Six educators and practitioners from all over the world who specialise in interior architecture joined me for a discussion about how they conceptualise the role of the interior architect in spatial design, what the challenges of the specialisation are and what kind of education would help meet those challenges.
SUZIE ATTIWILL
Associate Dean of Interior Design at RMIT University
How do you conceptualise the subject matter of interior architecture? Since interior design involves the part of space that is closest to humans, it is a highly effective tool influencing our daily habits, for instance. In a rapidly changing society, this close and personal space is subject to versatile and entangled processes. Therefore, we may presume that there are numerous ways to approach and deal with interior architecture. Where and how do you anchor your points of view?
While there are many aspects to the discipline of interior architecture—in practice, education and research—the most important matter is the concept of ‘interior’ and how to experiment with this concept as one of designing with spatial, temporal and material conditions. This involves a shift to using the term ‘interior design’ rather than interior architecture—to break the association and assumption of equating ‘interior’ as the inside of architecture and as enclosed space. ‘Interior’ is a curious concept—in some languages such as Mandarin and Turkish there is no translation, instead the closest term is ‘inside’.
If we break from the assumptions, one can see how ‘interior’ is informed by different philosophical concepts—for example, ‘interior as container’ is Platonic, ‘interior as intensification’ is Deleuzian, ‘interior as space’ is Modernist, ‘interior as relational’ is Poststructuralist. It is not a matter for the interior architect to become a philosopher but rather to become aware that the concept of ‘interior’ should not be accepted as a given but instead it can be a field for experimentation and invention.
In 2011, the International Federation of Interior Architects/Designers (IFI) held a global workshop to develop a definition of the profession, its value and identity: the IFI Interiors Declaration. In this document, the identity of the practitioner is defined as someone who ‘determines the relationship of people to spaces based on psychological and physical parameters, to improve the quality of life’ (IFI, 2011). As a relational condition, interior connects with exterior and engages an ecological and environmental mode of practice. This also transforms the way one might think of people’s relation with space—and open an opportunity to move from a humanist position to thinking about how we inhabit and live in a more interconnected and ecological way. In Australia, one can call themselves an interior architect only if they are a registered architect. Our programs at RMIT University are called interior design because they focus on the designing of interiors—this could be a room, an event, an urban assemblage. Unlike interior architecture and interior decoration, interior design has the potential to keep the question of ‘interior’ open as a creative, critical, contemporary proposition.
What are the challenges interior architecture is facing in the modern world and what is the kind of education that will help to meet those challenges?
One of the main challenges is to develop interior design as a distinctive discipline from architecture. In the twenty-first century and in a world impacted by Covid, interior design practice, research and education could make a significant contribution to transforming the current situation we find ourselves in. How we might live in this new world is a key question and is addressed directly to interior design as a practice that is concerned with the relation of people to their environment.
Education plays a critical and vital role in preparing students to enter into the profession by providing them with capabilities to practice in the present coupled with an understanding that they could continue to practice for decades into an unknown and uncertain future. Students who graduate in 2020 could still be practising in 2060. During this time of unprecedented environmental, social, cultural and technological change, education is a place where these challenges can be confronted through experimentation leading to innovation and invent that supports and enables the profession to transform and adapt. The kind of interior design education that will help meet these challenges is one that equips students with the ability to be responsive and able to make site-specific choices, to create a spatial-temporal-material composition that slows down forces, stabilizes the current and enables inhabitation. This education needs to be project-oriented and for students to learn through doing as we cannot predict the future, they need to be equipped with techniques that they can take into any situation.
What implications does globalisation have on interior architecture?
As a site-specific practice, interior design has the opportunity to become a critical practice in a globalised world pervaded by a sense of vastness and remoteness. For me is an interesting question how one designs interiors in different exteriors. Before globalisation, the exterior was local, now with globalisation, some say there is no exterior, just a continuous interior. However, I would say there is always an interior-exterior relation, and this is where the potential is for interior design. Globalisation opens up the potential for interior design to make relations with an exterior and the question then becomes which one. This is a critical and life-changing question.
The life span of interior design not only in commercial but also in many public buildings in Estonia is estimated to be around five years. That is a very short period of time which begs the question whether or not projects like that are more related to passing trends and superficiality, but it can also prompt deeper and more demanding challenges for interior design as a profession. How does the project life span impact the theory of interior architecture? Can we have any kind of theory in case of such a short life span?
We are in need of a new way of thinking about theory and history that can make relations with the temporal, temporary and ephemerality distinct from the current emphasis on artefact that gives value to permanency. This involves a shift from privileging form and space to one of movement, rhythms, relations, process and duration, ecologies. A theory of interior design could do this and in doing so enable many other practices to see how they could take a different attitude in relation to their practice and their contribution. It seems we are at a critical moment in the lives of human beings and how we occupy the world needs significant transformation through new ways of thinking and doing.
Professor GRAEMER BROOKER
Head of Programme of Interior Design at Royal College of Art
How do you conceptualise the subject matter of interior architecture? Since interior design involves the part of space that is closest to humans, it is a highly effective tool influencing our daily habits, for instance. In a rapidly changing society, this close and personal space is subject to versatile and entangled processes. Therefore, we may presume that there are numerous ways to approach and deal with interior architecture. Where and how do you anchor your points of view?
The enduring references that I always utilize are based upon what I consider to be three fundamental principles of interiority: proximities, inhabitations, identities. These cut across all aspects of the interior: architecture, design, decoration. So, for me they are universal. Proximities talks to the fact that the interior is a site-conditioned entity, a discipline that I think always bears intimate relations with the environments around it. This is usually an existing building, but it doesn’t always have to be. Inhabitations refers primarily to the body in space, how we make environments which are directly related to all kinds of forms of its occupation and the relations between them. Identities talks of surface, and its ordering, whether found or applied. But it can also be related to the communities of people that the interior facilitates, the profession itself and its issues. In essence, all three together encompass my ‘anchors’ for conceptualizing the interior.
What are the challenges interior architecture is facing in the modern world and what is the kind of education that will help to meet those challenges?
Because of the comprehensive and inclusive nature of the interior, the challenges are universal and they mirror the enduring problems of the world and its occupants. As, in my view, the interior is so focused on building reuse, inhabitation, cultures of materials as well as the identities of people and communities, its challenges are directly related to climate justice, de-growth and human equalities, and therefore directly implicit in the actions of how politics can be reshaped to help us to reform these challenges. One of my interests for a long time, and the issue I have written about in many books, is building reuse. The world is a finite resource, and I would argue that we must consider how everything in the built environment is already with us. Therefore, single-use buildings, adapting the existing, maintenance, repair, care, the formulation of anti-extractivist strategies for making interiors and buildings constitute a major challenge for not just interior architecture but all forms of design.
What implications does globalisation have on interior architecture?
For me globalisation is better explained through the distinction and relationships between the global north and the global south. The role of the interior in this relationship is to be always aware of and to ask itself in every project and in every piece of research a number of important questions. How will its formation impact the citizenry of its inhabitants and to what purpose does it contribute to social justice? What are the implications of the resources and hence the climatic impact in this project? What is the political dimension of the work? By its very nature, through its relationship with particular sites, people and communities, the interior is political. To ignore this renders it merely as a superfluous entity, a situation which all of us involved in the discipline are keen to avoid.
The life span of interior design not only in commercial but also in many public buildings in Estonia is estimated to be around five years. That is a very short period of time which begs the question whether or not projects like that are more related to passing trends and superficiality, but it can also prompt deeper and more demanding challenges for interior design as a profession. How does the project life span impact the theory of interior architecture? Can we have any kind of theory in case of such a short life span?
I have been aware for a number of years of numerous theorists, futurists, predicting the end of new-builds as a justifiable approach to the creation of the built environment. It’s the same for interiors. We now have to imagine that everything built is now with us and is the fundamental material resource for any future changes. Therefore, we must reconsider that there is no waste, we must develop design strategies that foreground salvage, hacking, copying, remixing, and so on. We must understand, even through regulatory change, that there are no single-use buildings and materials, and all aspects of the built environment need a material passport: a document of its constituents, qualities, re-use and/or exchange values. Superuse, ROTOR have been instrumental in some of these advances. I have written about it a lot, but there needs to be many more theories, practices and approaches to make reuse the main way of formulating the built environment.
PAVLE STAMENOVIC
Assistant Professor of Architecture at University of Belgrade
How do you conceptualise the subject matter of interior architecture? Since interior design involves the part of space that is closest to humans, it is a highly effective tool influencing our daily habits, for instance. In a rapidly changing society, this close and personal space is subject to versatile and entangled processes. Therefore, we may presume that there are numerous ways to approach and deal with interior architecture. Where and how do you anchor your points of view?
In my opinion, scale is a crucial concept in terms of interior architecture, but also for architecture in general, for that matter. Methodologically speaking, when it comes to the issue of ‘human scale’, there is no difference between the interior and the exterior. If we focus on the tactile, empathic aspects of space, a forest becomes a room, and vice versa. In this regard, interior is perceived as our immediate and intimate spatial context, the extension of our body. Therefore, we could say that the focus of research in interior architecture draws its substance from the concept of the body and all of the complexity that this notion implies. This intimate relationship between the body and the space defines the thin line that differentiates interior architecture from other spatial design disciplines. Another crucial aspect in interior architecture is that it is an experiment-based discipline. It seems that, while progress in architecture is defined through simulation, newness in interior architecture is defined through making. I’d say that this is the crucial advantage and potential of interior architecture: it pulsates with today and it grows through experiments in the physical realm.
Secondly, it is very important to acknowledge two separate but often interweaving lines of investigation in (interior) architecture: problem-solving which is defined by ergonomics and usefulness, and sense-making which is defined by atmosphere and senses. From my point of view, it is crucial to always find a well-balanced relationship between these two.
What are the challenges interior architecture is facing in the modern world and what is the kind of education that will help to meet those challenges?
Ready-made, mass produced architectural elements, and the decline of artisan craftworks in design could be considered as the biggest challenge of contemporary design processes. The market of prefabricated architectural elements and products promotes the processes of implementation instead of the creative process. Physical spaces are ever more designed by the corporations, while people are increasingly spending time in non-physical spaces.
In the context of education, hacking these conditions as a method of creating new design might be fruitful, especially for tech savvy generations that are studying now and should be familiar with what that approach implies. This reminds me of a quote from Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil: ‘Can you fix it? No, I can’t, but I can bypass it’.
Creating the new is dialectically related to preserving the old. Maybe, until we understand better how to create better, we should first consider preserving the existing. There is a lot of creative potential in developing progressive preservation methods and techniques in the contemporary design environment.
I think that education in interior architecture needs to adopt a contemporary, transient mode of existence with intelligent relationship towards preservation and ecology, and especially towards repairment and recycling. Maybe design methods should be more focused on the objects rather than ‘dressing’ the interior spaces. That way, if the particular space becomes obsolete, the designed objects can still serve their purpose elsewhere. This approach calls for more abstract thinking during the process of design education, which calls upon the academia to develop methods that would stimulate abstract and conceptual thinking. That way, a young professional is equipped with abstract and conceptual tools that they can shape and tailor for any specific task in the future.
What implications does globalisation have on interior architecture?
Interior architecture is even more than architecture influenced by the traditions and rituals of the everyday. Simultaneously, while these rituals are fading due to globalisation, they are also being continuously disseminated by the fluctuation of people (this is mostly visible with ethnic cuisine restaurants, for instance). Contemporary (digital) nomads are spreading local rituals that, at some point, become globally trendy via social networks and Internet in general. Therefore, the autochthonous is exported with migrations.
In this sense, today there are manifold interior architectures. In the context of global (capitalist) economy, these practices are defined by social class rather than location. So, it comes to the question of wealth and lifestyle.
Also, recent geopolitical trends show the emergence of conservative, protectionist tendencies and general scepticism of globalisation. We will see where this takes us, but we can already perceive the rise of new conservatism in architecture and also in interior architecture: plasticity in shape and material defined by textures, colours and ornaments serve as a hint of this reactionary attitude towards built spaces. On the other hand, the metanarrative of ecological awareness very much unifies the theory and practice on the global scale but at the same time encourages localized modifications since this attitude is embedded in the whole ‘think global, act local’ approach. So, despite globalisation, spatial practices including interior architecture are very much fragmented depending on program, budget, context, regulations and intentions. Nevertheless, this fragmented image is global(ized).
The life span of interior design not only in commercial but also in many public buildings in Estonia is estimated to be around five years. That is a very short period of time which begs the question whether or not projects like that are more related to passing trends and superficiality, but it can also prompt deeper and more demanding challenges for interior design as a profession. How does the project life span impact theory of interior architecture? Can we have any kind of theory in case of such a short life span?
Unlike buildings that have life span expectancy between 50 and 100 years, the life span of an interior has a lot to do with an ever-faster pace of the everyday life, and the economy, for that matter. This applies to living spaces as well as to commercial spaces (enterprises). We live faster (and this is already a commonplace), therefore the need to continuously modify the spaces that we inhabit increases. Generally speaking, architects often despise trends and trendiness, since architecture is considered to be more related to endurance than transience. Secondly, architecture is too slow to accommodate the fast pace of trends and fashion in design. Interior architecture, however, stands on the borderline between the two. This position should be considered as an advantage and a privilege. I would argue that, for an architect, it is a question of a decision: whether to design a frame that could inhabit all changes and modifications, or to design objects that themselves can modify according to the ever-changing conditions. Both design strategies are legitimate and have a methodological stronghold.
And this is where we come to the role of theory. I think that the relationship between theory and practice is intense and fertile. Sometimes, theoretical concepts define practical acts, and sometimes a practical, empirical case opens a field for (new) theory. The empirical approach through trial and error experimenting is probably more suitable in the contemporary fast pace world.
The following answers can be read here
Questions by KAJA PAE, Maja’s editor-in-chief 2017-2022
PUBLISHED: Maja 101-102 (summer-autumn 2020) Interior Design.
