaning
that the building must rotate around the driver, rather than the driver
around the building. By such faithful adherence to the conventions, the
original intention was to aid readability.
In part 1, the car has been driven through the intake tube into a
clockwise rotating drum. The driver’s center of vision remains steadfastly
vertical. A curving yellow line marks the path of the sun across the spherical
roof. In part 2, the drum has rotated further, the volume of air contained
within the drum warming or cooling to the internal temperature of the
house. The driver’s center of vision remaining steadfastly vertical, the intake
tube and the room must therefore follow and swing round. In part 3, the
drum has rotated yet further so that its internal walls now align with those
of the house. The car has become the gorgeous object within.

Figure 5.2 Michael Webb, Drive-in house. Horizontal Section Cut. 3 phase depiction of the rotation.
Airbrush, Color-Aid paper and Solar Path diagrams. (1995)

The operational geometry of the drum was an attempt to emulate

– albeit at a giant scale – the Wankel engine’s ingenious rotational
harmonies; hence the term “intake” or “exhaust” with the car itself playing
the part of the gas and air mixture. The analog only takes you so far! Figure
5.3 represents a work in progress although, as you can see, the word
“progress” is what this drawing has not achieved. The mechanism is more
compact, and as a result, the rotating car and its concomitantly opening
doors seem (and seem, here, is the operative word) to sculpt a shape which is
a negative of the car from the solid material of the house. The interior walls
of the house, then, are a distended negative of the car exterior. The outside is
the inside distended, and thus, results in an interior architecture.

Figure 5.3 Michael Webb, Drive-in house. Roof Plan at night. Photostat with added Pantone color.
(1985)

Notes
1 The airliner’s ceiling, while invisible, is very much an actuality … so is Tyrell’s ceiling.
2 The cone has been sectioned horizontally, thus making its top surface a parabola.
3 Taken from the prefatory poem that begins Alice in Wonderland.
4 The smart, self-driving car (rentable version only): drive it, leave it at the entrance to J.C. Penney
and there’s another waiting for you when you exit … sure … after a 10 minute wait … at least has
the potential for eliminating those pressed metal deserts more completely than ever the drive-in
could.
Part two

Territories
Chapter 6

Symbiotic spaces
Decolonizing identity in the spatial design of
the Museum of Macau

Emily Stokes-Rees

This chapter considers the narrative character in the Museum of Macau

(MoM hereafter) and its potential to demonstrate how museums can use
spatial configuration as a way of shaping knowledge and history. Dvora
Yanow, Professor of Organizational Studies at Keele University in the UK,
has studied museum buildings as narrative spaces. Her central thesis is that
buildings – museums in particular – are both storytellers and part of the
story being told; the museum is both a house of material culture and an
artifact itself. It presents itself to be read and deciphered as an integral part
of the narrative alongside the displays. Echoing Yanow’s position, this
chapter employs the idea of symbiosis, pointing to the mutually beneficial
coexistence of unlike organisms – a synergistic relationship that might result
in the emergence of a new species.
Symbiosis can also be used as a model for the mutual relationship
between the idea of the museum, its nation of origin, its building, and its
narrative; each benefit from the relationship. This chapter posits that the give
and take between form and function in the MoM and its building reflect the
extent to which the museum’s building and story are inseparable, and that
Macau’s unique identity is inextricably linked to its colonial history. The
architecture, both exterior and interior, is not subservient to the museum’s
content and message, but rather, acts as a protagonist in the communication
of symbiotically framed ideas about the past and the present, form and
function, colonial and postcolonial, and East and West.
National museums, like all built structures, exist on many levels.
We encounter them first as built form in the physical landscape, and then, as
one enters the building, as spaces of exhibition. Public spaces, like museums,
are also inherently tied to community, being both spatially anchored and
symbolically constructed. As architect Tan Hock Beng has claimed,
“Buildings remain a space for the formation of identities. This, architecture
achieves through the relationship between buildings and the people who
question how and why they come to be.”1 Lawrence and Low (1990) echo
this sentiment in their description of the built environment as:

tangible evidence for describing and explaining the often

intangible features of expressive cultural processes… . As
expressions of culture, built forms may be seen to play a
communicative role embodying and conveying meaning between
groups, or individuals within groups, at a variety of levels.2

In other words, the physical space of the museum can be seen not simply as
a lifeless container to hold objects and visitors, but as a dynamic participant
in the interpretation of culture and the experience of identity. At the same
time, the organization of the built environment affects the people who
experience it – their feelings, behavior, and relationships with others.
Throughout history, the museum has been an “emblem of Western
cultural tradition, [a] formative tool of modernity, a means to reconfigure
colonial pasts” and a lure for tourists.3 As Douglas Davis has put it, “no
building type can match the museum for symbolic or architectural
importance.”4 Tony Bennett, for example, examines the political uses that
governments have made of museums as sites for social reform, carefully
constructed public spaces through which state objectives can be achieved.5
He describes museums at the turn of the twentieth century as monumental
institutions built to simultaneously represent enlightened thought, political
unity, and evolutionary continuity. The imposing facades and entrance halls
of many museums were designed to be inspiring and uplifting (perhaps
intimidating), their internal layouts echoing the discourses of science,
culture, and power presented within.6 Resembling historic ceremonial
monuments, their architecture was comparable to Greek or Roman temples,
cathedrals from the Middle Ages, or Renaissance Palaces. Not only did their
architectural characteristics make these historic museums reflect ancient
sites, their settings also emphasized the building as a site of contemplation
and learning. To this day, museums are often set apart from other structures,
approached by an imposing central flight of stairs, or set back from the street
and nestled into parkland. In constructing buildings in this style, a ritual
process is experienced by visitors to the museum: the climb up to the door
feels like entering a church or cathedral, for example, and individuals are,
therefore, psychologically and culturally prepared to respect the “civilizing
rituals” of museum visiting.7 Traditional museums like the Smithsonian or
the British Museum immediately spring to mind, where temple-like
architecture sustains the image of the national museum as a spiritual
repository representing all human achievement.
While the traditional form of the museum has continued to be an
important feature in many nations throughout the twentieth century, it has
also acquired several new roles. Michaela Giebelhausen’s edited volume of
essays explores, for example, the ways in which the modern museum
building helps to “unlock urban memories [and make] visible the city’s
hidden histories.”8 She cites the example of the Centre Georges Pompidou in
Paris (1977), which was conceived not simply as a museum, but as a
multipurpose cultural center designed to “enliven the city.”9 Other museums
have taken on more commemorative roles, and still others are the products
of urban regeneration projects, reusing abandoned or neglected landmarks
and transforming them into new museums. As Giebelhausen argues, “The
museum building again is being conceived as an evocative entity that is in
dialogue both with its content and urban context.”10
When such expressions of identity are influenced by postcolonial
politics, this task becomes increasingly complex. Lawrence Vale has noted
that in states liberated from colonial regimes, building design has been used
as “an iconographical bridge between preferred epochs, joining the misty
palisades of some golden age to the hazy shores of some future promise.”11 In
other words, architecture in a postcolonial context can play an important
role in the enforcing of political control, often under the guise of creating a
“national style.”12 Whether one believes the destruction of physical traces of
colonialism will alter the history of the nation, or whether one chooses to
build upon the memories of that past through the reappropriation of colonial
buildings, the construction of new museums remains an important debate in
many formerly colonized nations.

Macau and its museum

Macau is a small “special administrative region” on the southern coast of
China, to the west of Hong Kong across the Pearl River Delta, bordered by
Guangdong to the north and the South China Sea to the east and south.
With an estimated population of around 636,200 living in an area of 30.3 km2
(11.6 sq. mi.), it is among the most densely populated places in the world.
Macau was administered by the Portuguese from the mid-sixteenth century
until December 20, 1999, when, as the last remaining European colony in
Asia under Portugal, sovereignty over Macau was transferred back to China.
The Museum of Macau occupies the Fortaleza Sao Paulo do Monte,
otherwise known as the Monte Fortress. Built between 1617 and 1626, the
Monte Fortress formed part of a complex of buildings, including the Sao
Paulo Church and the Jesuit College, which has often been referred to as the
“acropolis” of Macau – the symbolic and (almost) geographical center of the
city.13 Prior to 1623, the entire complex was controlled by the Jesuits, but in
that year, when the first Capitao-General arrived in Macau, he took
possession of the fortress, which subsequently served as the Governor’s
official residence and the center of Portuguese political and military power
in the territory.14 The fort thus became the heart of the original Portuguese
settlement. Later, it served as a barracks, a prison, and, since 1965, a
meteorological observatory and public park. Its central location as well as its
historic importance indicates that the fortress has been an important part of
civilian life throughout history.
Consider for a moment, therefore, the risk (or perhaps the irony)
of making a Portuguese fortress the location for a museum whose aim is to
tell the story of interethnic harmony and tolerance that characterizes Macau.
In interviews with museum staff and government representatives during a
field visit there not long after its opening, it was impressed upon me over
and over that the designers desired to highlight the problems of building a
museum as a reflection of the problems in building a postcolonial identity
for Macau. Local architect Carlos Bonina Moreno believed the location and
historic significance of the fortress met all the optimal conditions for the
museum site; however, he observed two problems which are chronicled in
detail in the museum’s publication entitled, A Museum in an Historic Site:
The Monte Fortress of St. Paul (1999). The first hurdle was accessibility. Like
all good military fortresses, it is strategically positioned atop a large hill with
steep cliffs and commanding views over the city. As Moreno put it, “After
all, it’s a mountain. If people have to climb up the hill and get all hot and
exhausted trying to get there, they won’t come. We wanted to make it easy
for people to come.”15 Second, and more problematic, the fortress consisted
mainly of walls and turrets, with only one small, single-story building. As a
result, it did not actually have any structures to sufficiently house a museum
of the size envisioned. The question thus became focused on how to go
about creating a space large enough to accommodate 1,500–2,000 square
meters of exhibition space that would not risk harming the historic fabric
and ambience of the fortress and that would be easily accessible from the
Sao Paulo ruins and the street below.16
The solution lay in incorporating the building directly into the
museum’s story; its physical characteristics and structure have determined
the narrative logic of the exhibition space. The completed museum
comprises three floors, two of which were excavated within the fortress
walls, and one standing above ground (Figure 6.1). The main entrance to the
museum is thus underground, accessible by a series of escalators which
carry approaching visitors in and up to the lobby area, flanked by a large
mural sculpted out of Portuguese marble portraying Macau’s history. Once
in the entrance hall, there is an expansive stretch of colonial arches in cream
and white running around the original walls of the fortress (Figure 6.2).
With the building elements adjusted to fit within the existing historic
structure on the site, the museum remembers its past while at the same time
looking forward as a modern proactive cultural institution.
Moving from the entrance hall and into the galleries, the MoM’s
exhibits have been arranged within the structure of the building to describe
the nation’s progress from distant past to recent past. Reflecting this plan,
the museum is divided into three major sections, corresponding to the three
floors of the building: Genesis of the Macau Region, Popular Arts and
Traditions in Macau, and Contemporary Macau. Each of these sections is
then divided into thematic areas. Moving through the museum, the visitor is
drawn along a set path, picking up elements of the story by stopping at the
vignettes along the way. The extent to which this kind of predetermined
route is enforced upon visitors is described by Bennett as part of an
“exhibitionary complex” – an efficient and disciplinary way of getting
visitors to internalize meanings. He describes early exhibitions in which the
world was staged for British consumption; visitors to these museums, he
says, proceeded along directed routes, devised “to comply with a program of
organized walking which transformed any tendency to gaze into a highly
directed and sequentialized practice of looking.”17 In this way, the museum
building, through its spatial layout, organizes time and ideology within its
walls.
Figure 6.1 The third floor of the Museum of Macau – the only part of the building that appears above
ground
Image credit: E.S-R (2002)
Figure 6.2 Reaching the top of the escalator which carries visitors through the foundations of the
fortress into the museum’s entrance hall
Image credit: E. S-R (2002)

Contributing to the effect of movement through history, the MoM

uses the concept of “time traveling” by displaying its prehistory in a tunnel-
like passage, a technique more and more frequently used in new museums.18
As one enters the museum and travels along the length of the opening hall,
the corridor narrows perceptibly, bringing (both physically and
symbolically) representations of Western and Chinese civilization –
displayed on opposite walls – closer together in space, through time (Figure
6.3). They do not physically meet, but converge in the gaze of the viewer
upon a video box centered on the far wall, with red holographic writing that
reads, “MACAU.” In this way, the physicality of the entrance hall sets out the
main representative strategies of the museum. First, it establishes symmetry
between East and West, an important theme in the construction of Macau’s
postcolonial identity. Second, it demonstrates, through its parallel
comparison of developments in philosophy, writing, mathematics, empire,
religion, and technology, that China and Europe are equally civilized and
cosmopolitan. Lastly, it initiates the museum’s main narrative of Macau as
the product of the “inexorable encounter between these two monolithic
culminations of four thousand years of history.”19 As Director Teresa Fu
Barreto commented to me on the Project Team’s initial vision:

Figure 6.3 Introductory exhibition hall in the Museum of Macau, with European material on the left
and Chinese material on the right. Depicting the parallel development of European and Chinese
civilization is important in constructing Macau’s postcolonial sense of identity.
Image credit: E.S-R (2002)

They wanted to choose bits from the Chinese way of life and the
Portuguese way of life and show how the two blended and
balanced to live in a peaceful way. They didn’t want to talk about
different versions of this history or different opinions … so, the
museum reflects this throughout the building.20
Thus, this introductory gallery has the effect of bringing objects from
different cultures and time periods together to convey a message of Macau’s
history as a product of the convergence of two great civilizations. It
highlights the theme of cultural flow and symbiosis carried through the rest
of the museum.
This type of exhibition reinforces the passage of time; it is a long
history, and it is a history that has steadily and linearly progressed through
time, reminiscent of Smith’s observation that “the central idea of modern
society is that of progress, because modern, industrial society lives on and is
sustained by perpetual growth.”21 The physical structure of narration is
characterized by interiority and the progression from a beginning to a
finishing point, calling attention to the performative acts of moving and
viewing, of the ordering of one’s experience of history as a continuous,
unified story. Through the spatial construction of the narrative, the
relationship between the prehistory of the nation and modern, developed
Macanese society is interpreted as “natural” – a past in symbiotic relation to
the present.
In the transition from the first to the second floor – further
illustrating the symbiotic relationship between structure and narrative – a
passage was built through an intermediate mezzanine floor where a historic
street scene is recreated. Here, the exhibits were adjusted to incorporate
existing interior architectural elements of the fortress, such as an old cistern
uncovered during the excavations, which has been restored and fit into an
exhibit recreating the environment of Macanese fishermen. In another area,
the displays incorporate original fortress walls, linking past to present and
adding to the narrative of Portuguese/Macanese “cultural symbiosis.”22 What
is on or separated by the walls is less important than what is occurring
within the museum’s spaces; the architecture is not a passive entity but
something of constant notice; the fortress is as much an artifact of the
narrative the museum articulates as any other object displayed within. The
effect of these techniques is also to turn the gallery into a parallel in situ
archaeological museum, and the building itself becomes an integral exhibit
object. The juxtaposition of colonial history and postcolonial present –
respect for colonial spaces adapted for museum use after independence –
thus becomes instrumental in redefining the nation. The museum is
symbolically intertwined with the fortress and hill, becoming a unique and
powerful blend of interior and landscape.
This cultural symbiosis of form and function is carried through the
displays with representations of symmetry between East and West. In one
gallery, a Portuguese and Chinese cannon stand side by side, and between
them a pile of stone cannonballs that could be used in either one. In another
area, an explanation of the symbolism of the nearby Sao Paulo Church’s
facade emphasizes its bicultural imagery and that it was a cooperative effort
between the Western Jesuits who designed it and the Eastern craftsmen who
built it. A text panel about the church reads:

There are statues of the Virgin and saints, symbols of the Garden
of Eden and the Crucifixion, angels and the devil, a Chinese
dragon and a Japanese chrysanthemum, a Portuguese sailing ship
and pious warnings inscribed in Chinese.23

This parallel structure, which is apparent throughout the museum,

emphasizes the historical process of the meeting between two separate but
equal civilizations and Macau’s role as an active generator of new cultural
forms. Elsewhere, displays on religion make reference to the female religious
icons of Tin Hau, Guan Yin, and the Virgin Mary, each occupying a sacred
space in their respective religions, binding the three faiths into one common
experience.24 As a place with which we can examine the relationship
between the construction of the past and the spatialization of public
memory, the MoM functions as both product and producer. It redefines old
spaces as new, represents changing cultural practices, and creates new
identities.
In her book on visual methodologies, Gillian Rose asks, “just how
effective are these disciplining technologies?”25 She argues that many studies
of museums “concentrate too much on the disciplining effects of institutions
and not enough on the way [they] … may fail or be disrupted.”26 Although I
was unable to speak to more than a handful of visitors in detail about this,
as I sat on numerous occasions watching people move through the museum,
it became clear that some visitors seemed to be drawn to certain areas by
something that caught their eye, rather than the greater narrative of the
exhibition. I also observed children making use of the space as a maze,
running and playing “hide-and-seek” rather than treating it as a display of
interesting information and objects. From these few observations, I would
argue that for the most part, while the museum’s layout cannot guarantee a
specific response in all visitors, and while the unusual behavior I observed
could perhaps be interpreted as symbolic of a struggle against hegemonic
history, the museum nonetheless privileges certain readings.
The literal and symbolic journey of historical progress finds its
climax as one exits the museum onto the rooftop garden and an outdoor
café. From here, the whole of Macau is in view, reinforcing the role of the
museum as overseer and protector of this tiny city-state’s heritage. Like
other famous mountains in cities (Rome comes to mind, or Mont Royal in
Montreal), high points are automatically places of iconicity. Locals can look
out and see their houses, workplaces, and locales of their childhood. By
virtue of the dignity of the location, its history, and its symbolic potency, the
Monte Fortress was a natural place to build a museum that was supposed to
“reflect the soul and spirit of Macau.”27 From inside out, the museum’s
design provides the visitor with opportunities to reflect upon the identity of
Macau through its symbolically ordered space. History becomes a
progression rooted in the past and moving forward and upward into the
future.
Ever since museums first appeared as institutions, their
architecture and interiors have been scrutinized; “praised and criticized in
equal measure.”28 Their unique qualities have attracted the critical attention
of cultural and architectural historians who have repeatedly tried to define
and articulate museums’ special characteristics. It has even been claimed
that museum architecture’s “cultural significance not only surpasses that of
other building types, but also possesses a genuine seismographic quality.”29
Michael Levin, for example, considers the museum to be an instrument that
“almost by definition, does more than express current social values and
tastes; it also makes a cultural statement which goes beyond its own place in
history.”30 As such, history and identity lie not only within a museum’s
displays but are also reflected through its exterior shell. Whether modern or
colonial, the museum building is an evocative typology in dialogue with
both its content and its wider social-historical context.
In his book How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton suggests
that it is within those commemorative practices involving some kind of
participation, whether through ceremonies, rituals, or codes of behavior, that
collective memories are produced and sustained among members of
society.31 Moving through the space of the museum in such a way, visitors –
whether consciously or unconsciously – participate in the creation and
maintenance of collective national identity. By controlling the path of
movement, ways of seeing, and the objects and displays around which this
vision is directed, museums acquire a special social authority. This chapter
has highlighted observations of the strong links between location and
narrative, form and function, architecture and interiority. The Museum of
Macau and its architecture, in turn, reflect the extent to which the museum’s
story was conceived as a systematic whole and key site for postcolonial
nation building. This discussion of exhibition techniques and dynamics has
enabled a clearer reading of the institutional processes of display at work
within the MoM. In addition to conveying knowledge, the visibility of some
of the specific modes of display highlights the museum as a medium for the
production of cultural identity, where “the museum itself is on display.”32
The MoM’s use of spatial layout, for example, was shown to dictate a
particular “path” through the nation’s history, as well as its history as a
place of exchange and cooperation.
Whether the MoM is ultimately successful in its presentation of
Macanese history is beside the point here. The key idea that I wish to
highlight is that through its spatial layout and aspects of its interior
architecture, the museum’s designers have attempted to present a certain
“story,” and therefore a particular image of Macanese identity. The narrative
path of national history is controlled by the internal route one is encouraged
to take through the museum, revealing the very nature of the building’s
design as an active agent in constituting knowledge and experience. The
museum in Macau uses spatial vocabularies and strategic sequencing,
dioramas, and recreations to communicate meaning; a symbiosis between
form and function, East and West, the past and the present. Emerging out of
the mountain, the MoM becomes a condensation of the rich natural and
cultural context in which it is located, where the rhythms of local life give
rise to the exhibits. Resonating within the building, various design elements
dovetail into relationship, blurring the boundaries between inside and
outside, past and present, architecture and interiority, city and museum.

Notes
1 Tan Hock Beng, “Reconstructing Memories”, in Between Forgetting and Remembering: Memories

and the National Library, ed. Kwok, Ho, and Tan (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 2000),
pp. 67–75.
2 Denise Lawrence and Setha Low, “The Built Environment and Spatial Form”, Annual Review of

Anthropology 19 (1990): 466.

3 Michaela Giebelhausen, ed., The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban

Contexts (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2003), p. 1; also Carol Duncan, “Art
Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship”, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures:

The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991),
pp. 88–104.
4 Quoted in Giebelhausen, ed., The Architecture of the Museum, p. 2.
5 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), p.
100.
6 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 171–172.
7 Carol Duncan, Civilising Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995).
8 Giebelhausen, ed., The Architecture of the Museum, p. 2.
9 Ibid., p. 6.
10 Ibid., p. 7.
11 Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity (London and New York: Routledge,
1992), p. 321.
12 Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity, p. 53.
13 Both the Sao Paulo Church and Jesuit College burned down in 1835, and today only the facade of
the church remains; Project Team of the Museum of Macau, A Museum in an Historic Site: The

Monte Fortress of St. Paul (Macau: Museum of Macau, 1999), pp. 79–95.
14 Project Team of the Museum of Macau, A Museum in an Historic Site, p. 84.
15 Moreno quoted in Anastasia Edwards, “Macau’s Rich Past Given a Future”, The South China

Morning Post, 17 April 1998, Weekend Entertainment Section: n.p. MoM museum clippings.
16 For a detailed description of the construction problems and process, see Project Team of the
Museum of Macau, A Museum in an Historic Site, pp. 115–159, 162–172.
17 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, pp. 186–187.
18 This can also be observed in history museums in Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong, for
example.
19 Museum of Macau, museum text, 2002.
20 Barreto, personal interview, MoM, September 2002.
21 Anthony D. Smith, “History and Modernity”, in Representing the Nation: A Reader (Histories,

Heritage, Museums), ed. David Boswell and Jessica Evans (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 46.
22 Project Team of the Museum of Macau, A Museum in an Historic Site, p. 150, 172.
23 Museum text, “Sino-Western Cultural Interchange”, MoM, 2002.
24 Mary is the central female figure of Catholicism (Christian), Tin Hau is the Taoist Goddess of
Mercy, and Guan Yin is the Buddhist name for the same figure.
25 Rose, Visual Methodologies, p. 183.
26 Ibid.
27 Cathryn Clayton, “Imagining Macau: Local Identities in Transnational Formation”, PhD Thesis,
University of California at Santa Cruz, 2001, p. 276.
28 Giebelhausen, ed., The Architecture of the Museum, p. 2.
29 Ibid., p. 2.
30 Levin quoted in Giebelhausen, ed., The Architecture of the Museum, p. 2.
31 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
32 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and B.S. Frey, “The Dematerialization of Culture and the
Deaccessioning of Museum Collections”, Museum International 54, no. 4 (2002): 59.
Chapter 7

Shape shifting
Interior architecture and dynamic design

Mark Taylor

The term interior architecture, as noted by Sashi Caan, has been around
since 1924, but over the past twenty years it has gained new currency.1 Since
the early 2000s, interior architecture has been closely aligned to ideas of
adapting existing buildings to contain new functions. Brooker and Stone
established a conservationist approach that revolved around themes of
preservation, restoration, renovation, and remodeling.2 Their methodology
aligned case studies with an analytical examination that sought coherence
and symbolic association between the new and old parts of the building.
While Brooker and Stone take a more rational approach to understanding
the interior through materials, form, geometry, and so on, Caan recognizes
that atmosphere, feeling, and spatial presence are factors affecting the
perception of an interior. What might be called “interiority,” which from its
early inceptions in philosophy and latter preoccupation by writers, offers a
connection to psychological life, memory, closeness, and intimacy.
 In recent years, the relationship between interiority and interior
architecture has been affected by advances in digital, electronic, and
interactive technologies, particularly the way real-time interaction alters
physical and psychological engagement with built space. The anthropologist
Marc Augé’s book, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity, for example, provides an analysis of the “customer’s” silent

engagement with late-capitalist space.3 Wandering through the reductively

generated self-similar and homogenized “supermodern” space of
supermarkets, train stations, and airports, “clients” are scrutinized,
identified, and directed by sensors, machines, and card readers. Replicated
indiscriminately across the globe, these spaces are the result of corporate
capitalism, business economics, or plain “efficiency diagrams.” By extending
Augé’s analysis, Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin argue non-places as
“sites that are wholly constructed and controlled to support the mobility of
global commodities.”4 This condition epitomized by “intense concentrations
of networked infrastructure” construct what they and others regard as
“supermodern” spaces of flow. The reality is that such spaces are often gated
and controlled by barriers, ticket machines (as on subways), and directional
paths that allow access by means of network cards that identify users.
In the prologue to his book, Augé identifies this terrain through a
man’s journey from the moment he draws money from a cash dispenser to
the time he settles back to listen to the Air France in-flight music channel en
route to Asia. The journey takes him from an ATM to Roissy airport via the
Dourdan tollbooth, the A11 and A1 autoroutes, underground parking, and
check-in desk where he books a smoking seat. Clearing passport control, he
purchases duty-free cognac and cigars, then boards and settles into the new
Espace 2000 business class seat prior to takeoff. Flicking through magazines,
he reads articles, advertisements, and reviews, before noticing the “fasten
seatbelt” sign has gone out, and, finally, adjusts his earphones in order to be
“alone at last.”
Augé’s ficto-character, the urban businessman Pierre Dupont,
surrenders to solitary individuality, having navigated the spaces that
advertised and encouraged the idea that “we are perpetually connected
when, in reality, we are profoundly disconnected.”5 This disconnectedness,
suggests Bingham, results from “the overabundance of information and
current events, as well as the acceleration of human life and history, but
even more so in the proliferation of non-places, which are inherently
impersonal and impermanent.”6 Dupont’s connection to the airport, “Roissy,
just the two of us!” is as ephemeral as the places and products in the
advertising pages of the in-flight magazine. He has spent the day in the
company of the ordinary, common, and impersonal space of an ATM, an
airport, and a magazine’s advertisement that connected his journey’s start to
finish through the word “Espace.”
In this short passage, Augé recognizes that much of our time is
spent using cash machines, traveling on motorways, wandering around
supermarkets, waiting in airports and hotels, and interacting with TVs, game
consoles, and computers. For example, the cash dispenser accepts Pierre
Dupont’s card and “told him he could have 1,800 francs [and] asked him to
wait,” before adding, “thank you for your custom.” Although this exchange
reads like a conversation, it is completed through a textual interface that
allows Dupont access to his money. There is no “personal” interaction,
though the passage reads much like a conversation between customer and
bank clerk. Media and technology writer Gillian Fuller observes that these
places tend to address participants and passengers through various
modulated messages, such as “do not eat in the train,” “find/lose yourself in
Paris,” “please present boarding pass and passport.” These textually mediated
modes of interchange provide rules that “address a virtual ‘average man’
subject to a series of silent exchanges and injunctions (turn left, insert card
now, Welcome to Sydney), where contractual modes of interaction are
sharply defined and textually mediated.”7
Ole Bouman proposes that we are in an architectural age in which
people, rather than place, become the interface with the ultimate aim of
“merging digital and physical environments in a single interface.”8 He
suggests the advent of ubiquitous computing and emergence of
asynchronous structures challenges architecture as a device that measures
specific events and moments in time. These ideas are embedded within his
own practice and curatorial efforts to produce architecture that adopts time-
based technologies, including animated surfaces, interactive environments,
and merged spaces with both real and virtual interface. In this world of
social networking through remote sites, where “human behavior is no longer
framed by place,” architecture “will lose its position and character as a
consistent and integrated form of cultural communication.”9 For architects
and designers, this new way of thinking extends the work of Anthony
Dunne and Fiona Raby, who also explore the links between the material and
immaterial. Their research focuses on the poetic and sensual rather than the
technical or utilitarian aspects of design, where pervasive computing is used
to produce a more intangible or ephemeral interface design that makes
visible the invisible or evokes immaterial sensuality.

Intelligent systems
In both exterior and interior spaces, media connectivity is having an
important impact on domestic architecture, “resulting in spaces that are
mediated yet somehow remote from our senses.”10 Weinstock argues that the
home has become a terrain vague, lying somewhere between the digital and
physical worlds, between the infinite extension of data worlds and the
decreasing experience of personal space. Through utilizing distributed
intelligence and responsive material systems, he suggests it should be
possible to change “internal parameters and performances in relation to the
life of their inhabitants and events in the external world.”11 Two examples
are offered in order to frame a discussion of the domestic relative to non-
domestic environments. The two examples, Aegis Hyposurface by dECOi
and the Freshwater Pavilion by NOX, indicate how walls can interact
spatially with the environment, either by physically responding to data as a
deformable surface or by altering a virtual real-time model in relation to
movement of people within the space.
The Aegis Hyposurface, conceived by Mark Goulthorp of dECOi
Architects, is the world’s first responsive architectural surface. It was
designed as an interactive artwork to be located outside the foyer of the
Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre (UK). An array of sensors, such as video
cameras and microphones, send data to a network of pistons that activate
the surface in order to bring “Aegis into a conversation with whoever
triggered a response.”12 It is a dynamically interactive surface, with
significant surface variability, which Mark Burry once described as a
movement that, at first, makes one feel a little seasick. Perhaps it is because
the effect is so spatially disturbing, while questioning the seeming solidity of
the Aegis Hyposurface’s metal surface. There are, however, other surfaces
such as tent canvases and soft skins that also have spatial variability. The
temporary T-Room (2005) designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma for
the Alternative Paradise exhibition held at Kanazawa 21st Century Museum,
for example, utilizes an air-filled translucent membrane structure that was
animated by variations in air pressure. This project, however, did not use
stimulus/response networks to effect change, but operated on a movement
cycle which nevertheless forced a more intimate relationship between
bodies, as well as between body and architecture.
With this in mind, Weinstock suggests that “housescapes will
require distributed intelligence and active material systems,” and while these
advances utilize digital technologies, some buildings have other forms of
sensors that manipulate environmental conditions, but may not be regarded
as “intelligent.”13 The question of building intelligence has been addressed by
cyberneticist Ranulph Glanville, who observes that the oldest likely example
is thermostatically controlled central heating (or cooling), in which the
internal environment is conditioned by a sensor switch attached to a heating
or cooling system. He suggests that once such systems might have been
thought of as intelligent, but only when such “behavior seemed wondrous.”14
Relative to Turing’s test for intelligence, Glanville concludes that these
examples “perform tricks,” since they do not offer anything that is remotely
interactive, but are stimulus-response actions. Although the smart fridge
that tracks products and offers menus is closer to an interactive device, it is
not truly interactive and is probably closer to a servicing device. Glanville
proposes that “the buildings and devices we currently have are nowhere
near interactive, let alone intelligent. They are merely built to include clever
tricks that allow them to react, often in ways designed to retain a static
stability.”15 Despite Glanville’s observations, these new forms of interactive
technologies, principally operating through the Web of Things, connect
activation with performance. Reciprocal relationships between data input
(stimulus) and surface change (response) are affected in many ways, not
only through digital screens, but also through mechanical systems such as
those used in the Aegis Hyposurface.

Network infrastructure
The means of achieving any spatial or environmental change, in real time, is
dependent on how technologies are coupled to not only enhance our
experience, but also how they reconnect space and time with the interior.
Our presence in the physical world, which was once marked by seasonal
changes of temperature and light, is now mediated by constantly unfolding
data – whether this is through social media or technologically derived data
(what we might call “big data”). This suggests that lives exist between digital
and physical environments. Supportive technologies, such as the
development of wearable technologies, also means that interaction with the
device no longer need occur through graphic interfaces, but “through tactile
and direct contact with the instruments located on the body.”16 Such
advances mean that the artificial or constructed environment might
reconfigure itself depending on the social dynamics that are occurring.
Whether we want to inhabit this world or not, what is clear is that
the introduction of mobile digital and electronic technologies into everyday
life, and the development of new materials and controllable structures,
emphasizes the distance between inhabitable space as a fixed architecture
and as a flow of information. Now capable of dialoguing with variable
environmental conditions, including the emissions of sounds, smell, climate
data, and so on, architecture is a complex adaptive robotic system of
interacting installations. One example is the proposed Digital Pavilion Korea
(2006) by ONL, the office of Kas Oosterhuis, in which the Voronoi cell
structure of the pavilion was controlled and kinetically manipulated using
actuators in the beams of the structural system. This use of actuators
operated in a similar manner to the earlier Muscle (2003) experiments by
ONL, in which infrared motion and proximity sensors “detect people’s
movements in the surrounding area prompting the Muscle to react slightly,
while touch sensors induce a stronger reaction.”17
Given these developments, how might the interior respond to such
challenges as ideas are transferred across domains, and how might these
affect previous notions of interiority? Moreover, if the super modern interior
continues to absorb technological innovations, it will cease to exist in its
current format. This situation forces consideration of alternate locations,
sites, and environments as potential receptacles for interiority and dwelling
of the individual.
The technologically driven animate architectural interior that is
not constrained by built form as the precursor to design intervention (in a
Brooker and Stone sense) or fabricated in response to a psychological intent
(in a Caan sense) offers a dynamic exchange that changes both form and
feedback such that no single reading is possible. This mode of engagement
with the built environment through information technology and
connectivity is, as Ole Bouman argues, challenging the classical worldview
of architecture as a static, built placemaking device. Under this paradigm,
architecture is no longer about people engaging with built architecture or a
place, but is about wireless embedded technologies that “reach you
directly.”18 It is a form of architecture that questions the idea of timeless or
classic architecture which, in a traditional sense, is conceptualized as the
desire to represent oneself beyond the present. In a social sense, this
recurrent process of time measured from the past through to the present
anticipates a predictable future informed by stability. The data-driven
environment, however, is inherently unpredictable, as its “stability” is ever
changing.
To this extent, where monumental architecture has become the
signifier of the ability to transcend death, because it seems to be eternal and
claims durability and imperishability, the responsive environment has an
immanent relationship to lived space that, if not “intelligent,” is beginning to
collect data and respond to patterns of use within a real-time scenario.19
Under this conceptualization, the relationship between interior architecture
and interiority is dynamic and mobile, and ultimately aided by the
inhabitant’s response to the interior environment – and vice versa. As a
means to structure social interaction, it “enables individuals and groups to
sustain shared concepts of changes in meanings and values,” such that “time”
is now inherently bound to design thinking, in the manner that an entity
establishes dynamic associations with its environment as well as within
itself.20 That is, it opens space for the transitory and transformative to resist
traditional paradigms and ideologies.

Notes
1 Sashi Caan, Rethinking Design and Interiors: Human Beings in the Built Environment (London:
Laurence King Publishing, 2011), p. 188.
2 Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone, Rereadings: Interior Architecture and the Design Principles of

Remodelling Existing Buildings (London: RIBA Enterprises, 2004).

3 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe
(London and New York: Verso, 1995).
4 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures,

Technological Mobilities (London: Routledge, 2001).

5 Kirk A. Bingaman, Treating the New Anxiety: A Cognitive-Theological Approach (New York:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), p. 24.
6 Ibid., p. 25.
7 Gillian Fuller, “Life in Transit: Between Airport and Camp”, Borderlands e-Journal 2, no. 1 (2003),
www.borderlands.net.au/vol2no1_2003/fuller_transit.html
8 Ole Bouman, “Architecture, Liquid, Gas”, Architectural Design 75, no. 2 (2005): 17.
9 Ibid., p. 21.
10 Michael Weinstock, “Terrain Vague”, Architectural Design 75, no. 1 (2005): 47.
11 Ibid., p. 50.
12 Mark Burry, “The Persistence of Faith in the Intangible Model”, in Persistent Modelling:

Extending the Role of Architectural Representation, ed. Phil Ayres (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and
Francis, 2012).
13 Weinstock, “Terrain Vague”, p. 50.
14 Ranulph Glanville, “An Intelligent Architecture”, Convergence: The Journal of Research into New
Media Technologies 7, no. 2 (12–24·June 2001): 17.
15 Glanville, “An Intelligent Architecture”, p. 17. See also Ranulph Glanville, “Variety in Design”,
Systems Research 11, no. 3 (1994): 95–103.
16 Valentina Croci, “Inhabiting the Body and the Spaces of Interaction”, Architectural Design 78, no.
4 (2008): 123, 122–125.
17 Kas Oosterhuis, ed., Interactive Architecture (Rotterdam: Episode Publishers, 2007), p. 21.
18 Bouman, “Architecture, Liquid, Gas”, p. 15.
19 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell,
1991), p. 221.
20 Paul Filmer, “Songtime: Sound Culture, Rhythm and Sociality”, in The Auditory Culture Reader,

ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 91–92.
Chapter 8

Politicizing the interior

Liz Teston

Interior architectural theory, particularly as it pertains to the political, is a

relatively underrepresented – yet growing – area of inquiry. Of the
approximately 195 Council for Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA)
accredited programs in North America, only fourteen percent grant
diplomas in interior architecture.1 At an Interior Design Educators Council
(IDEC) conference held in 2009, the status of programs that teach the design
of the interior environment in the United States and Canada and the use of
the name “interior architecture” was debated. Interior architecture, interior
design, and architecture journals continue to publish papers on the topic.2
Beyond a North American context, the debate over the nature of interior
architecture continues, and with it, the potential for misunderstandings
regarding territorial nomenclatures.
This chapter examines the role of politics in interior architecture
through the work of Marc Augé and Guy Debord, an analysis of cultural
theory borrowed from urban design and anthropology. By acknowledging
the blurred edge between the territories of interior architecture and urban
design, this chapter suggests that the interior is comprised of both spatial
and political experiences. It recognizes that interior architecture is rooted in
the human experience of the interior volume. While the focus of this chapter
is not professional legislation (the typical setting for defining disciplinary
territories), a few definitions may help simplify classifications found here
and set aside territorial questions about the varied design professions. This
chapter focuses on place, space, and non-place as experiential drivers in
contemporary interiors. Then, it examines how the Situationists
International subverted conventional disciplinary research methods in the
urban environment and how similar methods can enhance interior
architecture. Finally, given that designers must appropriate political theories
from allied fields, this chapter questions how interior architecture can
stimulate new forms of community, political agency, and social
consciousness across the disciplines.

Disciplinary geography: territories and frontiers

Interior architecture deals with designing places for people to occupy. By
extension, those who design interiors focus on the human experience of the
interior volume. Architecture is distinct from interior architecture due to its
external and scalar characteristics. In addition, designers are more likely to
employ formal exploration as a design strategy in architecture rather than in
interior architecture where space is privileged. When we expand to the scale
of the city, political and geometric forces often rule; the routes and paths of
an urban grid meet the collective demands of designing for the public. If we
step back to the scale of interior design, individual and aesthetic influences
prevail, for instance, in the haptic textures, luminance, and ergonomic
furnishings determining the characteristics of a reading nook.
It is possible, of course, for urban design to take on an individual,
experiential quality and for the interior to adopt a politicized spatial
condition. Some of the most innovative design work traverses the territorial
membrane of these disciplines. Regardless, interior architecture assumes the
importance of the human experience in the interior volume – how people
activate space or how space activates people. A brief review of design award
jury comments illustrates these varied disciplinary identities in the public
arena. The AIA Interior Architecture Award–winning Beats by Dre
Headquarters by Bestor Architecture, for example, was described as “warm
and inviting – a place where we would like to work. The design also seems
to energize the staff in a relaxed atmosphere.”3 The account of IMG’s
Worldwide Offices by Studios Architecture in Interior Design magazine’s
“Best of Year” issue focused on materiality and furnishings. It describes
“restored mosaic and terrazzo flooring that could serve as both background
and counterpoint to an ultra contemporary museum – white walls and
neutral-toned furnishings.”4 The AIA jurors valued the Beats by Dre
Headquarters’ spatial experience. The Interior Design magazine critics
emphasized the placemaking aesthetics of the IMG Worldwide Offices.
Having defined both of these territories, we may now traverse
them. A frontier is the outer limits or boundaries of a country, territory, or
discipline. It could easily be misconstrued as a defined edge (Figure 8.1), but
a frontier is, in fact, a liminal zone; it has thickness. We often assume there is
a hard line between each design discipline, but in reality the defined edge is
imaginary. Designing interior places relies on current conditions within the
existing building and is contingent upon the surrounding context.
Systematically designing interiors that focus only on aesthetic and
individual phenomena feeds a restrictive notion of boundaries. Likewise,
urban design, which dedicates itself primarily to political and geometric
forces, supports the illusion of a disciplinary edge. Each discipline should
make use of the broader frontiers of its neighbors. As Terry Meade has
commented, interior designers often overlook critical discussions about the
sociopolitical issues occurring in the built environment.5 This circumstance
has arisen because most interior spaces are private and not a part of the
commons. Designers may feel that they are absolved from allegiance to
meeting the collective demands of the public, but the discipline is neglecting
a varied and stimulating discourse. This inattention to the concerns of urban
society is a cavity in everyday design practice. As such, the theoretical
inquiry into collective memory and the politics of inclusion and their role in
the built interior are not as prevalent in contemporary interior architectural
theory as in other design disciplines. To begin incorporating them into
interior architectural theory, we must appropriate perspectives from urban
design and anthropology. Acknowledging the politics of the interior through
the lens of other disciplines will enhance both interior architectural theory
and practice.

Figure 8.1 Diagram depicting related design disciplines and territorial frontiers. Hatched zones
represent interior architecture, architecture, and the urban design. Overlapping areas represent
opportunities for appropriation between the disciplines (e.g., political-spatial meets individual-
experiential). Dotted zones represent allied fields not addressed in this chapter.
Image credit: author

Cultural geography: place, space, and non-place

Emotions are individual feelings produced by internal provocations like
memories or shared external stimuli, such as catharsis or euphoria at a
public performance. Emotions drive our actions, our creative work, and the
way we perceive designed places. Our state of mind has a distinct social
character, caused by and occurring within social situations. There are
societal norms for emotional and experiential responses to situations, places,
and interactions. The emotional culture of a people embodies and
communicates the principles of that society.6 Emotional culture is a
reflection of our group identity. Collectively, our memories and emotions
read space through a lens that is unified by a culture – be it generational,
geographical, or otherwise. The shared constitutional order of the urban
fabric persists while the built environment is obliterated, reimagined, and
revered. The collective memory remains.7 Society forms the outer layer of
the spatial public realm. There is an implicit agreement, a social contract,
which recognizes the role of collectivity within that framework. Mundane
daily activities (the structure of our lives) avert our eyes from seeing the
impact of society on the city. By studying and valuing familiar moments in
everyday life, we understand how humanity transforms the design of
interiors.
In his philosophy of place and space, Michel de Certeau, a French
Jesuit priest and scholar, describes space as an area that is stimulated by
people. He describes place as an area of stasis, where everything is ordered,
identifiable, and codified, and anthropological space as an experiential place
within a contextual setting.8 Marc Augé expands his theory of place as a
derivative of de Certeau’s anthropological spaces. Unlike de Certeau, he sees
place and space as a dialectic and makes a distinction between the two. His
interpretation of place deposits layers of events, histories, and cultures to
reinforce the inertia of place. He describes space as abstract – occupied by
people, a physical void, or a time interval. Interior architectural theory
should consider space in terms of a people-activated zone made by human
interaction. Two people initially form a space, and then expand to a group,
followed by relation to the built environment, the city, and ultimately,
society. We transform a place into space by our interaction with each other,
with buildings, and with the city. We identify our perception of space
through these interactions, yet begin with the foundation of our collective
memory. Design reveals the importance of everyday life and intimate
moments within the built environment. Place forms our early memories.
By extension, Augé’s non-place is characterized as a postmodern,
generic space occupied by people for a predetermined reason (Figure 8.2).
For example, people relate to shopping malls and airports in a detached,
solitary manner.9 Non-places take our collective identity and twist it into a
heterotopic, transactional experience. The question remains, how do people
activate the space of a non-place, and how subjective is their experience? In
non-places, how much separation is there between Augé’s objective
conditions of space and the subjective experiences of place?10 What is the
phenomenology of the non-place?
We could speculate that non-places allow for experiences of
psychological interiority. The contemporary physical experience of space is
less subjective, thus allowing for greater introspection and the development
of an internal narrative. Society’s obsession with social networking and
uninterrupted engagement with online media has reinforced this condition
of postmodern interiority in the built environment. In light of this, what is
the phenomenology of physical places when one’s identity exists in a
smartphone? Perhaps due to this open-sourced global connectivity, people
are becoming even more consumed with how cultural and political identities
define themselves, and therefore, have grown more political about the near
environment.11 Conversely, an online identity may not be an everyday
identity, but a character projected to others.12 Online, people represent their
curated identity. Regardless, the spatial identity of society is changing due to
the postmodern condition. Further definition of the politics of the interior is
needed to enhance contemporary design scholarship.
Figure 8.2 IIT McCormick Center by OMA. From left: people-activated space at the computer center;
corridor as non-place; ritual of dining, materiality, and reflections create place.
Image credit: author

In reading space and understanding non-place in the context of

place, we must speculate on the everyday.13 Many cultural theorists elevate
the micro-subversions of the everyday as a diversion from the monotony of
the mundane.14 Consider the defiant pleasure you might experience in
covertly stealing shampoo from a business hotel, or the sense of control that
you feel in screening your phone calls. This way of understanding the
everyday, or quotidian routine of life, brings about micro-subversive actions
that drive away boredom. Likewise, the commodity consumption of
everyday material culture emits a signal representing our chosen identity. In
this model, using fashion, design, and online identities, we must project
ourselves as unique so as to undermine the banality of everyday life.15 Both
of these approaches to consumerism imply that everyday life is dull, yet by
researching the commonplace we elevate it. We lift it up in the same way
that cultural theorists have elevated micro-subversions and material culture.
Design is embedded in the everyday and has intrinsic value. Studying the
aesthetics of the mundane and non-place enhances the development of
interior architectural theory. It reveals that informal actions have value:
everyday objects, underserved populations, and modestly detailed buildings.
By analyzing the everyday, we can see the authenticity and the capacity of
“placeness” in the most ordinary of non-places.

Urban geography: political and experiential

To understand politics and the everyday, we should consider the work of the
Situationists International. Members Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and Constant
Nieuwenhuys were influenced by Dada and Surrealism. They would dérive
(drift) through the city by arranging experiential, unplanned (and often
alcohol-fueled) multi-day journeys. These dérives were used to question the
nature of urbanism, consumerism, and the individual. Through
psychogeography, the Situationists were attempting to take urbanism and
expose its individual, experiential qualities rather than aspects of political or
geometric structure. Debord described psychogeography as an
understanding of the “precise laws and specific effects of the geographical
environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of
individuals.”16 It was conceived to expose the means by which conventional
urban design controls everyday life and the ways in which this control can
be exposed and subverted.17 For the next few years, the Situationists created
political art responding to these issues (Figure 8.3). Public housing
developments were of particular concern, and they suggested that the top-
down design approach stifled psychogeographic aspects of the city and
individual creativity. It removed the artist from the environment of the city
and prioritized the rationale of the city grid over the urban experience.18
Figure 8.3 “Beauty is in the Street”; Situationist poster in support of May 1968 uprising
Image credit: Bibliothèque nationale de France

The work of the Situationists is particularly compelling within the

context of political interior architecture, because it provides a model for
subversion of conventional urban design. While still being political and
concerned with spaces of movement, it explores the everyday city from an
experiential and personal standpoint. To enhance the political and spatial
motivations of interior architecture, we must heighten our awareness of the
everyday interior environment. Intimacy, memories, and emotions help us
acknowledge our humanity and understand place. Each person has value.
Each experience or memory is significant because it contains the bits that
make up a person. In light of this emphasis on the individual, how can
interior architecture stimulate new forms of community, political agency,
and social consciousness? In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.19 On the heels of World War II, the
international community created the document to assure that the atrocities
and suppression of that war were not repeated. The thirty articles
proclaimed that all humans had unassailable rights or liberties that cannot
be determined or oppressed by a governmental state. Articles 25(1) and 27(1)
describe the right of each person to health, housing, community, and the
arts:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the

health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food,
clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services,
and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness,
disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in
circumstances beyond his control.

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of

the community, to enjoy the arts, and to share in scientific
advancement and its benefits.

By examining the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we understand

that everyone matters and each person should be able to access well-
designed places and experiences. Interiors shape lives in the most
fundamental and personal way. The built environment is a part of our
collective memory, whether canonical or mundane. Memory and cultural
identity are inextricably linked.20 That concept gives everyday objects, like a
recycling center or a gallon of milk, a design status that is not always
initially evident. Everything is designed and has value. As designers, we
have the responsibility to promote access to design as a basic human right.
Through recognition of the occupiable threshold on the periphery
of interior and urban territories, we uncover the frontier unifying these
disciplines. We acknowledge the interior as both spatial and political, and
that interior architecture concerns itself primarily with the human
experience of the interior volume. Theoretical inquiry into collective
memory, the politics of inclusion and its role in the built environment, can
reposition the role of the interior in the volatile climate of contemporary
design. There are several potential trajectories for future research into
politicizing the interior: the conflict between material culture and
sustainability, issues of parity in space-related civil rights acts, the impact of
corporate design standards on experience and non-place, and the influence
of pop culture and lowbrow design in interiors. These cultural and political
issues have implications for interior architecture and beyond as the
theoretical dialog surrounding the field develops. Recent symposia and
lectures exploring the politics of the built environment may reveal a
growing interest in this area.21 All design disciplines, including interior
architecture, should exploit the built environment’s conventional frontiers to
appropriate perspectives surrounding collective memory, the politics of
inclusion, and the role of design in everyday places.

Notes
1 “Accredited Programs”, Council for Interior Design Accreditation, www.accredit-
id.org/accredited-programs (calculated based on info accessed on September 13, 2017).
2 Allison Carll White, “What’s in a Name? Interior Design and/or Interior Architecture: The
Discussion Continues”, Journal of Interior Design 35, no. 1 (2009): x–xviii.
3 “2015 Recipient | Institute Honor Awards for Interior Architecture”, American Institute of
Architects, 2015, www.aia.org/practicing/awards/2015/interior-architecture/beats-by-dre.
4 “2014 BOY Winner: Fashion Office”, Interior Design, 30 January 2015,
www.interiordesign.net/projects/detail/2516-2014-boy-winner-fashion-office.
 5 Terry Meade, “Interior Design, a Political Discipline”, in Handbook of Interior Architecture and

Design, ed. Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp.
394–403.
6 Guobin Yang, “Emotional Events and the Transformation of Collective Action: The Chinese
Student Movement”, in Emotions and Social Movements, ed. Helena Flam and Debra King
(London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 79–98.
7 Uta Staiger and Henriette Steiner, introduction to Memory Culture and the Contemporary City,

ed. Uta Staiger, Henriette Steiner, and Andrew Webber (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp.
1–13.
8 Michel de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2011).
9 Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (New York: Verso Books, 1995).
10 Ian Buchanan, “Non-Places: Space in the Age of Supermodernity”, Social Semiotics 9, no. 3 (1999):
393–398.
11 Meade, “Interior Design, a Political Discipline”, pp. 394–403.
12 Alexander H. Jordan, Benoit Monin, Carol S. Dweck, Benjamin J. Lovett, Oliver P. John, and
James J. Gross, “Misery Has More Company Than People Think: Underestimating the Prevalence
of Others’ Negative Emotions”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 37, no. 1 (2011): 120–
135.
13 Joe Moran, Reading the Everyday (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 1–28.
14 John Fiske, Reading the Popular (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1989), p. 65.
15 Susan Willis, Primer for Daily Life (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 175.
16 Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography”, in Situationists International

Anthology, trans. and ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), pp. 23–27.
17 Sadie Plant, Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (New
York: Routledge, 1992), p. 58.
18 Libero Andreotti, introduction to Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the

City, ed. Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de
Barcelona /Actar, 1996), pp. 7–9.
19 “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, The United Nations, 10 December 1948,
www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.
20 Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984), pp. 130–131.
21 For recent symposia and lectures refer to: Architecture Exchange Symposium at the Architectural
Association, “How Is Architecture Political?”, Online Video: 4:04:12, 2014,
www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=2702; or Mitchell Lecture Series at School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, “Urtzi Grau: Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects”,
Online Video: 1:29:40, 2015, https://saic.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?
id=f158c521-1969-4619-8f0e-1e8d860e3654; or Narratives and Design Studies Symposium: A Task
of Translation at School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, “Narratives of
Agency”, Online Video: 1:14:38, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2AMXZnWia0.
Chapter 9

Fabricating interiority

Marc Manack

fab·ri·ca·tion
1. the action or process of manufacturing or inventing something.
2. an invention; a lie.1

In order to situate itself as a unique field with its own disciplinary

parameters, interior architecture must create a distinction from architecture
– a field with its own equally problematic and conflicted record of
establishing disciplinary autonomy.2 As theorist John McMorrough has
noted,

architecture’s history and legacy – maybe its very meaning – is to

be found in the creation of reasonable explanations for its
existence, its raisons d’etre made in the midst of a series of
preservative justifications, in leaps of faith and defensive
postures.3
Perhaps rather than explanations, architecture’s best claim to reinforcing its
own discipline lies in the fundamental act of design in the creation of space,
making distinctions from “amorphous” and non-architectural
environments.4
For interior architecture, its disciplinary claim may be tied to the
creation of finer distinctions within architecture – as a subspecies. Unique
among the design disciplines, interior architecture is contingent upon
another field for its existence. The interior is derived from architecture, and
in every instance, architecture is a precondition for interior architecture, yet
the same claim cannot be made in reverse. Interiors are far less deferential to
architecture than architecture is dependent on the environment. Considering
parallel histories between the two fields, architecture has progressively
sought to diminish distinctions from the environment, while interiors have
sought to intensify distinctions from architecture. Rather than a submissive
or subservient stance suggested by its relationship to architecture – by
articulating its disciplinary autonomy in association with technological
advancements in design and construction – interior architecture has
developed the techniques to produce some of the most powerful
transformative effects available to designers engaged with space.
Although the common principle between architecture and interior
architecture is that each field is animated by organizing relations between
exterior and interior conditions, differences between the disciplines emerge
once we consider the means, methods, and position under which the
exchange between inside and outside are made distinct. Architecture begins
with the exterior, on the outside. Architectural projects come into being
through a dialogue between an external context with an internal use, from
which an interior will be defined and constructed. This process moves from
outside to inside given that the exterior environment is an existing
condition; architecture must first create a distinction from it. As such, the
methodologies of architectural production are primarily concerned with this
mediation of external and internal influences to construct a threshold that
articulates distinctions and relationships between natural and fabricated
worlds. Consequently, a work of architecture often establishes its identity
primarily through its exterior presence, with the interior serving to
authenticate the architecture’s attitude toward, and relationship to, its
exterior environment.
As its name suggests, interior architecture exists inside. While
interior architecture may affect or influence the threshold between inside
and out, its creative preoccupation lies in the production of an alternative
environment within architecture, a designed world within a designed world.
Interior architecture is contingent upon a constructed environment; its
possibilities and limits are defined by a built and consequently artificial
world. As a spatial practice, interior architecture emerges through the
imagination of the space between interior and architecture, a space far more
autonomous – and less constrained – than the relationship between
architecture and site. Given that interior architecture is a construct within a
construct, its relationship with architecture is at once less interdependent
and more relaxed, expanding the field’s potential for pure invention. It is
under these terms that interior architecture defines its territory and
intensifies its distinction from architecture. Ultimately, the interiority of
interior architecture is a complete fabrication, an artifice embedded within
an edifice.
If the narrative and ethics of fabrication are inextricably linked to
the discipline of interior architecture, it is through the developments of
modern design and building technology that the identity of the field has
been constructed and where its principles become evident. In terms of
building construction technology, the interior was historically more
autonomous than its modern counterpart. Its perceptual and experiential
distinctions are inherent in the technical capacities of construction methods.
In premodern building, the distinctions between exterior and interior were
often better defined by the composite effects of load-bearing exterior walls,
creating envelopes of solid construction that, despite creating a direct
relationship between enclosure and structure through a monolithic section,
allowed for a wide array of articulations. The massiveness and opacity of the
construction enabled expressive, unique, and often counterintuitive
distinctions in the formal presences, spatial qualities, and surface effects
between inside and outside, establishing unique identities between
architecture and interior through the use of poché and ornamentation to
create character. By coupling the technological and qualitative
characteristics, solid construction creates distinct exterior and interior
through a single act of architectural design, within a single discipline. In
modern building, as solid construction gives way to layered filigree
assemblies and systems as new building typologies emerge, interior
architecture finds its agency as a discipline. As an established profession, the
design of interiors comes into being through the modern tall building. This
building type, whose novel scale (at the time) and repetitive pro forma,
worked together to seduce architects into a simultaneously unbalanced
attention to the composition and appearance of exterior vertical surface and
collective disinterest in the interior space beyond the ground floor lobby.
Most of the interior volume of skyscrapers was given over to the interior
designer.
The paradox for interior architecture is that the skyscraper both
challenged and reinforced the discipline’s nascent identity. As modern
filigree construction of the steel frame and curtain wall construction
progressively dissolved the building envelope through the transparent
material, the possibility of distinction for the interior architecture was
equally diminished.5 The seeming loss of the interior identity by its
perceptual seamlessness with exterior in the glazed curtain wall is
dramatically counteracted, however, by the sectional dynamic of the
skyscraper. The repetition of uniform, undifferentiated, horizontal floors
connected by elevators at once prevents spatial experiences of vertical
continuity between floors and promotes horizontal expansion of space. This
effectively turns each floor into an isolated distinct world in relation to the
flattened “wallpaper” of the surrounding urban panorama on its perimeter
vertical surface. While the architecture of the building may have but one
static design by a single author, the skyscraper initiated the evolution of
multiple, episodic interior architectures by multiple authors. Regardless, it is
a moment where the modern interior is completely indifferent to, and
largely unaffected by, the architecture it is housed within, free to fabricate its
own identity and position of interiority. This freedom coincides with the
emerging independence of the construction of the modern interior.
Suspended ceilings, raised floors, demountable partitions, and flexible,
reconfigurable office furniture systems (the kit of parts of the modern
corporate interior) all operate with an impermanence and literal detachment
from the architectural envelope within which they are housed. These
elements become the means for the interior to assert its autonomy. The
decoupling of the interior from architecture, in technological terms, not only
provides the means for generating an independent interior architecture, but
also emancipates the field to invent the disciplinary logic of interiority. Here,
a complete and alternate world apart from the architecture, with unique
authorial expression and embodied spatial effects, embodies a presence and
identity that rivals architecture.
Effectively, the discipline of interior architecture seeks to recapture
the distinctions between inside and outside inherent in premodern
architecture, but with modern technologies, and from a point of view that
privileges interiority, developing discrete spatial experiences with unique
identities from the inside out. For interior architecture to achieve a distinct
identity requires legibility and a trajectory toward singularity, one which
takes its fundamental design techniques – namely the development of an
interior spatial envelope, the subdivision or demising of interior space, the
articulation or treatment of surfaces, and the placement of objects within a
space – and begins to merge them into singular emphatic elements that
define the spatial design as distinct from the architecture. The effect has been
for the interior architect to consider spatial design as a unified atmosphere in
a direct manner, with a limited vocabulary but a high degree of dynamic
quality. Under this conception, floor, wall, ceiling, furniture, lighting, and
beyond can be conceived not as distinct elements or layers, but rather as a
singular expression.
As interior architecture has expanded venues for its expression, as
well as technologies at the designer’s disposal, its capacity to produce these
singularities has increased, and its disciplinary position has intensified. This
apotheosis may be evidenced in contemporary digital design and fabrication
technology. Digital fabrication processes translate information from a digital
model or drawing to a computer-controlled fabrication machine,
transforming immaterial design content into a material product. The
technologies that seamlessly integrate design software and digital fabrication
hardware (including computer controlled 3D printers, laser cutters, routers,
mills, drones, and robots) have profoundly affected the design disciplines,
reinvigorating not only an interest in making and material exploration, but
also in the discourse and ethos of preindustrial eras.6 The efficiency with
which customizable, non-identical elements are designed and serially mass
produced has made the deployment of bespoke elements viable in the
construction industry by mitigating the premium cost for custom
components and assemblies.7 As a result of digital fabrication, the repertoire
of visually complex forms or patterns available to designers has expanded,
while the range of construction materials currently capable of working with
digital tools in any given technology has remained fairly limited. It is this
combination of increased modes of spatial articulation within a delimited
palette that has reinforced contemporary interior architecture’s ability to
assert its unique identity.
Interior architecture can achieve – and perhaps even exceed – the
autonomy of “inside-from-out” inherent in monolithic premodern
construction methods because current digitally fabricated work deploys the
cutting, carving, folding, and stacking of a singular material rather than
assemblies of multiple materials. The Crystal Bridges Museum Store by
Marlon Blackwell Architects provides such an example (Figure 9.1). Built
within the Crystal Bridges Museum by Moshe Safdie, an architecture of
distinct sculptural expression and material quality, the museum store creates
autonomy for the interior architecture by dramatically refiguring the interior
profile with an undulating spatial envelope composed of digitally fabricated
wood sections.
Using the analogy of a lamella (the rib-like structure that forms
the underside of a mushroom cap), the architects create the powerful
perceptual effect of a continuous surface that wraps ceiling and walls
through the sequence and spacing of the wood fins. Continuity is achieved
through the digital modeling process that slices a singular solid shape to
create the splines and profiles, which ultimately become the cutting paths
and templates used to extract the wood ribs from nominal panels. By
sectioning the shape, two-dimensional materials are laminated in series to
construct a three-dimensional volume of space, but in effect, the multiple
sections recede in the service of articulating the legibility of the singular
element and the experience of the singular space.8

Figure 9.1 Crystal Bridges Museum Store, Marlon Blackwell Architects, Construction Photo (Left,
Courtesy of Marlon Blackwell Architects), Interior View Complete Project (Right, Timothy Hursley
Photographer)

The spaces between the ribs are equally important in establishing

the distinctions between architecture and interior. As one moves closer to
align with the short edge of each rib section, one not only sees the thickness
of the rib, but its separation from the adjacent architecture. The thickness of
the construct is visible, an experience that was once only available through
the abstraction of section drawing. The space of poché is now embodied in
the material perception of the digitally fabricated rib. The detailing and
curvature of the museum store only heightens the separation of the interior
architecture. The wood ceiling and wall envelope never touch the
surrounding construction, with continuous reveals at the perimeter creating
the effect that this element hovers within the space. At moments creating
affinities and alignments without deference to the architecture, the smooth
geometry of the interior appears as a delamination from it, yet borrows the
logic of the architecture to establish independence and distinctions from it.
In the museum store, the combination of digital design and fabrication
reveal the processes and techniques of the interior architecture’s philosophy
and development in the final product. This creates an increased awareness
between conceptualization and effect, at once strengthening its disciplinary
position and experiential quality.
If the technique of sectioning available through digital fabrication
has the possibility of rendering explicit the space between interior and
architecture, then digital patterning and tiling uses surface effects and
superficiality to implicitly animate distinctions between inside and out.
Digitally fabricated patterns generated from computer-controlled cutting
and carving tools have dramatically expanded the capacity of interior
architects to generate unprecedented ornament and material surface
articulation. The fact that these patterns can emerge out of information
established in relational criteria from a project’s architectural context is
perhaps the digital technologies’ most important contribution to the
development of interior architecture’s discipline.
SILO AR+D’s North Presbyterian Church in Cleveland
demonstrates how a relational pattern developed through the techniques of
digital fabrication can transform the space between architecture and interior
to create a radically alternative environment (Figure 9.2).
Set within an existing industrial building and a much larger
renovation project, the limits of North Presbyterian Church’s volume were
highly constrained by the existing structure and infrastructure. Additionally,
programmatic requirements of the church and other users in the building
demanded the sanctuary space be scalable and multipurpose. The interior
architecture worked to exploit the inherent contradictions in the project: to
create a single sanctuary with the qualities that often characterize religious
architecture (symmetry, axiality, volume, and indirect natural light) while
allowing that same space to be subdivided into multiple rooms with
asymmetrical entries (due to the constraints of a corner site).
Figure 9.2 North Presbyterian Church, SILO AR+D Complete Project (Left, Scott Pease
Photographer), Exploded Perspective Drawings (Right, Courtesy of SILO AR+D)

By simultaneously working with concepts of volume and

subdivision, the spatial design of North Presbyterian Church was conceived
as a hybrid canopy/cathedral, a singular ceiling surface that continuously
inflects to create a series of pyramidal vaults that delineate multiple scales of
space, concealing the appearance of hardware and headers required for
movable partitions. Using digital design tools, a sequence of design
operations began by testing space plan and volume limits against the
material dimensional constraints. The resultant form is derived as the
interior applies pressure to the exterior, in effect, vacuum forming to its
architectural limits. Clad in a durable bamboo resin material used in the
construction of skateboard parks, the faceted ceiling panels are subdivided
into an animated triangular pattern that accommodates lighting, HVAC, and
sprinkler systems. This digitally fabricated pattern evolved by coupling a
desire for visual complexity, nonstandard repetition, and material efficiency
with the desire to create a spatial effect that would have local asymmetry
and nuance within each face of the ceiling geometry. It does not sacrifice
visual coherence, regardless of the spatial configuration and point of view. In
addition to aesthetic considerations, to make the pattern feasible given the
extremely tight budget constraints, material economy and fabrication time
had to be maximized. Thus, a limited amount of standard triangular tile
shapes are determined computationally by subdividing a standard,
rectilinear sheet of the ceiling cladding. These elements are repeated in
various configurations to achieve the desired spatial effect.
This design process reveals a unique potential of digital fabrication
for interior architecture: to develop a highly controlled, yet
nondeterministic, spatial configuration and surface effect emerging out of
resituating the autonomous interior in relation to an existing architecture.
By exploiting the competing logics of complexity/economy and existing/new
building technology for architecture and interiors made possible by digital
fabrication, SILO AR+D’s North Presbyterian Church creates an interior
architecture using a singular dynamic element born out of those tensions. Its
vicissitudes are registered on its surfaces, transforming the existing building
into a distinct and immersive interior space.
As a product of pure invention, or fabrication, interior
architecture’s claims to disciplinary distinction may lie in the appearance of
autonomy expressed in the arguments and effects of recent spatial designs. It
is not enough, however, for an interior to simply look different from the
architecture it is housed within. Instead, interior architecture must articulate
its position in relation to architecture by revealing the means and methods
in which those distinctions are manifested. The evolution of building
technology throughout history has made possible the constructional
separation between architecture and interior, which has evolved to the
current moment through digital design and fabrication. The interstitial zone
between disciplines can be subjected to finer and increasingly complex
relationships which release the interior to establish its existence as absolute.
Ultimately, digital fabrication has begun to actualize interior architecture’s
disciplinary imperative to, quite literally, fabricate distinctions from
architecture through interiority. In doing so, it has activated the spatial
designer’s capacity for speculative imagination.

Notes
1 Fabrication definition excerpted from Google, www.google.com.
2 For more on architecture’s search to define its disciplinary autonomy see Robert Somol,
Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America (New York: Monacceli Press,
1997).
3 John McMorrough, “Ru(m)inations: The Haunts of Contemporary Architecture”, Perspecta 40
(2008): 164.
4 Distinctions and the production of design worlds form the basis for William Mitchell’s definition
of “architecture” in William J. Mitchell, The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and

Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

5 An in-depth and elegant comparison between the historical, conceptual, and technical
distinctions between solid and filigree construction methods is available in Andrea Deplazes,
Constructing Architecture Materials, Processes, Structures, a Handbook (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2005).
6 Two books that offer substantive introductory surveys into the techniques, processes, and effects
of digital fabrication: Lisa Iwamoto, Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques

(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009) and Branko Kolarevic, Manufacturing Material

Effects: Rethinking Design and Making in Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2008).
7 For more on the implications of authorship, mass customization, and the role of identicality in
architecture’s disciplinary foundations, see Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

8 Sectioning is a term borrowed from Iwamoto, Digital Fabrications, pp. 8–17.
Chapter 10

Territory and inhabitation

Amy Campos

This chapter1 proposes a development from the nineteenth-century

territorial idea of a politically and geographically located landscape to a
more nuanced understanding of territory as a defined, but placeless, field of
action. Territory evolves from a fixed place to a nomadic system of
occupation. Using historical examples that suggest varied definitions of
territory, as well as contemporary interiors that engage modern conditions
of placelessness, nomadism, and transience, this chapter describes a
reciprocal, rather than hierarchical, relationship between territory and the
inhabited interior.

The frontier
From the vantage point of the nineteenth-century American frontier,
territory connotes the promise of ownership of land and resources and
simultaneously suggests an affirmation of self. During the westward
territorial expansion of the United States, settlers were allowed to stake
claim to land under the notion of Manifest Destiny, a belief that American
citizens had a fundamental right to own land and a duty to steward it.2 This
claimed landscape was seen as a resource-rich, culturally blank slate upon
which owners could pursue new ideals, beyond the persecution of feudal
hierarchies and “Old World” values. In the Jeffersonian sense, the
enculturation of place was dictated by the will and self-realization of the
free individual who staked claim to that territory. Ownership of a landscape
territory provided the social freedom for an owner to construct one’s own
inhabitation of that place. Territory, as a located place, became the
hierarchically dominant component of a complex spatial and cultural
system. In this case, the land itself provides the structure for inhabitation
and the cultural context that might emerge from it.3

Constructed territories
Neolithic Southern Anatolia represents an inversion of the frontier’s
territorial hierarchy. The construction of habitations produced a fabricated
territory upon which a public culture was defined. Çatalhöyük was one of
the earliest and most unique urban settlements.4 It was occupied between
7400 and 6200 BC on the Southern Anatolian Plateau in present-day Turkey.
In this densely populated settlement, individual houses were built directly
adjacent to each other. The houses were built from mud bricks reinforced
with wooden posts, made up of a large single room with smaller storage
rooms built around the periphery. Interior walls were plastered and
decorated frequently; platforms for various uses were built within the main
interior. The only means of egress was provided through the roof via a
wooden ladder and openings to the exterior. In Çatalhöyük, there were no
streets or squares separating independent buildings, only an aggregate of
dwellings entered through rooftop hatches. The city was built as a single,
agglomerated structure. In fact, the roof of this megastructure was the
thoroughfare, the public square, and the entry point for interior dwellings.
Over many generations, houses were rebuilt on previous layers of
demolition. Sometimes, as many as eighteen layers built the city mound’s
topography, making the roof structure stepped to provide shady places to
gather outside and a vertical surface for small windows providing light to
the interiors. The roofline acts as the territorial marker between interior and
exterior – private and public – space. The spatial hierarchy of the American
frontier is reversed in Çatalhöyük’s monolithic city. Here, the constructed
interior produces a public space that defines the territory of the city.
Where the frontier and the aggregate cityscape suggest various
intersecting relationships between territory and interior, the Lockheed
Burbank Aircraft Plant exemplifies a complete disconnection of the interior
activities from the exterior environment in which it resides. After the attack
on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese at the end of 1941, the United States
enlisted Colonel John F. Ohmer to deploy camouflage and decoy techniques
to help protect key military sites in California. Ohmer had witnessed the
success of military decoys at the Battle of Britain in 1940: by placing full-
scale decoys of military equipment on the ground in the countryside,
including tanks, aircrafts, and buildings, the British misdirected surveillance
from enemy planes flying above and forced the enemy to expunge massive
amounts of bombs on these decoy targets.5 In Burbank, rather than
strategically directing enemy attention to another unpopulated location
using decoys, the United States wanted to camouflage existing military
locations. In order to deceive the Japanese in much more urbanized areas in
California, Ohmer would have to deploy this decoy strategy at the scale of
an entire landscape. At the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant in the suburbs
of Los Angeles, teams of set and prop designers, decorators, stage managers,
and other experts from Hollywood’s production stages were recruited to
take on the massive project of hiding a military operation the size of an
entire neighborhood. An enormous scrim roof was constructed to cover the
entire plant, including all of its buildings, streets and parking infrastructure,
aircraft hangars, and runways. The scrim was erected to look like the
American suburbs that surrounded the plant. Paper thin fake houses, streets
with rubber cars, trees, and shrubs, even laundry lines complete with drying
clothes and fire hydrants made up the elevated horizontal decoy. This
exterior space, seen only from above, produced a new horizontal facade built
as a peripheral diversion for a series of precise and enclosed actions. The
decoration of the exterior, as a decoy landscape, acts an architectural
distraction from the covert operations of the plant inside, becoming the
antithesis to the adage “form follows function.”6 The interior of the Lockheed
Burbank Aircraft Plant is created and enclosed by an artificial suburban
landscape that blends into the actual surrounding suburban landscape,
neither of which is integral to the internal operations of the plant itself.
Interiority exists independent of territory as a located condition. The plant is
a hidden, placeless island within an intentionally inconsequential landscape.
The landscape of this false suburb, the camouflage scrim, allows the interior
to be liberated from place, suggesting a potential for it to exist in any
location or no location.

The liberated interior

An excellent historical example of an interior condition that migrates from
place to place is provided by the use of tapestries. Tapestries were prized
possessions, taking much skill, time, and capital to produce. The large-scale
manufacture of tapestries increased significantly at the end of the Middle
Ages, simultaneous with the advancement from wooden fortresses to
defensive stone strongholds in northern Europe’s colder climates. As
territories became defined by more permanent architectural outposts, the
tapestries developed as equally valuable tools for indicating dominion and
power as rulers traveled from one location to another. The tapestries served
two primary functions: to ease the chill of the interior of these massive stone
constructions by acting as an applied insulation, and to depict the power and
wealth of those who owned them through the scale, complexity, and
narrative depictions of each tapestry. The Redemption of Man Series from
the early sixteenth century, for example, is made up of ten 26-foot-wide
panels.7 Only a hall or space at least 260 feet long could accommodate the
series, and as tapestries are meant to travel, the implication here is that the
owner of such a masterpiece could only have such vast wealth and property
as to accommodate such a large series in multiple locations. Tapestries were
easily transported and quickly installed, moving with the owner from
fortress to fortress and even onto the battlefield. Wherever their owners took
them, tapestries marked territory. By the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, tapestries often depicted realistic scenes of distant or fantastical
places. The tapestries became a virtual window to another highly
embellished narrative territory regardless of the actual environment within
which it resided. They typically passed between multiple generations,
reinforcing family mythologies through their narrative depictions. It was the
mobility of the tapestries that rendered them strategically more valuable,
precisely as a result of their itinerant quality.
Today, such value is amplified in the context of increasingly
nomadic economies and populations. Recent and ongoing global crises in
resource scarcity, skilled labor, climate change, and shifting industries have
resulted in mass migrations of markets, resources, and people. In the United
States, people relocate frequently at an average of every five to seven years
over the course of their lifetimes. The ability for the liberated interior to
move redefines territorial occupation as a materially and culturally transient
condition.
The design for Titlecase, a typography studio in San Francisco, is
approached as a spatial puzzle that can be reconfigured indefinitely.
Titlecase is a joint venture between two independent typographers who had
moved from New York at different times, met in San Francisco, and are
partners in the space and various events within it while maintaining
independent practices. Both partners plan to eventually expand into separate
spaces. Faced with this situation, the choice is often relatively disposable,
temporary interior products meant to be consumed for a single space and
discarded when locations change. With increasing resource scarcity and
population mobility, however, this is a progressively untenable approach to
the way we live today. At Titlecase, this temporary condition was addressed
through the development of permanent modular components (shelving,
desks, benches, and cabinets) proportionately designed in dimension and
detail for easy reconfiguration within their current location and
transferrable to any new space (Figure 10.1). The scale of change exists in
daily or weekly cycles within a single location. Here, work space for the two
partners and their temporary staff becomes instructional space for hosting
workshops, instructional space becomes lounge space, and everything can be
moved to the perimeter to act as backdrop for social gatherings, lectures, and
parties. Designed for a permanent state of flux in program, this project
produces a permanently nomadic plan for a single space that can be
transferred and expanded into a new space; spatial informality and
flexibility are necessities. The clients participate in the making of the space
every day and use the framework of the design as a platform for their own
experimentations in occupation.
Placemaking for tools of their vocation became highly specified:
organization and creative space on the desks articulated through the specific
location of pen holders, accommodations for right- or left-handedness,
preference for notebook or trace roll racks, and foot rests are all part of the
desk designs. Territory is staked out at the scale of furniture rather than at
the scale of landscape. Semi-permanent installations provide a consistent
identity to varying events and configurations at Titlecase: an homage to Fred
Sandback in the form of a string installation ten feet above the floor, a
painted datum that coincides with the height of the desks and cabinets, and
a custom-made, vacuum-formed, translucent, backlit ceiling feature made
using the client’s vocational tools. The lack of commitment to the space
itself, but acknowledgement of the need for specificity in environmental
identity and function, afforded a free experimentation as a series of ongoing
physical and programmatic installations. This interior provides new ground
for the exploration of mobility and impermanence in the context of any
spatial environment.
Figure 10.1 ACA – Amy Campos Architect, Titlecase custom furniture details (2012)
Image credit: Amy Campos

Similarly, the Migrant Interior residential project in San Jose,

California, straddled spheres of interior design, curation, installation, and
organizational planning. This client knew they would move multiple times
over the life of the design, so most of their financial and emotional
dedication to the project went toward what we normally think of as the
least permanent, most migrant components. Similar to Titlecase, the clients
knew that the place they inhabited would likely change before the things
they put in that space would. They were building a family and a home
together and wanted to start that process before settling in one location or
space, as is increasingly the case for contemporary populations. The project
was approached as a set of usable environmental guides to be deployed
within this space and built upon within any other space they might inhabit
in the future. The interior as a set of inhabitable elements, from their point
of view, defined a much more permanent sense of place than the architecture
or location – very much like the example of the tapestry. What was
ultimately provided for this client was a plan of action, a designed timeline
for use and change from location to location.
Aesthetic decisions for the furnishings and materials had to be
coordinated throughout the project so that items rearranged in a new space
could match. Specific consistent color and material strategies that could
shuffle as their family grew provided a long-term foundation for the quality
of their home in any location and in any configuration. A movable, custom
installation of a floating field of glass spheres was commissioned as a long-
lasting investment in their notion of home because of its mobility.
Consisting of almost 100 hand-blown glass spheres suspended from seven
different colors of monofilament that would catch the natural and artificial
light existing in the space, the sculpture is designed to adjust volumetrically
to new spaces as the family moves (Figure 10.2). The design also had to
specifically address the process of installation in multiple locations so that
the final piece could be installed and hang with no two glass balls touching
each other once in place. In this case, the piece floats over the dining room,
lowering the perceived verticality of the space and casting bubble-like
shadows on the walls. The opportunity to embrace transience as a design
strategy is inherent to the impermanent character of the interior, being more
fixed to this family’s evolving scale, location, and eventual dispersion than
the architecture or place. Fixed location is seen here as a changing scaffold
for a durable but nomadic interior condition.
Figure 10.2 ACA Amy Campos Architect, Migrant Interior installation detail (2011)
Image credit: Amy Campos

Territorial transience
In the twenty-first century, occupying a situated place becomes less
significant than the ability to sustain multiple and simultaneous conditions
in one space or location. The design of the interior and its objects can be
defined as processes of occupation rather than as artifacts of a specific
location. The design of the Tailored hair salon and art gallery, in downtown
San Francisco, seeks to balance flexibility and transformability with
economy, accommodating multiple spatial configurations using a set of
modular furniture components in a single temporary location. The 1,200-
square-foot space simultaneously houses the everyday workings of a salon,
including a retail display, with the ability to transform into an art gallery
and venue for special occasions. Because of the transient nature of the
project, a singular design solution could not provide for the many
simultaneous activities required in the space.
A modular system of components was designed for the project
that could move, aggregate, stack, and disperse to produce multiple, varied,
and at times simultaneous inhabitations of the space (Figure 10.3). The
“toggle stool” is a multidirectional furniture piece designed to stack and
cluster as lounge and party seating, tables, counters, or shelving that can
hang from the wall or rest on a grid of pegs. Styling stands contain
concealed lighting at the top of the mirrors to illuminate clients; they can be
rolled into place for various styling configurations or pushed into gallery
wall combinations for art openings. At the top of each mirror is a groove
that can receive a picture rail hook so that art could be hung in front of the
mirror and lit by internal led lighting. The styling stands can be plugged into
any location within a grid of power outlets in the ceiling above. The stands
house all styling equipment, including holsters for hairdryers and flat irons
that float above a power trough in the base of the stands, omitting the usual
trail of cords from the floor. The design of the interior becomes an integral
part of the company’s growing mobile aesthetic. The salon’s modularity can
accommodate the expansion of their business in the current space and in
new spaces as they grow and build their brand. The flexibility of the
modular system acknowledges diurnal processes of use to orchestrate
multiple uses at the same time. At Tailored, the employment of modular
objects enables the structuring of movements, cycles, and simultaneous
occupations in space, regardless of location.
Liberated interiors, like the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant and
the Migrant Interior project, suggest an inversion of the nineteenth-century
territorial idea, allowing the interior to be defined as an inhabited – if
placeless – territory. Transient interiors, exemplified by the tapestry,
Titlecase, and Tailored Salon, introduces mobility and simultaneity as an
evolution of territory in a twenty-first century, resource-scarce, nomadic
context. Inhabitation locates territory within a placeless, modern social
context. Territory as occupied space, and interior as defined inhabitation,
have evolved into a singular field of designed action, equally and
reciprocally defining each other.

Figure 10.3 ACA Amy Campos Architect, Tailored Salon (2013)

Image credit: Amy Campos

Notes
1 Portions of this chapter were previously published in the International Journal of Interior

Architecture + Spatial Design 1, “Autonomous Identities” issue (2013).

2 John O’Sullivan, “Annexation”, The United States Democratic Review (July–August 1845): 5.
3 Thomas Jefferson, “Louisiana Purchase Treaty”, Paris, 30 April 1803.
4 UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Neolithic Site of Çatalhöyük”, 2015,
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1405 (accessed 1 July 2015).
5 Lockheed Martin, “Lockheed During World War II: Operation Camouflage”, 2015,
www.lockheedmartin.com/us/100years/stories/camouflage.html (accessed 3 July 2015).
6 Louis H. Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”, Lippincott’s Magazine,

March 1896: 403–409.

7 Anna G. Bennett, Five Centuries of Tapestries (Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, Japan: The Fine
Arts Museums of San Francisco and Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1976).
Chapter 11

Swimming upstream
Repositioning authorship and expanding the
agency of the architect

Blair Satterfield and Marc Swackhamer

Designers can no longer afford to operate outside the flow of production.

This chapter highlights examples of interior architectural practice models
and projects built with custom tools that challenge conventional fabrication
methods. Through increased participation in the construction process,
materials research, tool design, and atypical collaborative teams, the
designers discussed herein have increased formal variation to produce work
that is more sensitive to program and performance, while decreasing cost.
An example project, Swimming Upstream, speculates on how designers can
recapture control of construction processes that have left them increasingly
marginalized as participants in the conception of interiors, buildings, cities,
and infrastructures. It offers tactics like the production of custom adaptable
tools and processes (applied to a variety of material practices) to transform
and aggregate excessively standardized building materials at varying scales
from architectural interiors to infrastructure. It considers moving the point
of production from the factory (consolidated and centralized) to the jobsite
(distributed and situated), and returning control of production to the
architect.

The expanding space of work

The petroleum, software, biotech, metals, and pharmaceutical industries are
not typically offered as model examples for best practices in design. The
mention of them here is in no way an endorsement of their products,
politics, or global practices. Instead, they are presented as business models
that share one important trait: each of these industries defines the space of
work as a complete and inclusive continuum that has location and
directional flow. In each of the examples offered, the space of work is
referred to as a stream with distinct locations defined as upstream,
midstream, and downstream. Each location refers to a specific phase or type
of work. Upstream identifies the search for and extraction of a resource.
Midstream refers to the storage and distribution of raw materials.
Downstream is where a given resource is refined and converted into a
product. Designers, and to some extent architects, are increasingly
expanding their work streams. As new technologies and tools become
available, it is productive to consider other industries for examples of how
the field of design is evolving.
Increased access to information and digital tools is expanding the
reach of the designer, allowing entry into areas of production and fabrication
long lost to other industries and professionals. These tools are also opening
up market segments and fundamentally shifting how designers conceive of
materials, construction, and architectural form. Software has grown into
more than merely a tool of representation. It is increasingly paired with
digital fabrication tools, a marriage of input and output that become
generators of real physical form. The compact sizes and increasing ubiquity
of these tools relentlessly erodes the defining hold industry has had on
construction, and therefore design strategies, up to and through the
twentieth century. These shifts have opened new areas of discourse in design
and changed how we define authorship. The following models are offered as
examples.

Shared collaborative authorship

Consultancy in design practice is a trusted approach where specialists from a
variety of focused disciplines work in support of a lead designer’s
established vision for a project. Jenny Sabin Studio uses this strategy to
generate its designs. By designing collaboratively with individuals ranging
from materials scientists, electrical and systems engineers, and cellular
biologists to members of parallel disciplines (industrial designers at Nike, for
example), Sabin is able to conceive and prototype innovative projects that
operate at multiple scales and use material properties and biological
processes as points of departure. One example, “eSkin,” studies cellular
behavior and utilizes it as a model for generating responsive architectural
surfaces. These novel systems actively answer to environmental input at a
microscopic level. The result is a project that behaves more like a living
organism than a building. By developing the design through bioengineering
research and collaboratively authoring that research with consultants earlier
in the process (upstream from where an architect typically operates), Sabin
fundamentally challenges the status quo of conventional design practice. In
another project, Branching Morphologies, she collaborates with a discipline
even further removed from design: the University of Pennsylvania’s
Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Through a simple set of
rules gleaned from her collaborator’s research into lung endothelial cell
growth, a complex datascape of woven textile surfaces emerges. In the
project, Sabin serves less as a conventional designer and more as an
investigative researcher, by identifying rules and patterns from another field
of study from which she borrows to generate architectural form. Branching
Morphologies serves as a didactic to clarify for the layperson an otherwise
impenetrable biological process, while simultaneously offering a novel and
unpredictable spatial experience.
Authoring new tools
Innovation within an existing set of means and methods has limits. In order
to truly push a boundary, the tools used to generate ideas, forms, and
assemblies need to evolve as well. Gehry Technologies was borne out of
Frank O. Gehry Architects’ interest in developing new and more powerful
ways of delivering complex architectural projects.1 Founded over twenty
years ago, Gehry Technologies was an early adopter of Building Information
Management (BIM) software. The firm borrowed parametric software and
digital fabrication tools from other industries and applied them to building
design and delivery. This ultimately led to direct collaborations with
aerospace and automotive designers and engineers to develop new tools and
techniques for their practice. Today, Gehry Technologies (acquired by
Trimble in 2014) is a powerful consultancy with services that range from
modeling and detailing architectural assemblies to generating 4D models of
construction and product delivery. The lesson gleaned here is that,
increasingly, when architects and designers grow dissatisfied with the tools
available to them for project design, construction, and delivery, instead of
compromising their work to fit into an antiquated system, they are
swimming upstream to design the tools that help them design their work.
This requires new knowledge and an ability to collaborate with and borrow
ideas from others. In the case of Gehry Technologies, dissatisfaction with in-
place modeling software led the company to look outside the conventional
boundaries of the field of architecture. In other cases, designers have instead
relied on their own unique expertise to influence areas of project delivery
typically not under their control.

Authorship through labor and behavior

SHoP Architects designed the Virgin Atlantic Upper Class Clubhouse to
accommodate first class travelers in JFK International Airport’s Terminal 4.
The project is conceived as a combinatory critique of security (visual
surveillance) and privilege (conspicuous consumption). The resulting interior
project is a complex undulating screen wall comprised of thousands of
digitally designed and fabricated components.2 The construction of the
project would have been prohibitive if skilled labor was required. The
solution was to control assembly at the point of production. The logics of
digital fabrication allowed the designers to create idiosyncratic pieces that
were numbered and keyed for easy site assembly. Through this project and
others like it, SHoP has grown to become specifically known for taking
unprecedented control of construction and fabrication processes to carefully
manage project output and costs. Where, in the case of Gehry Technologies,
designers look outward to develop new tools for internal design processes
(swimming upstream), in the case of SHoP, designers look inward to develop
new tools for external partners (swimming downstream) in order to help
them realize projects more efficiently and cost-effectively.3 In both cases,
they are operating outside conventional territories of their discipline to
create new spaces.
In the Silk Pavilion, Neri Oxman and MIT Media Lab’s Mediated
Matter Group do more than manage construction; they give design authority
over to those doing the building.4 Instead of using digital fabrication tools to
control the assembly of their design, the design team for the Silk Pavilion
use scientific observation to predict the behavior of their construction team
– live silkworms. Oxman and company deploy the live silkworms over a
prefabricated, stretched net to weave the skin of an indoor domed room. By
creating an armature that is first, a habitat for some 6,500 silkworms, and
second, a space for human habitation, the team leverages the behavior of a
natural system to ensure that the final design is unpredictable and
serendipitous. While the designers can predict and direct a formal outcome,
the precise nature of the pavilion’s appearance is left in the hands (or
spinnerets) of the silkworms. The pre-constructed armature anticipates
behavioral tendencies, but cannot, with any degree of certainty, predict final
appearance. Like Gehry Technologies and SHoP, the Mediated Matter Group
resituates authorship in order to redefine what it means to “design”
something. In this case the designers are “swimming midstream” to conflate
design and construction into a single process.
 This leads us to VarVac Wall, which we offer as an extended case
study of our own work, to further speculate on the myriad ways designers
are redefining design agency. In VarVac Wall (HouMinn Practice), we
resituate control, and consequently the hand of the designer, by developing
first, a system, and second, a tool, which together generate the project’s
formal characteristics. We do not willfully design the project. Instead, its
final appearance is contingent upon programmatic circumstance and
material parameters. As the designers (or perhaps more accurately, the
strategists), we set the stage for the project to unfold as a consequence of
dynamic variables. The resulting project is more precisely responsive to its
surroundings and markedly less expensive than it would have been using
traditional construction techniques.
To understand how the project’s system and tool set resituate
authorship, it is first important to describe both in some detail. To generate
the system, we surveyed the acoustic characteristics of an existing space: the
front lobby/reception area of the University of Minnesota School of
Architecture (Figure 11.1). This space has very particular sound requirements
that change locally within the space from position to position. For example,
in one location where a visitor might stand to converse with a receptionist,
the room needs to be acoustically deadened with as little sound echo as
possible. In another area, where that same visitor might sit to wait for an
appointment, the room needs to be acoustically diffusive, but not necessarily
absorptive as verbal communication is less important. To accommodate
these differing sound requirements, we mapped a large wall in the space
according to which areas adjacent to it needed to be absorptive and which
areas needed to be reflective/diffusive. This mapping exercise defined zones
on the wall with gradient conditions along their boundaries.
Once this system was in place, we developed an adaptable
modular panel that could transform incrementally to accommodate the
space’s varying acoustic requirements. We identified a material in which we
could easily modify shape and could also, dependent on its porosity, modify
its ability to absorb or reflect sound. Because of our experience with it, and
our mounting dissatisfaction with its limitations, we chose to use vacuum-
formed polystyrene. We say dissatisfaction because traditional vacuum
forming comes with significant limitations. It is an excellent material if the
goal is to produce multiple copies of an identical shape. This is because the
initial mold presents a relatively high upfront cost, but the cost per unit
decreases as more copies are produced. However, if units with any variation
are desired, it is a very expensive material and process. Any modification to
unit shape, even if minor, requires the fabrication of an entirely new mold.
We grew interested in challenging this inherent material limitation.

Figure 11.1 Image of installed VarVac Wall, University of Minnesota School of Architecture main
office
Image credit: Ryan Lodermeier

To do so, we developed a variable vacuum-forming mold (Figure

11.2). This mold turns traditional vacuum forming on end through the
incorporation of dynamically modifiable components in the mold itself. The
mold is relatively simple and inexpensive, especially when compared to
traditional molds. It is comprised of a large rectangular frame the size of the
finished panel, and a series of cables stretched across it. The quantity,
position, and density of those cables are variable. To produce a panel, a sheet
of polystyrene is heated in a traditional vacuum-forming machine until it is
droopy and pliable. Then, it is placed over the mold, where suction from the
machine’s vacuum pulls the pliable plastic through the openings between the
cables. This produces a final panel made of a series of topographic hills.
There are large hills where the cables were spaced further apart and small
hills where they were spaced close together. From here, we set up a system
of rules to perforate the panels. Any “hill” in a panel, as described above,
extending higher than six inches, was trimmed off, turning it from a “hill”
shape to a “butte” shape (or perhaps more precisely, a “volcano” shape, as
this produced not a flat, closed top, but a hole). Larger hills resulted in larger
holes. Described in another way, the further apart the cables on a given
mold, the more porous the panel; the closer together the cables, the less
porous the panel (Figure 11.3).
This detailed project description is necessary to fully explain how
VarVac Wall resituates authorship. The correlation between cable spacing on
the adaptable mold and degree of acoustic absorption/reflection could now
be combined with the mapping of the wall’s desired acoustic properties.
Where the wall was mapped to be more absorptive, an algorithmic script
randomly generated a less dense pattern of cables. Conversely, where the
wall was mapped to be more reflective, the script generated a denser pattern
of cables. In short, a mapping system was combined with a material logic to
produce the shape of the wall. We did not actually design the wall itself. We
designed a system for managing information and a new approach to
material fabrication. The powerful combination of those two influences was
more responsible for the design of the wall than we were as the project’s
actual designers. In VarVac Wall, similar to examples from Gehry
Technologies, SHoP, and the Mediated Matter Group, design authority is
resituated. By working upstream, midstream, or downstream from the
design of the project itself, the designer is able to more fundamentally,
precisely, and responsibly influence the character of the projects themselves.
Figure 11.2 Diagram explaining the logic of VarVac mold. In VarVac, the thermoforming of plastic is
a straightforward process. A sheet of material (plastic) is suspended over a form (a simple frame with
insulated wires stretch across it). The plastic is heated until malleable, and then lowered over the form.
The location of the wires is derived from a Grasshopper script that translates desired acoustical
performance into a pattern of lines. The wires are organized to match these lines. The heated plastic is
lowered and allowed to sag, finding its own form between the wires.
Image credit: authors
Figure 11.3 Detail of installed VarVac Wall. This image shows vacuum formed panels assembled over
a green felt backing. Deeper draws result in larger openings. This reveals more sound absorbing felt.
Image credit: Ryan Lodermeier

VarVac Wall and the other examples outlined earlier serve as case
studies in how spatial designers might begin to resituate design authority,
not to impact their work less, but, ironically, to impact it more. By
relinquishing control in an area of a project where they traditionally seek to
maximize control, the designer can paradoxically seize greater control. This
is a risky proposition. It tasks designers with stepping outside of their typical
disciplinary constraints to learn new skills and to collaboratively embrace
the expertise of those from other disciplines. If we thought of our practices
like the internet sales giant Amazon thinks of its business, what
opportunities might arise? What are the corollaries in interior architectural
practice to Amazon’s expansion into the film, television, music, or home
delivery industries? By asking these fundamental questions, we offer that
designers might want to swim upstream in order to more meaningfully
influence the path of the water downstream.

Notes
1 Elite Kedan, Jon Dreyfous, and Craig Mutter, eds. Provisional-Emerging Models of Architectural

Practice USA (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), pp. 182–189.
2 Kimberly Holden, Gregg Pasquarelli, Christopher Sharples, Coren Sharples, and William
Sharples. SHoP: Out of Practice (New York: Monacelli Press, 2012), pp. 74–89.
3 Kedan et al., Provisional-Emerging Models of Architectural Practice USA, pp. 136–144.
4 Blaine Brownell and Marc Swackhamer, Hypernatural: Architecture’s New Relationship With

Nature (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), pp. 128–131.

Part three

Spatialities
Chapter 12

Inside looking in
The prospect of the aspect

Ursula Emery McClure and Michael A. McClure

The most impactful, important, and relevant artifacts of human occupation

have one striking similarity: they resist the modernist impulse to be
singularly understood. Instead, they are integrated, complex systems that
resist separation. Only the design disciplines separate an interior from an
exterior, from a landscape, from an urbanism, while in reality these elements
are experienced as connected conditions. The Pantheon in Rome, for
example, is a complex, connected set of experiences that draws 1.5 million
visitors every year. It is equally celebrated by the trained designer and the
tourist. The Pantheon contains one of the most recognizable interior spaces
ever created by humankind. Visitors are drawn inside as all attention is
pulled toward the omnipresent axis mundi. It is a center. It is a cave; heavy,
cool, and dimly lit. The oculus always draws the viewer’s attention to the
sky and to the exterior. Consequently, the Pantheon is both a connector and
a separator from the interior, from the landscape, and from the urban
condition. To be under its portico temple front is to be simultaneously in the
Pantheon and in the landscape of the city. This multiple connectivity
continues upon entry into the adjacent piazza and the city beyond.
The modernist distinctions between exterior and interior, and
between object and space, do not hold at the Pantheon. The prospect is an
aspect of its context. This chapter discusses the value of spaces that possess
the prospect of the aspect – multiple interiorities across scales. Spaces that
are simultaneously interior and exterior are not exclusive. They are
inclusive, consistently defined, and reevaluated by their context. They persist
through cultural shifts and thus contribute to their environs continuously
across shifting social, cultural, and stylistic norms.

Prospect and aspect

The prospect of the aspect describes an experiential multiplicity of an object
or space. The words prospect and aspect are derivatives from the Latin verb
specere, “to look.” The word prospect from pro- “forward” and specere “to

look,” and the word aspect from ad- “to, at” and specere “to look.”1 The
prospect of the aspect is the looking forward from how one perceives and
the continuation of that experiential multiplicity. It is a relationship between
the exterior and the interior, but one that is not necessarily defined as under
roof to not under roof. It is defined by the clarity of both being within a
limited boundary (interior) and simultaneously looking beyond and
experiencing that boundary (exterior). It is also infinitely repetitive. The
prospect of the aspect is a recursive quality that gains its value in continuum
and overlap, similar to standing between two mirrors that reflect
continuously, also known as the Droste effect.2 It is never a singular
experience, as its physical construction denies spatial exclusivity.

Modernist hermetic seal and the isolation of

disciplines
It is in the denial of spatial exclusivity that the prospect of the aspect
counters the modernist hermetic seal and isolation of the design disciplines.
The invention of air conditioning in the early twentieth century led to many
monumental changes in the constructed environment, none more or less
important than an absolute boundary between inside and outside. The
ability to seal off the interior from the exterior meant that the interior no
longer needed to negotiate – or even acknowledge – the exterior. The
surrounding context, environment, and human occupations could be
ignored. The building envelope became the boundary, and the object and its
relative space could become entirely self-referential. This isolation increased
when coupled with the requirements for occupancy classifications, fire
separations, and protected egress. Rooms could be just about rooms,
buildings just about buildings, and landscapes just about landscapes. The
modernist doctrine “less is more,” according to Venturi in his seminal book
Complexity and Contradiction, “bemoaned complexity and justified
exclusion for expressive purposes. It … permitted [one] to be highly selective
in determining which problems to solve.”3 This exclusivity aligned with the
professional distinction and education of the disciplines (architect, engineer,
landscape architect, interior designer, etc.). The legal boundaries, the
perceived boundaries, and the selected boundaries led to very static and
singular objects and spaces, denying an architecture of complexity and
contradiction that has a special obligation toward the whole. Its truth must
be in its totality or its implications of totality. It must embody the difficult
unity of inclusion, rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.4

Occupying the Oculi

The prospect of the aspect only exists as part of the whole. It is both
internally referential (look at) and externally referential (look forward). This
characteristic establishes the truth of the condition, and it is also what helps
a human-occupied object or space maintain its continuum and relevance.
The object or space that possesses the prospect of the aspect continuously
contributes and participates with its environs across shifting social, cultural,
and stylistic norms. Traditional projects from cultures around the world
demonstrate a strong relationship between the prospect and the aspect. A
heightened awareness of the prospect of the aspect is the main purpose of a
menhir, a pyramid, a stupa, a stela, an obelisk, or a mound. They are objects
that are to be looked at while simultaneously directing focus to another axis.
It could be argued that for these archetypal projects, the prospect of the
aspect is an essential program. The following three examples present
variations of the prospect of the aspect and attempt to illustrate qualitatively
this connectivity and inclusiveness.
The Pantheon in Rome serves as the first example of this fully
developed relationship. Much like its traditional precedents, the Pantheon is
concerned with an extremely minimal program and was once an object in a
field. In its current urban context, it offers a complex, connected set of
internal-external experiences. Though the object is simple, the prospect of
the aspect is quite complex. The Pantheon draws the occupant in – it is an
interior. The sphere imposed within a cylinder creates an unavoidable and
overwhelmingly powerful center. That center is drawn into a vertical axis
mundi through the introduction of the oculus. The space demands that
attention be paid to the center, or away from it. Every aspect of the interior
supports this reading: the octave division of niches, the paneled marble of
the walls and floor, the coffered dome, the horizontal cornice banding that
highlights precisely where the dome and cylinder meet, all work to reinforce
a prospect to the axis mundi. Once there, an aspect to a measured
representation of the geometries at play is revealed. This recursive
relationship reaches an apex at the oculus. The oculus draws the eye to the
sky by experientially collapsing the interior, the building, and the exterior.
At the oculus, an interior that is designed to focus all of its energy to the
center immediately reverses, placing the human at the center of the
universe, and becoming the intersection of a universal x, y, and z axis. As
soon as the occupant believes a spatial moment has been defined, another
begins. Consequently, the Pantheon is both a connector and separator from
the interior and the exterior – from nature, from the landscape, and from the
urban. This recursive spatial relationship continues upon exiting the
rotunda. The colonnaded porch sets a liminal boundary to the plaza, which
itself is an urban room designed as an interior space. The surrounding
buildings read as interior walls of the space, not as exterior facades. This
multiple connectivity continues in the adjacent piazza and the city beyond.
The prospect of the aspect created at the oculus is so powerful that it
becomes the measure of the enveloping neighborhood (Figure 12.1).
Although the purest examples of the prospect of the aspect can be
exemplified in such a premodern expression, this spatial condition has
continued to be an important analytical tool. The same complex
interrelationships can be found in modern and contemporary examples.
Aalto’s Saynatsalo Town Hall, with an entirely different program, material,
culture, and location, creates a similar recursive experience. Like the
Pantheon, Saynatsalo offers prime examples of quality architecture, interior
architecture, and landscape architecture. Saynatsalo also similarly dissolves
the isolation of these scales. A centralized space is accessed through a heavy
masonry threshold, employing Aalto’s site planning principle wherein “a
given building is invariably separated into two distinct elements, and the
space between is articulated as a space of human appearance.”5 The entrance
leads up and into a low, square exterior (under sky) room, a room that keeps
its walls low, yet emphasizes the vertical through a measured expression of
thin columns. The prospect is now forced to the surrounding vertical birch
trees and the sky above. Like the Pantheon, there is a simultaneous
connection to and separation from nature. Here, however, the physical
relationship has changed. Standing in the oculus, instead of under and
looking forward from it, the prospect and the aspect are brought into a
conversation in the thin, yet simultaneously expansive, threshold. The
double height volume of the council chamber continues the prospect of the
aspect. The tower and its implied interior can be experienced from the
central exterior space. The council chamber’s interior draws attention up to
the structure. It reframes the exterior with a large north-facing window,
whose vertical slatted shutters mimic the vertical trees in the distance. This
becomes a dialog between the two thresholds that frame the prospect
horizontally and vertically. The complex is a building and an urbanism; it is
an object and a space, but most of all, it is an overlapping of interiors. It
creates its context and intertwines with it (Figure 12.2).

Figure 12.1 The radiating prospect of the aspect at the Pantheon (cones of vision, major and minor
axis, and spatial continuum)
Image credit: author

A third, more recent example presents another application of the

prospect of the aspect. The Centre George Pompidou in the Marais District
of Paris establishes a different – but no less powerful – prospect of the
aspect. While the Pantheon and Saynatsalo create a clear scalar escalation of
the condition, in-to-out and out-to-in, the Centre Pompidou is a bit more
gloriously convoluted. Here, the urban room, the surrounding city, and the
building are all spaces/objects with the prospect of the aspect. The building
essentially becomes a scaffolding to offer views from itself: views to the
plaza, to the city low, and to the city high. From every aspect of the
building’s exterior, the prospect is offered. Richard Rogers explains the
rationale behind the design:
Figure 12.2 The overlapping prospect of the aspect at Saynatsalo Town Hall (cones of vision, major
and minor thresholds, and interior/exterior overlaps)
Image credit: author

The idea was that you had a public space, and you’d go up the
facade of the building in streets in the air with escalators floating
across it, so the whole thing became very dynamic. People come
to see people as well as to see art; people come to meet people. So
we wanted to practice that as theatre.6

The complexity of the steel frame rectangle is truly remarkable. The overlap
begins on the approach from any of the Parisian streets, perpendicular or
parallel. No matter how much space outlies the actual Centre Pompidou, it is
consistently embedded in its context. Even when entering the plaza, the
scale of the building is so encompassing that the plaza does not act as a
space before the building (a space to view the object), but instead slips
through the steel frame, appearing to pass under and through the ground
floor. The city never stops; it passes right through the building.
Simultaneously, similar to the piazza outside of the Pantheon, the
Pompidou’s plaza is very much an interior room in the city, entered through
multiple portals. The plaza occupant is both in and out. This condition
continues in the ascent and descent of the escalators. Inside the glass tubes,
the overtly bracketed “interior” space offers the prospect of the aspect to the
strata of the surrounding context. From the surrounding buildings’
fenestrated walls, down the street canals, over the plaza, and eventually the
rooftops, all is presented in isolation and overlap. The dynamism of the
escalators enables this prospect of the aspect, but it is in their careful
orchestration with the steel frame and the program (the city, the museum,
the art, and the French culture) that solidifies it, until final arrival at the
rooftop. The frame is under, the escalators and pipes aside, any singular
aspect of the object has dissipated; it has become wholly part of the
prospect. Looking forward, Paris lies proffered below. The recursiveness of
the prospect of the aspect continues on further toward the Eiffel Tower,
which is its own example of this condition (Figure 12.3).
The rooftop of the Centre Pompidou, similar to the interior central
axis of the Pantheon and the courtyard of Saynatsalo, is both a connector
and separator from the interior and the exterior; from nature, from the
landscape, and from the urban. The perceived interior is turned inside-out.
Even though it is clearly a space with defined edges, the spatial
expansiveness of the universal x, y, and z axes the rooftop provides is
palpable. Conceptually conceived of as a “theater for the people,” the Centre
Pompidou’s spatial articulations epitomize the looking at the looking from;
the prospect of the aspect. Even at its young age of forty-four years, the
building has already persisted through cultural shifts and continues to
contribute to its environs across shifting social, cultural, and stylistic norms.
“The whole idea of Pompidou was that it is a place for the meeting of all
people, and the success of it was that the French took it over and it became
the most visited building in Europe.”7
Figure 12.3 The recursive prospect of the aspect at the Pompidou (cones of vision, urban spatial
layering, and horizontal and vertical inclusiveness)
Image credit: author

What is at stake?
Why concern ourselves with this analysis? Is this a mandate for more
flexible and systemically integrated designs that achieve relevance through
their inclusivity? Is this a call for a more collaborative and cross-disciplinary
environment? Absolutely, but the present system is seemingly set up against
the creation of a complex and integrated built environment. The design
disciplines have been isolated professionally and legally. The benefit has
been that each discipline has been able to develop its expertise, but the cost
has been a built environment that is increasingly separated from its site, its
context, and society. Most contemporary built contexts consist of the
efficient metal building (Walmart), the nondescript strip mall, or the isolated
object building (art museum). For the first two types, not only are they
applied everywhere, ambivalent to their surrounding environments, they are
also constructed with an ambivalence for persistence. The average Walmart,
for example, is given an estimated useful life of seventeen years. In
comparison to the 2,000-year-old Pantheon or even the 63-year-old
Saynatsalo, this obsolescence speaks to a practice of exclusivity and
efficiency, where the primary (and some might argue only) consideration is
the corporate gain, not a continued contribution to the physical environs
across shifting social, cultural, and stylistic norms.8 The practice of
exclusivity affects the isolated object building as well. Todd Williams and
Billie Tsien’s short-lived American Folk Art Museum (2001–2014)
exemplifies what happens when a design cannot maintain multiple complex
connections, as noted in the Architectural Record:

While the demolition is deeply painful to all of us who helped

create it, our distress is of secondary importance to the civic,
cultural, and sustainable issues the debate surrounding the
building has raised. We remain deeply grateful to all who have
protested this senseless and unnecessary act of destruction.9

This is not to say that contemporary examples of environments that exploit

the prospect of the aspect are not present, nor are they solely limited to large
public buildings. Examples can be found everywhere and at every scale, but
the examples of isolated, nonintegrated landscapes, buildings, and interiors
prevail. Too often, both the intention and the evaluation of the built
environment are set as binary oppositions of this versus that: function vs.
form, cost vs. quality, scale vs. scope, efficiency vs. waste, inside vs. outside,
urban vs. rural, traditional vs. modern, and practical vs. poetic. The
modernist tenet of “less is more” still dominates, and the “unity of inclusion”
still remains difficult.
If the designers of objects and spaces hope to maintain and
produce new built environments that are equally appreciated by the
designer and the public, they must make the case that the prospect of the
aspect should be included in both the intentions and critiques of the built
environment. It is these spaces that will resist obsolescence; they will not be
destroyed when their current program or style becomes outdated. As with
similar projects before them, those that incorporate the prospect of the
aspect will persist.
Notes
1 “Aspect” and “prospect”, Merriam-Webster.com, 2015, www.merriam-webster.com/.
2 The Droste effect identifies a technique in art that creates a recursive picture in which a smaller
version of the image is placed inside itself repeatedly. This effect is also referred to as mise en

abyme, which generally describes the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, seeing
an infinite reproduction of one’s image. Mary McMahon, “What Is the Droste Effect”, Wisegeek,

www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-droste-effect.htm (accessed 26 April 2015).

3 Robert Venturi and Museum of Modern Art (New York), Complexity and Contradiction in

Architecture, 2nd ed. (New York and Boston, MA: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), p. 24.
4 Ibid., p. 23.
5 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Oxford University Press,
1980), p. 197.
6 Richard Rogers, “The Pompidou Captured the Revolutionary Spirit of 1968 – Richard Rogers”,
DeZeen Magazine, 26 July 2013, www.dezeen.com/2013/07/26/richard-rogers-centre-pompidou-
revolution-1968/ (accessed 5 April 2015).
7 Ibid.
8 Estimated total useful life (years) = (Property and equipment, gross − Land) − Depreciation
expense for property and equipment, including amortization of property under capital leases =
(182,634 − 26,261) ÷ 9,100 = 17. “Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT)”, Stock Analysis on Net, www.stock-
analysis-on.net/NYSE/Company/Wal-Mart-Stores-Inc/Analysis/Property-Plant-and-
Equipment#Estimated-Total-Useful-Life (accessed February 2015).
9 “MoMA Begins Demolition of Folk Art Museum Building”, Architectural Record, 14 April 2014,
http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2014/04/140414-MoMA-Begins-Demolition-Folk-Art-
Museum.asp (accessed 5 April 2015).
Chapter 13

The waiting room

Transitional space and transitional drawing

Susan Hedges

What great genius invented the waiting room?

Every sublime idea no doubt is simple, but
Simplicity alone is never enough.
A cube sequestered in space and filled with time,
Pure time, refined, distilled, denatured time
Without qualities, without even dust … 1

The waiting room can be imagined as a frequently visited place, a room to

linger, to sit or stand, to walk and converse. It is a transitional point before
entering or moving to another room, in which no actual movements of the
journey occur, but where time is implied. It is a place where our attention
may be directed toward the fact that the passage of time has slowed down,
until later it seems as if no time has passed at all.2
The waiting drawing offers a sense of marking time, an instant of
concentrated activity, perhaps with whatever drawing instrument and
surface is ready at hand. A seized drawn moment is an attempt to possess
time; these kinds of drawings may be followed by further transitional
drawings, repeating moment from moment. The waiting drawing described
in this chapter is seen not as an answer, but rather, as a marking of time. It is
explored through the waiting room as a point of mobility and temporary
arrest, a place where the fixed and mobile converge. The waiting room,
suspended in time and structure to be entered and explored, becomes an
architecture that renders itself uninhabitable to the extent that we
understand aesthetic experience – not as a recollection of a timeless reality,
but as an experience that is as if it had no duration.3
This chapter models a narrative of the waiting room with a study
of the Auckland Railway Station (1928–1930) designed by Gummer and Ford
and Partners. In particular, singled out for closer examination is “Sheet No.
24 Details of Ladies’ Waiting Room,” as a means to consider the waiting
drawn detail in the now obsolete Auckland Railway Station. The waiting
drawing is represented as a paneled interior of recurrence, an experience of
time, and a prediction of time on itself. The sheet simultaneously shows
complexity, incompleteness, and a promise of structured waiting.

The waiting room and the waiting drawing

Waiting is a common human experience. Often the impression it conveys is
one of anxiety, boredom, and anonymity. People are distributed among rows
of seats, figures thrown together at the mercy of someone, or something for
which they are consigned to wait. They wait in separation from each other,
unspeaking, or in chattering groups. “All things come to those who wait,”
implies an understanding of waiting that is anything but resigned, accepting,
and inevitable. The patience of waiting becomes a vigilant attentiveness,
perhaps surfacing amid uncertain respites, an arduous experience of unsure
stillness affected by time, speed, and sluggishness.
Walter Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project that “waiting is in
a sense the well-varnished interior of boredom, that rather than pass the
time, one must invite it in.”4 Benjamin equates boredom with waiting. To
wait “is ultimately the same as refusing the idea of change, and this refusal
suggests that boredom and waiting are figures of resistance to the empty
recurrence of history.”5 Literary theorist Mieke Bal writes of the pause as the
moment in a waiting room before entering or moving to another in which
the narrative remains stationary. It is a pause where our attention is directed
toward the fact that the passage of time has slowed down, a disruption to
the flow of time and function, and a silence in the construction of the
narrative.6
Waiting for a train at the station, building rhythms are slowed, a
kind of stillness results, a pause in time and movement. Expecting an
imminent arrival or departure at an indicated time, timetables become links
between the present and the future. The waiting for an event the occurrence
of which is certain – although not always on time, or completely uncertain,
even when the train is delayed – the time and place become an interstitial
period.

Waiting drawing and the waiting detail

For some, the waiting drawing is a moment to capture an instant in a few
quick strokes, a transitional drawing that is a marking of time, perhaps a
careless regard for passing hours rather than a search for an answer. The
transitional drawing is made up of differences in weight, interval, and
motion, moments of intense activity, of getting something down and seizing
the moment. Drawing as waiting or expectation is a projection into the
future.7 As the waiting drawing may reside in the long process of thinking,
making, breaking, and remaking, time figures as both contemplative and
instantaneous. The specific is approached with a fastidious attention to the
unseen – the invisible – and allowing in retrospect for the invisible to be
seen. It is a reflection of the drawing process itself, but also an overriding
awareness that in order to break new ground, each moment of doing
contributes to another sense of the “whole.” For the drawer, these moments
of doing, looking, thinking, and reflecting are critical within the process of
making a piece of work, but on completion of the work they also provide a
time for thought.8 Making the drawing becomes a way of seeing time; a
spatializing of time.
For architect Marco Frascari, architectural drawing is a heuristic
device. “It is a slow process of architectural sapience based on the ideas of
lingering, savoring, and touching. It is based on the ‘adagio’ time and
common places, proverbs, or rules of thumb.”9 For Frascari, labor-intensive
lines offer a sensory understanding of architecture. Drawing and waiting are
expectations – a projection into the future.10 Labor-intensive architectural
drawings, material and substance, the conceiving of a place to wait. A
lingering line, a tactile savoring, the same as slow time, sheets that are
marked, inked, penciled, or brushed, labor-intensive architectural drawings,
for users that cannot be predicted or estimated. Frascari writes:

Slowness is often related to negative values of clumsiness,

disinterest, sloth, and tedium, conditions that do not include the
positive effects resulting from paused, well-thought, and safe
attitudes. Architectural drawings are islands of slowness within
the stormy sea of the pseudo-fastness of the building industry.11

In some respects, the waiting drawing can be seen as an initial graphic

portrayal of an idea, directly from observation, or the memory of something
seen. Perhaps a preconceived plan, a projection of possibility, the drawing is
an idea generation, development, and modification. The waiting detail in
this light is a drawing performed in order to possess time, to capture the
possibilities seized in the moment; a moment of actualization.

The waiting room and the railway station

Construction of the Auckland Railway Station by architects Gummer and
Ford began in 1928 and was completed in 1930. It was the largest contract
undertaken in New Zealand at the time.12 Red brick set between classical
compositions of Corinthian columns with entablature, Roman arches, and
coffered ceilings, a monumental entrance with a grand foyer, and elaborate
systems of scale and surface make up the station. The building was reported
at the time to

… offer something new to New Zealand architecture in the way of

interior decoration, and it is safe to say that many Auckland
people will be astonished, when they enter the station for the first
time, at the bold employment of colors in the decorative scheme.
No other building in Auckland depends so literally on the artist’s
palette for its mural ornamentation.13

Arrival at the railway station is a passage through a grand lobby to a long

concourse, a movement toward a large space housing the static pleasure of
architectural detail (Figure 13.1). The appeal of the building lies in its
stillness and sculptural depth, in its implied resistance to the world of speed,
surface, and image. From here, people depart for the sea and the mountains,
a complex network connecting distances, people, and places. Platforms
bristle with anticipation, the clutter of rushing people, porters, and carts. The
anticipation of the landscape to be experienced is colored by the staccato
rhythms that connect ticket counters, corridors, and waiting rooms.
Figure 13.1 Auckland Railway Station Ticket Lobby
Image credit: Susan Hedges

In the Auckland Railway Station, spaces for arrival and departure

extended the small scale of the city; boundaries between town and
countryside fell away to railway stations, transfers, junctions, and stops. For
Auckland, remote places began to connect. Destination signs and plaques of
cities and towns along the length of the concourse implied a sense of
distance. An impressive masonry façade and a vast open concourse, roofed
with glass and supported by iron and steel trusses, the station became stalled
in its tracks a mile or two away from the center of the city, the size of the
station an ungainly interloper.
Conceived as a grand railway station, the building was never
tested to its full capacity.14 Its intended use as a point of convergence of the
city’s movement, a connector for trains, cars, radio signals, trams, and
pedestrians, as well as money, goods, and information, was perhaps, for a
moment, actualized in the early days of its construction; a “swirling
manifold of circuitry, switching points and deterritorialized, non-grounded
flows.”15 In the 1990s, however, its use shifted to student accommodation.
The exterior shell remained relatively intact under a “category 1” rating of
the Historic Places Trust.16 The interior changed dramatically. Along the
lengthy concourse, three rooms have become TV lounges, and the ticket
counter and the entrance have been preserved. What has been lost?

Beyond the vestibule is another striking feature of the layout, a

broad concourse which gives access to all the adjuncts of a
modern station including dining room, refreshment buffet, waiting
rooms, barber’s shop, dressing rooms, lavatories, post, telegraph
offices, ambulance, book stall, fruit stall, etc. The night traveler
will here find facilities for cleansing, rest, and refreshment in
preparation for his day of business or pleasure in the city. Here,
the tired suburban shopper will obtain afternoon tea daintily and
restfully served. Such services and amenities, though well
established abroad, will be to a large extent experimental with us,
and it will rest with the public to give them their sympathy and
support so that they may be developed to their fullest usefulness.17

The ladies’ waiting room

The waiting room sits somewhere between location and dislocation, a semi-
public gateway to private places, a somewhat ambiguous place, occupying
an uncanny position within the larger scheme of the building (Figure 13.2).
Little has changed in this 40-by-15-foot room, a combination of movement,
stasis, space, and events, as the building has been assembled and
disassembled into a melancholic – and somewhat comic – character. The
concourse and its adjoining waiting rooms at the edge of the city appear
unfamiliar and unhomely.
The ladies’ waiting room is a dark interior with paneled walls. A
clock and a mantelpiece face each other below a kind of Wedgwood ceiling
in white and blue, where three silver chandeliers were once suspended from
the ceiling.18 Time slows as one enters the room, thickened with its
connection to the past of the railway station, a golden age of travel in the
history of Auckland City. Dark paneled walls, ornate windows, and a clock
reveal a transitory space in a transitory building for women who wait. The
name of the room memorializes movement, speed, and stillness. The grand
notions of progress, moment, and technology have become an uncanny
room for temporary occupation and a place to wait.
The waiting room is a semi-private transition to the fully public
space of the concourse, an upholstered, paneled haven. Some people will not
pass through; it is a place for waiting and a peculiar limbo used before or
after travel. The opportunity to construct narratives out of static scenes
through repetitive waiting and minimal signs of activity – the checking of a
clock or lipstick, an exchange of glances – sees the room as a threshold
between stasis and movement. A transient population is viewed from the
dark interior through to the bright light of the concourse, neither fully
public nor fully private, an indeterminate character.
Figure 13.2 Auckland Railway Station ladies’ waiting room
Image credit: Susan Hedges

The room is caught between different scaled times and spaces.

They meet one another in pockets of unrelated and ephemeral interiorities.
Social roles and conventions have regulated, determined, and produced the
interior; etiquettes and excluding boundaries construct and save the waiting
interior, a constructed possibility of privacy. The nature of stillness,
contemplative and instantaneous, the waiting room is positioned
indifferently in a moment of stasis, originally against taxis, tickets, guides,
and porters. Timetables, arrivals, and departures, the starting point for a
new journey, sees the waiting room as a moment of running in place. Today,
the room still waits, empty, caught singularly against a building that has
changed. The clock face disassociates time, spatially projected in vision in a
rationalized notational form. Vanquishing time, “the clock reduces fraught,
immanent time to a single transcendent time, it relates all events to a single
‘thin’ duration that is general – the same for everyone, for all processes.”19
For the Auckland Railway station:

There are sixty-two clocks in the station, all controlled from one
master clock in the stationmaster’s room. Two of the clocks are in
the vestibule and two in the concourse, one is in the general
waiting room, another in the ladies’ waiting room, and there is
one in the dining room and one in the coffee room. Clocks, indeed,
are all over the place, and one has scarcely to turn one’s head to
see the time.20

Waiting drawings
Architectural critic Sanford Kwinter writes in Architectures of Time that
modernism changed the theories of time “in which time no longer remains
spatialized in order to furnish the stable ground or backdrop for phenomena,
but meshes inextricably with them, and forms the new rule of their endless
and aleatory proliferation.”21 The calendar and the clock are ways of seeing
absolute time but with no physical reality. Plans, sections, and elevations are
horizontal-vertical slices in a moment of time, a representation of space
rather than time. What of the attempt to draw time, what of the gradual
changes to space through the design process and possible future
occupations?
The drawing set consists of seventy-eight drawings on linen sheets
beginning with site plans and track lines, finishing with detail to stanchions
and cross sections of the subway. Ornate, partially drawn details show
wooden panels and fluting, plastered false ceilings, pierced carvings, bronzed
radiator grills, beveled mirrors, marble mantelpiece, openings to the
concourse and ladies’ lavatory, and a place for the clock. Step by step,
decisions have been made and project plans redrawn and newly drawn.
Every stroke counts; every screw has to be in the right place. The waiting
room, like many interiors, is transient, subject to fashion and impermanent
materials, to short lives with frequent renovation. The ladies’ waiting room
appears caught between moving occupation, its surfaces emanating the
atmosphere of its past.
Architect Mark Wigley suggests that the surface wraps the
atmosphere: the outer visible layer of an invisible climate where architecture
moves from the initial rough sketch to finely calibrated working drawings;
the lines on paper without atmosphere cleared of any effect, nothing to
threaten the authority of the line.22 “Sheet No. 24 Detail to Ladies’ Waiting
Room” holds to norms and conventions, recording a finished room. Running
dimensions, tolerances, and building materials define the space between
building elements, their dimensions, the recording of the building, and the
coordination of the structure.23 Sheet No. 24 can also be seen as a decorative
surface that exudes an atmosphere that the viewer of the drawings is meant
to experience, something of the building’s atmosphere. Drawings are
atmosphere simulators, and even the most abstract lines produce sensuous,
unpredictable effects (Figure 13.3).24
The plan and section, to be imagined as horizontal or vertical
slices, simultaneously reveal solids and voids its surfaces and nodes, an
improbable abstraction representing a multitude of constructed spatial ideas;
the waiting line representing a surface that has remained still while the
neighboring interiors have shifted.

What of the waiting room?

For the remnants of the station, the loss itself is significant: a fragment of a
living thing that people once built their lives around, and of which nothing
much remains. The railway station, choked by the indifferent architecture of
apartments that surround it, has become a forlorn building and a
melancholic interior where the fixed and mobile converged.
With a partial dismembering of its interior, the building is a victim
of time and place; no throng of people, no busy porters, just an empty lobby
and an even emptier waiting room. The ladies’ waiting room still conjures a
scene where absence becomes the room’s principle feature. For part of its
history, the room held people, furniture, luggage, a warm radiator, and a
clock above the mantelpiece. The empty room and somewhat deserted
building offer a drought of sound, an aural desert where light enters
unobserved over unburdened chairs. The room is unable to be read as part of
a larger whole. Time has slowed, and passing circumstance sees other parts
of the building move in other directions. The waiting room has an
unwitnessed existence; walls, ceilings, doors, and windows are cupped
around a space and have held it for a while. Something else occupies this
mysterious emptiness and the different sounds that time makes in passing.

Figure 13.3 Detail to Sheet No. 24 Details of Ladies Waiting Room, August 1927, Scale ¾", ¼" and Full
Size, Gummer and Ford, Architects and Structural Engineers, Auckland Railway Station, 1010 × 640
linen, original with annotations. Image credit: Ministry of Architecture + Interiors Ltd.
 The waiting drawing intertwines, connects, and pulls taut. It
undoes and reconnects the different strands, a marker for something that
was emerging, something provisionally knitted together that has permitted
us to undo and redo in order to forestall premature closure. This chapter is
not an attempt to restage history as it was, but rather, it explores historical
knowledge as an ongoing reconstruction in the present located somewhere
between fact and fiction. The remnant lobby and waiting rooms, as points of
mobility and temporary rest, are caught in time where many voices have
just left the building. For Frascari,

The best part begins when the plan is torn to pieces by history,
defeated by events, chewed by time; when it reaches us as an
incomprehensible collage of forgotten memories as an unexpected
and enigmatic structure, as existential lust, as pure decoration.25

Notes
1 Howard Nemerov, The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1977), p. 459.
2 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2009), p. 108.
3 Karsten Harries, “Buildings and the Terror of Time”, Perspecta 19 (1982): 59–69, 64.
4 He goes on to suggest, “to pass the time (to kill time, expel it): the gambler. Time spills from his
every pore. – To store time as a battery stores energy: the flâneur. Finally, the third type: he who
waits. He takes in the time and renders it up in altered form – that of expectation.” Walter
Benjamin, The Arcades Project; Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin; Prepared

on the Basis of the German Volume Edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
1999), p. 107.
5 “Through a dialectical shift in the experience of time, and opening toward a change beyond all
prediction. Boredom is always the outward sign of unconscious happening… . One must not
waste time but must load time into oneself … ” Ref (5.1.162, 164) cited 7776 in: J. Rolleston, “The
Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project”, PMLA: Publications of the Modern

Language Association of America 104 (1 January 1989): 13–27, 7, 19.

6 Mieke Bal, Narratology, p. 108.
7 Derek Pigrum, “Drawing, Dasein and the ‘Ready-to-Hand’”, Studies in Material Thinking 4
(2010): 10.
8 Angela Eames, “Embedded Drawing”, in Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and

Research, ed. Steve Garner (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2008), p. 136.
9 Marco Frascari, “Lines as Architectural Thinking”, Architectural Theory Review 14, no. 3 (2009):
200–212, 201.
10 “Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology,
mythology, and philology from alien territories, architects should write and draw with
hesitation, discovering the multiple aspects of architectural graphesis, a generative graphic
process understood in its slow making.” Marco Frascari, “Lines as Architectural Thinking”,
Architectural Theory Review 14, no. 3 (2009): 200–212, 202.
11 Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow-Food for the

Architect’s Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 29.

12 William Henry Gummer and Charles Reginald Ford were prominent architects in Auckland,
beginning their practice in 1923 and finishing in 1961. Trained under the beaux-arts traditions at
the Royal Academy of arts, they are responsible for some of the architectural landmarks of
Auckland City, including the New Zealand Insurance Building (1914), the Guardian Trust
Building (1921), the Dilworth Building, (1926), and the Domain Wintergardens (1928).
13 “Railway Decoration”, New Zealand Herald LXVII, no. 20698 (18 October 1930): 13, Papers Past,
National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Ma¯tauranga o Aotearoa,
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH19301018.2.129 (accessed 28 December 2014).
14 Due to Auckland City Council’s decision not to proceed with an underground system, the
building due to its awkward location became dislocated from the city. The New Zealand Railway
service later abandoned this station for relocation to the Britomart Transportation Centre. It was
sold during the privatization of the rail network in the 1990s, and has since been converted to
student accommodation by ADC Architects.
15 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 86.

16 “Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga”, 1985, www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/93&sm=
(accessed 27 March 2015).
17 W.R. Davidson, “Auckland’s New Railway Station: The Northern Portal of the N.Z.R.”, The New

Zealand Railways Magazine 2, no. 6 (1 October 1927): 26–36, 32 (accessed 4 April 2014).
18 “Railway Decoration”, New Zealand Herald LXVII, no. 20698 (18 October 1930): 13, Papers Past,
National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Ma¯tauranga o Aotearoa,
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH19301018.2.129 (accessed 28 December 2014).
19 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time, p. 21.
20 “Spacious Railway Yard”, New Zealand Herald LXVII, no. 20729 (24 November 1930): 9,
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH19301124.2.168.22 (accessed 28 December 2014).
21 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time, p. 36.
22 Mark Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere”, Daidalos 68 (1998): 18–27, 26.
23 Anette Spiro and David Ganzoni, eds. The Working Drawing: The Architect’s Tool (Zurich: Park
Books, 2013), 145.
24 Mark Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere”, pp. 18–27, 27.
25 Marco Frascari, “Plans”, Terrazzo 1 (1988): 96–131, 97.
Chapter 14

Spatial seductions
The everyday interiorities of Marcel
Duchamp, Edward Kienholz, and Pepón
Osorio

Pablo Meninato

Its surface seems slick, perhaps reflective, often translucent, skin-

like, visually viscous; its form appears curved, ballooned, bulging,
segmental, warped, and twisted; its structure looks webbed, ribbed,
and vaulted; its materials might be synthetic, resinous, metallic,
and alloyed; its interior would be cave-like, womb-like, tunneled,
burrowed, and furrowed; its furniture and fittings are envisaged as
soft, almost porous in texture, cast or injected, molded, and
sensitive to heat and light… . The techniques of its design are
drawn … from animation software that generates its complex
forms with the help of digital avatars that work, independently of
the architect, to produce multiple iterations of possible

combinations.
1
With this somehow lyrical description, Anthony Vidler outlines one of the
principal tendencies in contemporary architecture, characterized for its
perennial intention of creating new and unprecedented production. A
similar survey of an array of recent design magazines reveals multiple
images of these sculptural forms with specific regard to interior architecture:
carved spaces, undulating ceilings, and patterned fabric surfaces. Referred to
as blobs, fabrications, topographies, parametrics, or late modernisms, these
projects convey the unlimited possibilities of innovation, whereby only
budgetary constraints would pose restrictions to such extraordinary
concepts.2
The origins of these emerging interior architectural explorations
may be traced to avant-garde theoretical influences of suprematism,
constructivism, and de Stijl in the early modern movement. These projects
are characterized by their relentless rejection of tradition, search for
abstraction, and creation of spatial forms devoid of figurative iconography.
As demonstrated in Theo van Doesburg’s manifesto Towards a Plastic
Architecture (1924), the Dutch de Stijl group developed what is perhaps the
clearest embodiment of similar objectives:

The new architecture possesses no single passive factor. It has

overcome the opening (in the wall). With its openness the window
plays an active role in opposition to the closedness of the wall
surface. Nowhere does an opening or a gap occupy the
foreground; everything is strictly determined by contrast.3

In a series of alternatives titled Contra-Construction, Van Doesburg explored

many of the ideas introduced in his manifesto. Similar to the modus
operandi of interior architecture, his project blurs the distinction between
inside and outside spaces, top and bottom, and front, side, and rear
elevations. One of its most extreme ideas was the elimination of the most
conventional architectural elements, such as doors and windows. The door,
for example, rather than being an element in its own right (consisting of a
frame and a panel) is conceived as the absence of a wall. Likewise, the
windows are not punctures in the wall, but rather openings that are left
between the planes. The project serves as a formal laboratory whose
ultimate goal appears to substantiate the claims of the manifesto.
This chapter analyzes the spatial works of Marcel Duchamp,
Edward Kienholz, and Pepón Osorio to unpack notions of inheritance,
adaptation, reuse, and social agency sharing common motivations with
interior architecture. The spatial/object-oriented process of these artists
offers a critical lens for the emerging theoretical discourse surrounding the
connected disciplines of interior architecture and adaptive reuse.

Duchamp: doors and windows stripped bare

Other artistic endeavors contemporary to these early twentieth century
developments manifested an alternate departure from conventional art
processes, whose results led away from avant-garde formalism. The works
and ideas of Marcel Duchamp represent an alternative avant-garde that
dwelled on conceptual and intellectual elaborations rather than formal and
visual conditions. Most of Duchamp’s work contradicted the most
fundamental notions of modern art, such as the rejection of the past or the
search for abstraction, proposing instead a fresh look at existing forms and a
reconsideration of the figurative component in art.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Duchamp started
exploring the subtle and hidden qualities of everyday objects and artifacts,
eventually speculating on the notion of designating some of those objects as
works of art. The anecdote in which Duchamp, together with Brancusi and
Léger, went to an aviation fair and, while standing in front of an airplane,
proposed, “Painting has come to an end. Who can do anything better than
this propeller? Can you?” is quite well known.4 Duchamp himself would
elaborate the answer to that question with his Roue de bicyclette (Bicycle
wheel, 1913). With this work he reiterates his fascination with industrial
artifacts, but his attention now resides in the displacement of those objects;
the wheel appears unexpectedly installed upside-down and bolted to a stool,
therefore removed from its expected function. This seemingly simple effect,
later known as “readymade,” redefined the most fundamental conception of
the artistic act, since the artist is no longer the one who produces the work
of art; instead, he chooses it.
Unlike other modern artists, Duchamp did not participate in
collaborative projects with architects or designers.5 It should be noted,
however, that many of his works display an original consideration of
architectural elements. In what could be interpreted as an alternative to Van
Doesburg’s experimental Contra-Construction house, several of Duchamp’s
works reinterpret the attributes of the most conventional architectural
openings, namely doors and windows. With his Fresh Widow (1920), a work
he later defined as “semi-readymade,” Duchamp challenges the function of
the architectural element, a subject that he would also consider with the
conception of his doors.6 On its first impression, Fresh Widow appears to be
a reduced scale version of traditional French window – hence the pun
implied in the title the work. Instead of glass, the panels were made of wood
and wrapped with black leather (a clear association with the widow),
therefore blocking the views. Fresh Widow could be interpreted as the re-
creation of one of the most conventional building components, but by
removing its expected function to see through, Duchamp deconstructs its
meaning, which is to say, the window does not work as it should. The title
and the actual artifact constitute a sort of oxymoron: an anti-window. With
these operations, Duchamp redefines the parameters that define the notion
of the window; deprived of its conventional function it is confirmed as an
idea, an abstract and intangible concept susceptible to innumerable
variations. In her book Marcel Duchamp, Anne D’Harnoncourt quotes
Duchamp’s comments in regards to his considerations of the window as an
idea:

I used the idea of the window to take a point of departure, as … I

used a brush, or I used a form, a specific form of expression, the
way oil paint is, a very specific term, specific conception. See, in
other words, I could have made twenty windows with a different
 idea in each one, the windows being called “my windows” the
way you say “my etchings”.7

Another architectural element persistently examined by Duchamp was the

door. Similar to his windows, the door is usually considered as a displaced
object, with its functions canceled or fundamentally altered. His Porte: 11
Rue Larrey (1927) serves as an example of this tactic, a work that displays a
quite distinctive feature: it allows for the panel to be simultaneously open or
closed in two adjacent openings. Because of its location and type of hinge,
the door opens toward a room while at the same time it closes toward the
other. As with most of his oeuvre, the piece doesn’t stand out for its
spectacularity, but for its subtle irony. The originality does not lie in the door
itself – in fact, it is a standard and conventional element – but in its corner
location and its particular swing and operation. With this simple procedure,
Duchamp achieved a seemingly impossible condition: a door is that is
simultaneously open and closed.
Duchamp’s assemblage Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz
d’éclairage [Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946–1966]
represents possibly his most famous door. Built in absolute secrecy during
the last twenty years of his life (first with his mistress Maria Martins, who
served as a model for the sculpture, then with his wife Teeny fulfilling that
role), it is certainly his most enigmatic work.8Étant donnés has been
interpreted as both an art piece that contradicts his earlier works and as the
conclusion of his oeuvre. On the one hand, the work can be seen as a denial
of the readymade, a departure from nonretinal art, and a retreat from
ambiguity; all aspects present in Duchamp’s previous works. On the other, it
is a work that, above anything else, interrogates what constitutes a work of
art, an ensemble of uncertainties to be unveiled or interpreted by the viewer.
Visiting Étant donnés for the first time can be a strange
experience: an old wood door without any indication or sign stands in what
seems to be a museum’s cul-de-sac. Only the attentive or informed visitor
will notice that the door has two small holes at eye level, so the only
possible action is to spy, to satisfy the voyeuristic curiosity and see what is
behind the door. When leaning in to peek through the holes, the surprise of
the observer may be overwhelming upon discovery of a hyperrealistic
sculpture, where a naked female body appears lying on the grass, her legs
splayed wide open while one of her hands holds a gas lamp. Étant donnés is
an invitation to a voyeuristic experience, capable of provoking shame,
rejection, or allure. We know Duchamp brought the double wood door from
Cadaqués, Catalunya; it was displaced into an unexpected context, where it
was reassembled and perforated.9 The operation shares some similarities
with Porte, 11 Rue Larrey; in both cases, there seems to be a renewal of
meaning without the involvement of a formal transformation. A comparison
between both of Duchamp’s doors offers a paradox: while Porte surprises
because it can be always open, Étant donnés was conceived to be
permanently closed. By inserting the gate into a new context and making it
inoperable, the architectural element doesn’t make sense. In its renewed
function, the door has become a miniature window.
With the notion of the assemblage, Duchamp introduced an
alternative approximation to what constitutes the realization of interior
space and the ambiguous status of architectural elements, where the
emphasis is placed in metaphorical and allegorical associations rather than
formal or spatial configurations. In its various iterations, modernism appears
to have been fixated on a continuous search for abstraction and an
irrepressible will for creating new forms, a position that overlooked themes
such as desire, eroticism, or unpredictable associations. One of the artistic
avenues that derives from Duchamp’s assemblages was installation art,
namely the tableau, which is fundamentally a three-dimensional collage
where the space or scene is transformed not by means of formalistic
manipulations, but through the disparate displacement and combination of
ordinary objects.

Kienholz: postcards from the hospital

An interesting characteristic of the contemporary tableau, particularly those
developed in North America, is that for many authors it became a vehicle
that facilitated exposing political or social issues. In the case of Edward
Kienholz and Pepón Osorio, two artists who were able to inject allusions to a
number of contemporary subjects into their installations in quite different
contexts (Kienholz in California, and Osorio in New York City and
Philadelphia), including the Vietnam War, racism, cultural displacements,
and the different forms of violence present in American society. While
Duchamp conceived the assemblage as a medium to convey the absurdities
of life and the latent power of the erotic, Kienholz and Osorio utilize similar
tactics to expose the apparent or implicit conflicts that pervade our
contemporary world.
Two tableaux by Kienholz suggest a number of correspondences
with Duchamp’s work, particularly his investigations with the effects
provoked by the voyeuristic experience. The State Hospital (1966) is
essentially a square, dirty-white metal container; one of its sides has a
permanently closed door, and to its left, a grey sign that reads “WARD 19.”
The single opening of this quasi-hermetic box is a small barred window
placed at eye level at the center of the door. Just like with Étant donnés, the
viewer’s only option is to approach the cut in the door and try to spy what is
hidden inside the container. In this case, the scene is provocative: a single
bulb illuminates two similar creatures lying on metal bunk beds, each
shackled with a leather strap to the bed’s frame. Both appear naked, with
their genitals exposed, their heads made from illuminated fish bowls (Figure
14.1). The scene conveys immense pain and sadness, perhaps a stripped-bare
reconstruction of the sadistic scenes that the artist witnessed himself.
Twenty years before the conception of the piece, Kienholz worked in a
mental hospital in Lake Medicine, Washington.10
If The State Hospital is about an encapsulated, enclosed, and
claustrophobic space, Portable War Memorial (1968) is a full-frontal,
overexposed tableau (Figure 14.2). The viewer’s first impression is of an
uncanny agglomeration of domestic furniture, consumer advertisements,
and political posters, all elements coexisting next to a banal and prosaic
lounge space. Upon closer inspection, the work denotes two clearly
differentiated zones. In the left zone, the attention is drawn to the iconic
image of marines embracing a flagpole, then to an inverted white cross on a
black ground, an “Uncle Sam” poster, and the disturbing presence of a
dwarfed figure encapsulated in a trash can (the image resembles the 1950s
iron lung treatment for polio), whose figure displays just head and legs
while a trashcan substitutes the rest of the body. This is the “space of war,”
which illustrates the different forms of violence associated with it, including
the subliminal glorification of the propaganda tokens. The right zone
displays several lounge tables and chairs, an umbrella, a Coca-Cola vending
machine, and the grainy image of a smiling couple sitting at a diner with a
leashed, expectant dog sitting at their feet. This is the area Kienholz
described as “business as usual,” the perverse and perhaps indispensable side
of American wars abroad.11
Figure 14.1 Edward Kienholz: The State Hospital (1968) Mixed media tableaux (245 × 360 × 295 cm)
Copyright Kienholz. Image credit: L.A. Louver, Venice, California. Collection of Moderna Museet,
Stockholm.
Figure 14.2 Edward Kienholz: Portable War Memorial, 1968. Mixed media tableaux 114 x 384 x 96 in
(289.6 × 975.4 × 243.8 cm)
Copyright Kienholz. Image credit: L.A. Louver, Venice, California. Collection of Museum Ludwig,
Cologne

Osorio: displacements in the Barrio

Pepón Osorio uses similar artistic tactics to those of Kienholz, although the
narratives investigated in each body of work are distinctly different. A
fundamental characteristic of Osorio’s work lies in his particular
background; born and raised in Puerto Rico, he moved to New York City in
his early twenties where he trained and practiced as a social worker. This
dual condition of outsider and listener of stories allows Osorio to reflect on
the conflicts that emerge within the Latin American diaspora in the United
States – an array of bilingual and bicultural communities variously defined
by race, ethnicity, prejudice, violence, and displacement.
Operating simultaneously as dioramas, spatial installations, or
episodic fragments of interior design, Osorio often refers to his work as
“social architecture,” a notion that becomes palpable in his installation Badge
of Honor (1995), consisting of two adjacent rooms, each one representing
contrasting realities (Figure 14.3).12 The first is “the father’s room,” a prison
cell characterized by its austere minimalism framed by the black iron bars of
the permanently closed prison gate. The other is the “son’s room,” a space
saturated with typical teenage belongings and objects, such as a red bicycle,
a beach ball, posters, trophies, picture frames, and a Puerto Rican flag. The
massive wall that separates the two spaces may be interpreted as both the
impediment and the link between both characters. It may be considered as
the symbol of this implausible connection, since each side of the partition
displays a projection of father and son talking to each other (or to
themselves?), sharing their feelings, thoughts, and longings. The title of the
piece is disturbingly ironic, referring to the eerie pride evident in some kids
whose fathers are incarcerated, a “badge” that ostensibly indicates the
courage of those serving time.

Figure 14.3 Pepón Osorio: Badge of Honor, 1995. Mixed media installation.

Image credit: Pepón Osorio

If Badge of Honor dwells about interiority, and even

claustrophobic settings, then Lonely Soul (2008) is about a transient urban
structure. According to Osorio, the assembly was inspired after observing an
Afro-Caribbean woman selling piraguas (ice cream cones) on a hot summer
day in North Philadelphia.13 The subject is human displacement, a notion
translated into dislocating elements and objects whose functions appear
altered or removed. While the pushcart may evoke the iconic image of the
casita, or children’s house, its tilted position conveys a sense of instability as
if it were floating in the waters of the Caribbean. The underarm crutches,
instead of helping injured or handicapped people, have become the columns
that support a free-standing – though skewed – domestic construction. In
what may be interpreted as a subtle homage, the Duchampean bicycle wheel
does not appear to turn; instead, it has become a dysfunctional and
ornamental element.
These passages of installation art, particularly those associated
with the tactics of the tableau, could pose a meaningful influence to the
current developments in interior architecture and adaptive reuse.14 Both
Kienholz’s and Osorio’s works demonstrate that the formation of interior
space is not necessarily – or exclusive – the gestation of new forms, but that
it can also contemplate a range of mimetic tactics such as the displacement,
rotation, fragmentation, or dislocation of ordinary objects and elements. It is
clear that the listed “interiorizing” tactics are typically developed in a similar
terrain as that of interior architecture, where spaces are usually discernible
by determined boundaries and meaning is affected by the placement of
architectural elements and everyday objects. Conceiving space through
scenographic means obliges the viewer to think of interiority as the site of
reassembling, whereby the open quality of displacement takes the place of
unity.
Edward Kienholz once said, “the self-concept of our society can be
inferred from its garbage,” a provocative thought that may also be
interpreted as a reconsideration of the notion of junk, or the range of
disposable elements and objects created by our culture.15 Kienholz’s idea
suggests a clear affinity with Robert Venturi’s reassessment of the notion of
convention:

An architect should use convention and make it vivid. I mean he

should use convention unconventionally… . I do not refer to the
sophisticated products of industrial design, which are usually
beautiful, but to the vast accumulation of standard, anonymously
designed products connected with architecture and construction,
and also to commercial display elements which are positively
banal or vulgar in themselves and are seldom associated with
architecture.16

What Venturi suggests is essentially what Kienholz and Osorio demonstrate

in their work: a full reconsideration of the value of ordinary, disposable, and
conventional objects. This position, it could be argued, also conveys the
implications of unsustainability. We know the world is saturated with
objects; most of them are likely to end up in landfills. Rather than dismissing
(throwing away) those things, the challenge is how to discover alternate and
poetic meanings in them. Interior architecture, like installation art, offers a
spatial platform for the assemblage of elements: walls, ceilings, doors,
windows, and furniture.17 Installation art demonstrates how the significance
of those elements may be altered or modified depending on their placement
in relation to the space and to other objects; rather than imposing the
necessity of designing new elements, interior architecture and adaptive reuse
may also consider strategies of redefining existing elements, assuming
tactics such as collage, displacement, fragmentation, or ready-made.
Thinking of creative means for reusing and recycling existing objects,
elements, and buildings could lead to a reconsideration of interior
environments in a more sustainable, suggestive, and poetic manner.18
Notes
1 Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, 1930–

1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 178.

2 Ibid., p. 179.
3 Theo Van Doesburg, “Towards a Plastic Architecture” (1924), in Programs and Manifestoes on

20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrad (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), p. 79.
4 Anecdote quoted in various texts, among them Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New
York: H. Holt, 1996), p. 137.
5 There is an extensive list of collaborations between artists and architects through the 20th
century, certainly starting with the Bauhaus, where Gropius included this idea as one of the
school’s main goals. Some of the most well-known pairs of artist-architect collaborations are
Amédée Ozenfant and Fernand Léger, Antoni Gaudí, Salvador Dali, Alfonso Iannelli, and Frank
Lloyd Wright; and more recently Frank Gehry and Claes Oldenburg.
6 For a description of the concept of the “assisted readymade,” see Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking

Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), p.
137.
7 Quoted in Anne D’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1973), p. 295.
8 In his biography, Tomkins develops an extensive review of the passionate relationship between
Duchamp and the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins. See Tomkins, Duchamp, pp. 353–357.
9 Tomkins reports that Duchamp brought it from the region of Cadaqués, Catalunya. Tomkins,
Duchamp, p. 431.
10 In her review about “The State Hospital,” art critic Shelly Couvrette comments about Kienholz’s
experience working in a psychiatric ward in 1947. See www.cat-sidh.net/Writing/Kienholz.html
(accessed 22 February 2015).
11 In a letter to Artforum, Kienholz describes his ideas for this work. See Artforum #7 (Summer
1969): pp. 4–5.
12 González establishes a correspondence between Joseph Beuys’s “social sculpture” and Osorio’s
“social architecture,” see Jennifer A. González, Pepón Osorio (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Chicano
Studies Research Center, 2013), p. xi.
13 Commented in González, Pepón Osorio, p. xi.
14 The term “passages” refers to the seminal text by Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture
(New York: Viking, 1977).
15 Quoted in Michael Schulze, “The Forming Process of Assemblages and Objects”, Leonardo 23, no.
4 (1990): 373.
16 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1977; Orig. ed. 1966), p. 42.
17 Probably the most remarkable architectural examples that explore the notion of assemblage of
ordinary elements and objects are the “social explorations” of Samuel Mockbee and the Rural
Studio in Hale County, Alabama, and Teddy Cruz’s collage-like constructions in the Tijuana-San
Diego region.
18 Ellen Dunham-Jones, for example, discusses the opportunities offered by building and site
retrofitting in suburbia. See Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, Retrofitting Suburbia:

Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
Chapter 15

Inside the prefab house

Deborah Schneiderman

The investigation into modern prefabrication has enjoyed much attention in

the architecture community for over a century, but until very recently, the
literature documenting its significance has contained a notable omission.
The techniques and applications of prefabrication of the interior have been
evident for thousands of years. Prefabrication in the built environment owes
much of its advancement to concepts investigated in terms of interior
architectural elements and components, and thus it deserves closer
examination. The evolution of the prefab house decidedly includes the
development of ideas and integration of prefabricated interior components.
The notion of prefabrication, and particularly the prefabricated dwelling,
receives continued attention by architects and designers for reasons of
efficiency and affordability of construction coupled with a current shift
toward, or return to, sustainable technologies, designs, and environments.1
Historically, prefabricated interior elements and constructions
have been integral to the development of the prefabricated house.
Introduced in 1833 in England, the Manning Portable Colonial Cottage is the
first documented prefabricated house. It was transported to Australia for the
construction of new settlements.2 Houses like this considered the building
envelope – though the advent of interior prefabricated elements within the
prefabricated house would soon follow. Innovations in the prefabricated
interior of the prefab house ranged from individual elements to complete
assemblages. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Sears, Roebuck
and Company kit houses introduced an early prefab innovation: interior
lining that was essentially an early form of gypsum, which reduced
construction time of the kit-based house. Although an optional choice for
the home buyer, this innovative material could replace internal partitions
made of traditional lath and plaster.3 Even Frank Lloyd Wright turned to
prefabrication; he installed a prefabricated frieze in his own home and
studio in Oak Park, Illinois. An early example of a complete interior
prefabricated assemblage is R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Bathroom
(1936). The bathroom was designed in four basic sections, each of which was
stamped out of sheet metal. Extremely efficient in its design, this bathroom
included a tub/shower module and a lavatory/toilet module – all contained
within five square feet of floor space and weighing only about as much as a
conventional bathtub.4 This bathroom represents a forerunner that
influentially fueled the subsequent specialty prefabrication market. It serves
as a precursor to the pod bathrooms currently being designed and installed
in buildings today.5
There are many examples of innovative, singular prefabricated
elements within interior environments. This investigation looks at three
typologies where the interior environment is truly integrated in the
conceptualization of the prefabricated house and the significance of that
integration. These houses are uniquely representative of an interior
architectonic that is integral to the design of the prefabricated structure as a
whole. The Lustron House, a mass-produced prefab introduced by Carl
Strundtland in 1946,6 integrates a conceptual link between the house’s
structure, interior, and exterior as expressed through material and finish.7
The Furniture House series, an ongoing prefabrication investigation, elevates
individual and commonplace interior element of storage furniture to
multifunctional elements of structure, interior, and exterior.8 The Composite
House, an unbuilt project house, conceptualizes assemblages as structural
elements, which are at once interior and exterior elements.9 These three
houses share the notion that prefabrication was as critical to the interior as it
was to the exterior.

Lustron House: a closed-system prefabricated

home
The interior elements of the Lustron House were developed as a system of
prefabricated modular units that not only act as dividing or space-making
elements, but also function as programmed space, shelving, cabinetry,
closets, and vanities.10 In an article about the Lustron House, Wolfe and
Garfield note, “Twenty percent of the wall space was devoted to such built-
in cabinets, dressers, and closets, manufactured as complete units and
plugged into the house at the building site.”11 As such, this modularization of
the prefabricated parts brings a furnishing element to the level of
programmed prefabricated space. Though the panelized interior assemblages
did not function as structural elements themselves, later unbuilt iterations of
the project utilized the untapped strength of the steel panels as structural
elements.12
The Lustron House was certainly not the first example of a
prefabricated steel home, but it was the first to embrace the materiality of
prefabrication. In some of the early prefab homes around the time of the
Great Depression (e.g., the Armco-Ferro House in Cleveland), the exteriors
consisted of prefabricated steel systems. However, the interiors were not
prefabricated and called for traditional plaster walls that required standard
on-site construction.13 The prefabricated Motohome (1933) was built with
steel exterior panels and boasted a modern exterior façade. The interior of
this house incorporated elements of prefabrication – a highly touted kitchen
element and a novel built-in cigarette lighter. Interior surfaces demonstrated
innovation, yet featured finishes reminiscent of familiar interior materials,
such as plaster and hardwood.14 The interior of the Lustron House was a
rather radical departure from its site-built counterpart. The interior wall
panels and built-in furniture were manufactured from the same porcelain-
enameled steel panels that covered the exterior and roof, establishing a clear
visual interior-to-exterior connection. The materials were experienced in
their true form, and unlike the Motohome and other prefab houses of this
era, there was no attempt to hide the metal used as the interior wall and
cabinet finish.15 The homeowners, in many cases, embraced this unique
metal finish, utilizing magnets throughout the interior.16
The interior of the standard model consisted of eight prefabricated
cabinets and closets in addition to the plain interior wall panels.17 All wall
panels in the original design were non-structural and erected over a
structural steel framing system.18 The Lustron House was packaged with
several prefabricated space-making elements, including a bedroom vanity
wall unit that eliminated the need to buy a clothes dresser, and a built-in
china cabinet that formed the wall assemblage between the dinette and the
kitchen (Figure 15.1). As such, the interior elements defined space and
provided the living program.
The house also included mechanical innovations to make the lives
of the homeowners easier, such as a built-in kitchen exhaust and an
undercounter all-in-one dishwasher/clothes washer (although apparently
neither functioned especially well).19 The interior and exterior of the house
were designed and manufactured within a “closed system.”20 The elements
and components of the structural system, including everything from
windows to bathtubs, were designed specifically for the house. In what
would ultimately amount to a serious limitation, structural elements meant
for other homes could not be used for the Lustron House, nor could elements
of the Lustron House be used in other homes. The Lustron factory even had
a machine whose sole function was to produce a bathtub at a fraction of the
cost of the traditional tub; unfortunately, the Lustron tub was designed on
the dimension of 5 feet 1.5 inches as opposed to the standard 5-foot tub. In
order for the manufacturing to be cost effective, they would have to produce
twice as many tubs as the Lustron houses needed, which was impossible as
this idiosyncratic dimension did not meet the dimensions of the typical
tub.21
The design of the Lustron House proved to be manifestly
innovative in its expression of interior prefabricated elements. Though it
exhibited a visual connection between the design of the interior and the
exterior, a true integration would have been in a structural connection
between these prefabricated interior elements and the core construction of
the house. This lack of appropriate engineering may have been one of the
downfalls of the Lustron House. Highly redundant in nature, the separate
framing and panel systems did not otherwise take advantage of the
structural capabilities of the steel. The framing system, in fact, was
determined by Koch to be unnecessary. In his 1950 redesign of the house, he
developed an integrated panel that acted simultaneously a structure, and
interior and exterior surface.22 The Lustron Company folded in 1950, and
Koch’s ideas never actualized beyond the drawing board.23 Although the
goal of true mass production was not achieved, the integration and
significant placement of the prefabricated components informed the
evolution of the prefabricated interior.
Figure 15.1 Lustron House, 104 State Park Road, Beverly Shores, Porter County, IN. Prefabricated
porcelain-enameled steel built-in china cabinet/wall assemblage.
Image credit: public domain

Furniture House: an interiorized system for

custom house prefabrication
Shigeru Ban’s Furniture House relied on the prefabrication of what is
typically considered an object of interior design: furniture. Furniture House
elevated the status of furniture from an object added to a room to a space-
defining and structural element. Furniture House 1 was completed in 1995
and five houses of this typology have been completed to date.24 Ban’s
development of furniture as a means for structure formed a natural
progression in his investigations into unique forms of structure. An earlier
project premiered the repetition of recycled paper tubes.25 Ban’s exploration
of alternative construction methods remains ongoing; he applied his learned
lessons to the use of prefabricated concrete piles for structure in the PC Pile
House.26 After these houses, Ban continued with a succession of case-study
houses that allowed him to further test alternative structures. In the design
of Furniture House, Ban coupled his structural investigations with the
tragedies of Japan’s earthquakes – where falling furniture caused many
casualties. The idea for the first Furniture House was conceptualized when
Ban designed the “Library of a Poet,” in which he utilized a paper tube truss
construction coupled with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. From the design and
construction of the library project, Ban realized the possibility that furniture
could be designed to serve as the primary structure.27
For the fabrication of the first Furniture House, Ban collaborated
with a furniture manufacturer. The component elements were completely
manufactured and finished, inside and out, off-site. In many instances, the
furniture elements function simultaneously as interior, exterior, and
structure, containing insulating materials and having both interior and
exterior finishes as necessary. The construction of Furniture House
reconceptualized the traditional hierarchy of building. In this design, the
hierarchy is eliminated and “furniture and house are one.”28
Fundamentally, the Furniture House is designed as a conceptual,
realized system for the construction of a house. It follows a wood frame,
two-by-two typology, but contains enhanced strength. The construction of
the home is based on the module of the furniture elements. The dimensions
of the units used in this house are 240 centimeters high, 90 meters wide,
with a depth of 45 centimeters for bookcases and 70 centimeters for other
units. Each unit weighs approximately 80 kilograms so that a single person
can move it.29 Several types of furniture modules can be programmed into
the houses. There are many benefits to this construction typology; reduced
site construction time, reduced leftover materials that require removal from
the site, and a reduced amount of labor to build the house. Off-site
production was specifically chosen because building the structural furniture
in a controlled environment permits a higher level of craft and efficiency.30
Ban has proceeded to design and build several iterations of
Furniture House. Notably, Furniture House 2 was designed as a prototype for
a two-story house. The structural furniture on the first floor carries the load
of the second floor, and second floor furniture elements carry the roof load
(Figure 15.2).31

Figure 15.2 Furniture House 2 exploded axonometric depicting structural furniture elements; Shigeru
Ban Architects
Composite House: a non-hierarchical unit-based
building system
The Composite House, designed by Ferda Kolatan and Erich Schoenenberger
of su11 architecture+design, comprises an inherently flexible prefabricated
housing system.32 Given that its organization and the parts are integral and
connected, this design ethos is equally employed in both the interior
architecture of the house and the exterior. The house is a prototype, unbuilt
concept that is truly a culmination of this investigation. Add-ons, the
architects’ name for the prefabricated multi-programmed units, are
“components designed in response to specific programmatic and
atmospheric needs.”33 Add-ons carry the capacity to have walls, stairways,
doors, or storage attached to them.
The minimization of the importance of the house’s shell is of
particular interest in the Composite Housing project. The system is one that
is inherently fluid and quite unlike the largely fixed systems of typical
construction – or even most prefabs. The architects, in a sense, divorce
themselves from the role of designing the building or shell and allow the
resultant exterior to be derived based on chosen, mostly interior, program. A
local contractor would build the house skeleton (as it is termed by the
architects) from wood or steel. Each homeowner, through the selection and
combination of their preferred add-ons, would then personally design the
house. The interior and exterior architecture are combined into units by the
homeowner to meet their particular programmatic needs. There is a
dimensional system to enable design customization and configuration for
kitchens and bathrooms through a modular unit: one unit for a toilet, two
for a sink cabinet, three for a shower, and four for a bathtub. The elements
are intended for manufacture with an epoxy finish, one that would wear
equally well and meet the needs of both the interior and exterior
environment, balancing them hierarchically. The designers further connect
the interior architecture with that of the exterior through the composite
system which emphasizes the importance of interior habitation in the design
of the add-ons. “Surface and texture are integral to the design,
acknowledging the emotional connection people have with materials.”34 The
house celebrates everyday elements that are functionally critical to the
interior of the home like stairs, cabinets, and storage spaces. Rather than a
predetermined take on how individuals will live within the house, the add-
ons encourage the homeowner to consider the livability possibilities of the
interior of the home and select and arrange the units accordingly.
The add-ons are designed to be interchangeable, providing the
ability to reconfigure elements over time as necessary and/or desired. The
architects consider the units as a habitable puzzle consisting of several
functions, including object, furniture, and space (Figure 15.3).35 Color
choices, typically considered a decorative finish, are integral to this project,
applied largely as coding devices that define the planes and use of the
elements.
This system has been reconceived several times. In addition, the
architects have designed a second system called Composite Architecture,
which combines furniture and architecture systems into inter-programmed
space comprised of sofa and bed units, table and storage units, and other
components. These elements are purely interior prefabricated assemblages
and exist without connection to an architecture. The elements do not need to
be used within a specific structure and could be plugged into existing space
to create true interior prefabrication. The system, like the Composite House,
is customizable; the homeowner selects and previews the functionality,
materials, and colors through an online interface.
Figure 15.3 Sample Composite House add-on units, su11 architecture+design

Upon close investigation, each of the houses secures a place of

prominence for interior elements within the prefabricated home. All three
houses exhibit a strong connection between interior and exterior and
represent an evolution of the integration of prefabricated interior
components within the prefabricated house. All three houses consider the
notion of the prefabricated assemblage by means of programmed interior
elements and space-making devices. The projects are uniquely
interconnected through unified interior-exterior materials, while interior
elements are elevated for programmatic necessity rather than decoration. In
the latter two projects, the Furniture Houses and Composite Houses, interior
elements have a further architectonic role as they are functionally the
structure in addition to programmed interior space.
Though the Lustron House did not actually elevate the interior
built-ins or assemblages to the level of structure, the connection of interior,
exterior, and structure was implied through materiality and the space-
making nature of the built-in units. The Koch redesign of the structure did
begin to explore the structural nature of the panels, which could be
considered a precursor to a structural interior assemblage.36 The Furniture
House, in particular, questions the traditional hierarchy of design elements,
elevating furniture to be the structural element without which the house
would not exist.37 The Composite House, a prototype concept, is truly a
culmination of this investigation. Each contain composite elements of
interior, furniture, structure, and exterior.38 The traditional design
hierarchies have been eliminated, and the resultant form exists as an
equalization of all elements.
An overarching result of the use of prefabricated elements is of
particular interest in today’s receptive climate toward sustainability. For
example, building off-site has demonstrated reduced material waste and
labor costs, while the fabrication of modular, transportable, or
interchangeable elements allows for adaptability and reuse, increasing the
life of all the elements.39 Further investigations into prefabrication of such
interior elements by interior architects in a purposefully sustainable manner
will continue to advance the significant territory of prefabricated interior
architecture.

Notes
1 Deborah Schneiderman, Inside Prefab: The Ready-Made Interior (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2012), pp. 8–11.
2 Colin Davies, The Prefabricated Home (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), pp. 47–48.
3 Katherine H. Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl, Houses by Mail: A Guide to Houses From Sears,

Roebuck and Company (Washington, DC: Preservation Press, 1986), pp. 29–30.
4 Alden Hatch, Buckminster Fuller: At Home in the Universe (New York: Crown Publishers, 1974),
pp. 146–147.
5 Davies, The Prefabricated Home, pp. 25–26.
6 Douglas Knerr, Suburban Steel: The Magnificent Failure of the Lustron Corporation, 1945–1951

(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), pp. 78–79.

7 Thomas T. Fetters, The Lustron Home: The History of a Postwar Prefabricated Housing

Experiment (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2002), pp. 18–30.

8 Matilda McQuaid, Shigeru Ban (London: Phaidon, 2003), pp. 166–169.
9 Jill Herbers, Prefab Modern (New York: Harper Design International, 2004), pp. 130–131.
10 Barry Bergdoll, Peter Christensen, Ron Broadhurst, and Museum of Modern Art, Home Delivery:
Fabricating the Modern Dwelling (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), pp. 102–104.
11 Tom Wolfe and Garfield Leonard, “‘A New Standard for Living’: The Lustron House, 1946–1950”,
Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 3 (1989): 51–61.
12 H. Ward Jandl, John A. Burns, and Michael Auer, Yesterday’s Houses of Tomorrow: Innovative

American Homes 1850 to 1950 (Washington, DC: Preservation Press, 1991), pp. 197–199.
13 Fetters, The Lustron Home, p. 8.
14 Jandl, Burns, and Auer, Yesterday’s Houses of Tomorrow, pp. 141–145.
15 Fetters, The Lustron Home, pp. 12–14.
16 Jim Zarolli, “Prefab: From Utilitarian Home to Design Icon”, NPR Morning Edition, 2008,
www.npr.org.
17 Wolfe and Leonard, “‘A New Standard for Living’”, pp. 56–57.
18 Carl Koch and Andy Lewis, At Home With Tomorrow (New York: Rinehart, 1958), pp. 115–117.
19 Jandl, Burns, and Auer, Yesterday’s Houses of Tomorrow, p. 194.
20 Wolfe and Leonard, “‘A New Standard for Living’”, p. 56.
21 Jandl, Burns, and Auer, Yesterday’s Houses of Tomorrow, p. 196.
22 Koch and Lewis, At Home With Tomorrow, pp. 116–118.
23 Jandl, Burns, and Auer, Yesterday’s Houses of Tomorrow, p. 125.
24 McQuaid, Shigeru Ban, pp. 167–168.
25 Dana Buntrock, “Shigeru Ban: Ethical Experimenter”, Architecture 85 (October 1996): 104–109.
26 Riichi Miyake, “Shigeru Ban as an Empiricist”, The Japan Architect 30 (Summer, 1998): 4–13.
27 McQuaid, Shigeru Ban, p. 167.
28 Miyake, “Shigeru Ban as an Empiricist”, p. 8.
29 Shigeru Ban, “Shigeru Ban: House of Furniture, Yamanakako-Mura, Yamanashi”, GA Houses 47
(1995): 56–59.
30 McQuaid, Shigeru Ban, p. 168.
31 Yasuhiro Teramatsu, “Furniture House #2”, Japan Architect 30 (1998): 54–55.
32 su11 Architects, “Composite House”, su11, 2008, www.su11.com/projects/composite-house/.
33 Ibid.
34 Andrew Blauvelt, Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life, 1st ed. (Minneapolis, MN:
Walker Art Center, 2003), p. 228.
35 Ian Luna, New York: Architecture of a City (New York: Rizzoli International Publications Inc.,
2003), p. 237.
36 Koch and Lewis, At Home With Tomorrow, pp. 116–117.
37 Ban, “Shigeru Ban”, pp. 56–59.
38 Herbers, Prefab Modern, p. 130.
39 Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, Refabricating Architecture: How Manufacturing

Methodologies Are Poised to Transform Building Construction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), p.
43.
Chapter 16

Oceanic interiorities

Sarah Treadwell

Stepping precariously into the sea, across a littoral of dried weed,

sharp shells, and plastic, is a moment of slight anxiety and
clenched muscles. The water rises up the body as the beach slopes
down; lifted, immersed, and changed in temperature, the body is
held by surrounding water. To float, buoyed up by contouring
liquid of a silky kind, the sky dazzling, inspected by cruising
seagulls, requires trust and relaxation undermined by recurrent
images of the unknown in deep water.

To push into the depths accelerating away from sweet air into a
greenish, blurred world with limited horizons, briefly sea creature,
cetaceous and skillful, is some sort of amniotic return, and an
acknowledgement of complicity; human bodies mix salt and water.
Out of your depth in many senses the sea lifts and submerges;
dragging on flesh, it seems reluctant to release you back into
everyday life. You carry the sea with you.
To live in the South Pacific is to be conscious of the watery nature of
interiority. Epeli Hau’ofa, a Fiji Islander, writer, and anthropologist of
Tongan descent writing for Oceanic people, starts his text, The Ocean in Us,1
with words from poet Teresia Teaiwa: “We sweat and cry salt water, so we
know that the ocean is really in our blood.”2 On the other side of the world,
British historian Philip Hoare, in his book The Sea Inside, wrote of his daily
immersion in northern oceans and his longing for engagements with the
deep waters that maintain the globe.3 These recurrent references to an
interior relationship with the sea suggest a spatiality that this chapter will
traverse.
Water covers approximately seventy percent of the earth’s surface.
The salt-laden oceans constitute the most extensive interiors that we
confront, and on which we depend. Because we have the sea within us and
because we also fear immersion (in the collective) in death, the sea is
envisaged in this chapter as a spatial condition that epitomizes our
vacillations between individuality and collectivity. This conflicted
relationship is explored through the making of a written image of the space
of the sea; an image of oceanic spatiality constructed by following threads of
writing that exhibit a sensitivity to the vast interior space that we exploit,
pollute, and endlessly imagine as escape.
Speculating on conditions of oceanic space that acknowledge the
shared and discrete natures of bodies and objects of the world, the written
image addresses the inevitable tension between the spaces of our collective
alignment and the temporality of individual lives. Each being in the world –
human and nonhuman – tends to be resistant to being taken over. Each body
can also be seen as open to combined engagements through the action of
work and negotiation.4 To swim in the sea is to form, momentarily and
warily, a collaborative relationship with the medium while still maintaining
our breathing selves. To undertake oceanic writing is to recall and enact that
collaboration.
Artist Robert Smithson shaped earth and water into a spiral with
the understanding that there was a connection between the Red Sea and
blood;5 oceanic writing acknowledges the scalar shifts between human and
marine bodies, both liquid and teeming with life. Such oceanic interiority is
maintained by permeable membranes (skin and shore) that permit
separation while allowing connections at individual and global scales. These
encounters have ethical and formal conditions. The immersive interior is, in
one sense, a uterine space; a space of beginning that endlessly repeats the
ordinary dramas of life and recognizes an exteriority within that cannot be
expelled.

Interior geometries and porous conditions

Epeli Hau’ofa ends his influential essay, “Our Sea of Islands,” with the
following words addressed to the people of Oceania, cast by the West as
isolated inhabitants on small and insignificant islands in a vast sea. Hau’ofa
instead understands the inhabitants as part of an expansive liquid terrain, a
surface that is traversed with skillful navigation:

Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and

generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and
regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are
the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use
it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine
us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spaces that we
have resisted accepting as our sole appointed places and from
which we have recently liberated ourselves.6

Hau’ofa points to a vital enlargement of space – oceanic space as expansive,

extending past the terrestrial ground of islands to make connections of all
sorts. The skills of navigation were recorded in the sand and in stick charts,
precise spatial descriptions of bodies moving under a rotating sky in a wide-
horizoned ocean. The stick charts describe geometries of the surface of the
sea aligned to time, with marks that record moving islands, rising stars, and
planets. Hau’ofa points out that prior to European arrival in the Pacific,
“Boundaries were not imaginary lines in the ocean, but rather points of
entry that were constantly negotiated and even contested. The sea was open
to anyone who could navigate his way through.”7 The sea is porous, map-
like, narrated, and figured.

On the brink (of falling)

Philip Hoare wrote on his daily practice of swimming in The Sea Inside:

That fixity of sea and sky is a supreme deception… . The horizon is

only an invention of our eyes and brains as we seek to make sense
of that immensity and locate ourselves within it. The sea solicits
such illusions. It takes color from the clouds, becomes a sky fallen
to earth; it only suggests what it might or might not contain. Little
wonder that people once thought that the sun sank into the sea,
just as the moon rose out of it.8

On the surface, thickened with life, reactive to elsewhere, Hoare sees hints of
a condition beneath the skin that is at times a mirror. Invitation and
unreliability collect in his descriptions of the surface; meretricious,
ornamental, the sky falls. Across the surface that stretches along the
curvature of the earth, Hoare slides the horizon, which, while imitating
closure, lures mind and body around the globe. Standing on the edge of a
northern island, he notes:

The sea defines us, connects us, and separates us. Most of us
experience only its edges, our available wilderness on a crowded
island… . Perpetually renewing and destroying, the sea proposes a
beginning and an ending, an alternative to our landlocked state, an
existence to which we are tethered when we might rather be set
free.9

Hoare reflects on oceanic, tidal oscillations that make and remove; his sea
provides an image of the fluctuations of life: sailors might drown, but
Aphrodite was born of sea foam, the floating sperm of Uranus, according to
Hesiod.10 For Hoare, the sea is shaped as a sharp-edged image of freedom
opening into the world.
Teresia K. Teaiwa, in an essay on native Pacific cultural studies,
“Lo(o)sing the Edge,” also tests the limits of oceanic edges. She writes of the
edge of the ocean as a place to stand, a point to look out and back from and
as a critical or cutting edge. She asks:

Is the edge always held at the edges of the Pacific? Is it possible to

have an edge on the world’s largest ocean? Epeli Hau’ofa says that
‘our edge is the ocean’ (Waddell, Naidu, and Hau’ofa 1993). No
other people have had their history shaped so much by an ocean.
The islands of Kiribati and Tuvalu may not exist in thirty years’
time. ‘The ocean has the edge.’11

The ocean in Teaiwa’s image is not only the recipient of history, but also its
instigator and participant. Temperatures of the world have been raised, but
it is the ocean itself that will pour across the reefs and beaches of Pacific
islands, removing traces of past and present occupation. The ocean will
change the histories of Pacific people; it is not possible, Teaiwa suggests, for
people to have an edge on the Pacific. Herman Melville in Moby Dick, or: the
White Whale gave that ocean a heartbeat and divinity. “Thus this
mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world’s bulk about; makes all coasts one
bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.”12

Dreaming escape
From the edge, an opening into the surface conditions of the sea prevails; we
look out to a pulsing liquid skin that surrounds us. To fall into water is the
stuff of fantasies and nightmares; sailors, those who navigate instrumentally,
fear death by drowning while things beneath the surface disappear from
consciousness, surfacing only as fleeting anxieties and desires. Attentive, no
doubt, to the lines of reflection and dispersal that pattern and ornament the
sea. As a constrained child, John Ruskin, author of The Seven Lamps of
Architecture (1849), gazed out from the edge.
Rosalind Krauss has told the story of Ruskin as a child watching
the sea. Her reportage evokes his restricted and constrained childhood that
left him with the gift of observation. Ruskin says:

But before everything, at this time, came my pleasure in merely

watching the sea. I was not allowed to row, far less to sail, nor to
walk near the harbor alone; so that I learned nothing of shipping
or anything else worth learning, but spent four or five hours every
day in simply staring or wondering at the sea.13

The small, immobilized boy is aligned with the beat of the sea received only
in his stillness, immobility undone imperceptibly by the waves, like the
tides. The blood in his system barely circulates with the slow rhythm of
passing time. An image of elsewhere, a removal from the social, the sea is
pictured as “opening into a visual plenitude that is somehow heightened and
pure, both a limitless expanse and a sameness, flattening it into nothing, into
the no-space of sensory deprivation.”14 Krauss’s words, like the waves under
observation, construct the sea as a neutral space for wondering. The
detached plane of the surface offers some sort of compensation for enforced
restraint.

Beat of blood and guilt

The contemplation of the sea, childhood troughs and peaks of desire,
inscribed in a wash of salty liquid, would in Ruskin’s adulthood turn vividly
to color in response to Joseph Mallard William Turner’s painting, “Slave
Ship.”15 Ruskin wrote:

Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast
upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing
like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst
 the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in
lines of blood … and cast far along the desolate heave of the
sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.16

Waves with no substance merge with the miasma of the scene. Stained and
flaming, the sea carries the guilt of the slave ship, tinted with the blood of
those cast into the water; waves as a funeral procession, marking passing
lives, approaching death. The sea is described by Ruskin with reference to
the guilt of Macbeth:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather The

multitudinous seas in incarnadine, Making the green one red.17

Spreading guilt has replaced water’s virtues of cleansing and purifying.

Marcus Wood, writing on the visual representation of slavery and Turner’s
painting of a slave ship, noted that the “The potency of the red blood
reasserts itself … to dye the entire sea.”18 More than was measured in the
King James Bible in Revelation 8:8, where, when the “second angel sounded,
and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and
the third part of the sea became blood.”19
Shot through with redness, partially or wholly bloody, oceans are
colored by disaster or domestic dereliction (abattoirs regularly flow into the
sea). Even as the sea, becoming blood, is oxygenated with an infusion of red
cells, the “second angel emptied his bowl into the sea, which turned into a
fluid like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing in it died.”20 The sea is
understood as a container of all the detritus and rejected things of the world.

Tears overflow
Spatially imagined as a bleeding container of fear and trash, or a still surface
mirrored and riven by geometry, or shaped as a mechanism for abstract
detachment, the sea is also remembered as an implacable leveler. In the early
twenty-first century, a number of severe tsunamis hit Aceh, Japan,21
Samoa22 and other countries on ocean edges. The seas spread, dissolving and
eliminating many thousands of objects: people, animals, insects, houses,
furniture, and plants. Film clips from the time are haunting as the
insignificance of individual objects is set beside an immense body of moving
water in a washing away that rendered all equivalent; a scouring that left
the earth of Aceh exposed. Statistics gathered from writing and reports on
the tsunami noted:

Age and sex were described as risk factors for death …

significantly higher death rates were reported among females… .
Significantly elevated risk of death was also observed in children
… and older adults … Other risk factors included education which
was inversely associated with mortality risk; fisheries-based
livelihoods, indoor location at the time of the tsunami, and home
destruction and the physical environment. The majority of
tsunami deaths were due to drowning.23

Statistics cannot remain dry in such circumstances. With the many deaths,
the sea was both the instigator and repository of loss and mourning; lost
love, becoming child in loss, the ocean filled with catastrophic tears. Hélène
Cixous, in “Déluge,” wrote a final oceanic image of lost love and mourning:

I went right to the end of the labyrinth, under the roar of the tidal
wave, I ran beneath the sea, I ran on the earth, I went right to the
end of misfortune, above the racing tide rattled to the wind, below
I forced my way, I went right to the limit which I pushed back,
alive I abruptly entered behind the time after hope, as long as we
advance we prevent the story from ending, I ran, everlasting the
love – mourning in me the child-suffering created a flow of tears
matching the tidal wave above, bearing love death life further, no I
 would not let myself be comforted and dried out, I would run on
until dream or reality gave me back my love, to the end, I run.24

The space of mourning is filled with the resistance of the running figu