New Territories: Reimagined Interiorities

At a time where boundaries within society, culture, and technology are continually challenged and redefined, even the commonly understood binary oppositions within areas such as gender, age, and digitality (Negroponte, 1995) are becoming less visible, measurable, and socially accepted. In this new realm where even physical reality is encroached upon by the digital, are the tangible and perceived distinctions between interior and architecture also becoming extinct? The emergence of more flexible and transitional space appears to not only blur the boundaries of inside and outside, interior and architecture, but also the previous distinctions of function. Space is no longer solely intimated by visual cues, materiality, or the physicality of walls and interior objects. Instead, we see increased ‘function neutrality’ within buildings, with rising opportunity for user interpretation and take-over. This renewed focus on the user can enrich our built environment as we embrace new equality of the interior and relish its new freedom and voice.

Between Inhabited Interiors and Interiors on Display: Exploring Spatial Boundaries at Rosenborg Castle

When visiting museums, we meet various types of physical barriers, such as glass vitrines, railings, and extended ropes, which have been put there to protect the objects on display. Such barriers are often accused of creating an unfavourable distance to museum objects but can also be thought of in more positive terms, as this article will seek to demonstrate. Based on analyses of museum display boundaries at Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, where visitors can experience objects from The Royal Danish Collection within historic interiors, the article looks into the effects of such boundaries on the museum experience. The article explores the particular threshold experiences that take place at Rosenborg where you constantly fluctuate between, on the one side, looking at objects and interiors that have been put on display in front of you, and, on the other, being inside the historic interiors. It argues that this spatial ambiguity opens up productive, albeit obscure, in-between spaces for the museum visitor to inhabit and points to the importance of truly attending to the design of display boundaries when creating museum exhibitions.

Grafting Interiority: Generative Methodologies Between the Natural and the Synthetic

Design is approaching a crucial period where the exchange between interior and exterior systems needs to be rethought and addressed from the standpoint of resilience and innovative environmental responses. The era of the detached interior bubble that is climate controlled and therein severed from natural systems is no longer justified or feasible. Interior spaces must respond to environmental conditions and proactively engage natural systems. The paper examines grafting methodology as an interior spatial formula that aims to generate complex sectional strategies for new programmatic typologies. It showcases work from a third-year interior architecture studio where students utilised natural landscapes as the premise to develop generative computational models that informed their design interventions.While placing interior interventions between natural and synthetic processes, interior grafts outline a design tactic that challenges the disjunction between internal settings and external parameters. The potential to draw relevance from external parameters and integrate the derivative systems into the interior volume carries many implications for interior architecture and urban dynamics. This approach demarks a radical repositioning of the interior volume as a continuation of the exterior scape, proliferating a fluid and active interiority.

Prioritising Storage Practices: A New Approach to Housing Design Thinking

Inhabitants of UK housing have more possessions than ever, whilst space for living in standardised houses is at a premium. The acquisition of material possessions, and how it affects both space and inhabitants’ wellbeing, has not previously been considered in architectural practice or housing policy research fields. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how practising architects design for the storage of material possessions in housing. For the first time, it places storage practices at the centre of housing design thinking, by engaging practising architects in a design intervention to explore original design solutions that support inhabitants’ lives and lifestyles, and therefore their wellbeing. The study uses a new storage-focused conceptual design framework to seek design knowledge, to better understand how storage practices could be considered when designing. The findings have implications for design practice research, providing an account of how architects consider storage in housing design, drawing on novel design intervention methods.

The Public Interior Space Within Louvre Abu Dhabi Dome: A Visual Reflection

What defines an interior space? Is a traditional threshold the only building element considered as a clear component demarcating interiority from the outside environment? Could light or water be just as clear? How can scale challenge the identification of an internal space? Is a living space more identifiable as an interior volume? What about an internal courtyard for a family house outlining the beginning of a nation or the opposite extreme in the time-space continuum, a 24,000 square meters domed roof over a series of intimate spaces establishing a nation’s cultural intention internationally? Can a central space act as a gravitational point to other space fragments and elements? Can the ephemerality of the space bind it together in a unique, memorable encounter?We set ourselves to answer these questions using different phenomenological responses methods including digital video, photography, drawings, and architectural observations. All depict different layered trajectories through the segments of the architectural strata that compose a cultural enclosure, such as Jean Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi. As we transverses through space and time, we use regional typologies to create a timeline spectrum connecting regional context, culture and architecture, attempting to emphasise the interiority qualities of the space under the dome.

El Croquis Night: Excursus into Nocturnal Obliteration in Architectural Media

El Croquis is one of the most prestigious architectural magazines in the world. Founded in 1982 by Richard Levene and Fernando Marquez, it publishes five monographs every year. The volumes dedicated to established Pritzker Prize names like OMA Rem Koolhaas, SANAA Sejima & Nishizawa, Herzog & de Meuron, Alvaro Siza or Rafael Moneo, are considered their respective oeuvre complète. The journal almost never publishes nocturnal photographs of interior spaces. The same goes for other major architecture magazines. In February 2020, HEAD – Genève invited Richard Levene to create a night edition of El Croquis. The workshop focused on the idea that night is a forgotten paradigm in the construction of modern and contemporary architectural discourse.

Animated Interior

An animated interior represents a departure from the idea of interior space as a permanent and timeless entity. The understanding of animated characters in the interior allows for the emergence of our complex relationship with space through various forms of engagement. The understanding of an animated interior offers further possibilities that become the basis of design practice. This issue of the Interiority journal presents a collection of inquiries and approaches that reveal various animated qualities of the interior in various contexts. The articles address the character of the interior, which is dynamic and dependent upon various temporal conditions of inhabitation. At the same time, they demonstrate the possible design practices that could emerge from the understanding of animated interiors.

Virtual Interiorities

A practice of the virtual offers to interior design a dynamic conception of interiority that transcends simplistic representative notions of space, recognising the inseparable relationship of space and time, as well as an understanding of interiority as lived experience and its attendant amenability to active interpretation and therefore design. Ultimately, a practice of the virtual facilitates an understanding of interior as a dynamic and ongoing network of relations, and interior design as individuating participation in this network. In this article, we describe in detail an expanded notion of the virtual, and extrapolate how an understanding of this notion might help shape future interior design practice. We then offer some examples that might help translate these ideas into practice.

The Interior World of Books, Browsing, and Collecting Inside the City

A most desirable and collectable material object is the ubiquitous book. A bound composite of printed pages with words and images, it contains a microcosm of myriad narrative viewpoints, experiences, and imaginations. Metaphorically, a book compactly conceals a kind of interior space that protects the provocative lives of people, their character, ideas, and explorations, thus communicating different scales of interiority. Book collectors, called bibliophiles, revere and covet books as their object of desire. The bibliophile as seeker-collector-seller partakes of simple and complex transactions that essentially protect the lives of the books. This essay concentrates on two main book browsing locations within the urban context of Istanbul, Turkey, and the everyday interior spaces of the sahaf, the secondhand bookseller, who continues a tradition of selling new, pre-owned or secondhand ordinary or rare books. Its text moves between historic information and first-person narrative based on fieldwork to express and expand views of interiority theory, through reality and metaphor. The many scales of individual and collective impulses found inside the city streets and their inserted passage structures are exemplified by the significant simultaneity of the desire for the hand-held object and its hand-to-hand exchange.

Critical Spatial Practices: A Trans-scalar Study of Chinese Hutongs and American Alleyways

Across time and cultures, the built environment has been fundamentally shaped by forces of occupancy, obsolescence, and change. In an era of increasing political uncertainty and ecological decline, contemporary design practices must respond with critical actions that envision more collaborative and sustainable futures. The concept of critical spatial practice, introduced by architectural historian Jane Rendell, builds on Walter Benjamin and the late 20th century theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to propose multi-disciplinary design practices that more effectively address contemporary spatial complexities. These theoretical frameworks operate through trans-scalar means to resituate the built environment as a nexus of flows, atmospheres, and narratives (Rendell, 2010). Assuming an analogous relationship to the contemporary city, critical spatial practices traverse space and time to engage issues of migration, informality, globalisation, heterotopia, and ecology. This essay documents an interdisciplinary academic design studio that employed critical spatial practices to study correspondences between Chinese and American cities. Here, the notions of urban and interior are relational. Urbanism and interior spaces are viewed as intertwined aspects in the historical development of Beijing hutongs and Cincinnati alleyways. These hybrid exterior-interior civic spaces create sheltered public worlds and socio-spatial conditions that nurture people and culture.