Introduction to the Interior

The purpose of this short essay is to look for connections between things and images, and finally, to answer the question of why have the selfies of people with virtual bunny ears become so popular.

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Visual Spaces of Change: Designing Interiority - shelter, shape, place, atmosphere

2020 •

Pedro L E Ã O Neto

The International Conference on the 5th issue of Sophia Journal, which took place at FAUP, opened a new cycle of international forums, henceforth to be held annually, and taking up the theme and topics examined in Sophia for each year. Thus, the following peer reviewed articles discuss the core of interiority in architecture as a matter open to diverse ideas and practices in the realm of built space to be experienced by its dwellers. Interiority to be argued as a dimension that differentiates a place of a non-place. The non-places are spots with which the individual does not create any relation; they are transit- places without memory, identity, history, personal construction, references, emotions of which solace is not a minor one. Interiority claims that kind of space that accommodates thoughts, dreams, nightmares, intimacy, changes, silence, noise, neurosis...life. Shelter, shape, place, atmosphere portray scenarios that enhance experiences, events, occurrences beyond the functionalistic rhetoric enveloping them. Preserving heritage through new narratives: designing a guesthouse within a cross-disciplinary team from Pedro Bandeira Maia and Raul Pinto discusses a very demanding design program of transformation of an interior space from a former pharmacy to a guest house in a historical building from the nineteenth century. The article exposes the methodology followed by a cross disciplinary team debating the project’s narrative illustrated with very expressive images. The role of architecture in an engaging and meaningful experience of the physical exhibition from Bárbara Coutinho and Ana Tostões evolves from the main argument that the physical exhibition is the immediate way to encounter the arts in line with the phenomenological understanding of the aesthetic experience. It recalls the inspiring role of exhibition designs of Frederick Kiesler, Franco Albini and Lina Bo Bardi as examples to contrast with the growing process of digitalisation and dematerialisation of the involvement with art. Authors address then the reasons why for contemporary times it is important that an exhibition is designed to be a physical matter between spectators and art. The need for Shelter. Laugier, Ledoux, and Enlightenment’s shadows from Rui Aristides and José António Bandeirinha discourses about the human need for shelter as the essence that defines the discipline of architecture. This approach is developed within an historical framework, namely referring the legacy of Laugier and Ledoux intertwined with philosophical and political issues.Based upon these reasoning, the authors go further and tackle the architecture’s role regarding shelter in contemporary times. Other sections besides the peer reviewed articles have been integrated into the journal’s structure as a way of enrichening the publication with diverse viewpoints from experts in the field and other types of readings apart from the articles from the call. Thus, we present in Featured Texts the magnificent interview of Danish Designer Hans Thyge entitled The Power of Imagination by Guest Editor Fátima Pombo which offers valuable insight into the process and tools of this designer’s professional practice. Next are two probing critical texts, each written by a different architect curator - Nuno Grande and António Choupina - both of whom are very close to the work of Pritzker architect Álvaro Siza. Their readings focus on Siza’s architecture when analyzing two photography series by Mark Durden and João Leal from the collection “The Idea of Álvaro Siza”. These series focused on the Carlos Ramos Pavilion, Bouça Council Housing Project and Serralves Museum, published in a special edition of scopionewspaper, and both Nuno Grande and António Choupina offer a differentiated understanding of Siza’s oeuvres and his mastery of light and shadow, which the lens of the two photographers have so well conveyed. In Reviews we have Mark Durden’s remarkable text “Light Catcher” that tells us how the performances of the photographer Peter Finnemore reveal his relationship to the medium of photography and the way he apprehends and plays with light. Finally, in the essay “About the book: A Talk on Architecture in Photography” the editor of scopio Editions starts by contextualizing the upcoming book “Valerio Olgiati - Bas Princen. A Talk on Architecture in Photography - Images from Valerio Olgiati Personal Archive and Photographs by Bas Princen” to be published in 2021, which is based on the last Duelo/Dueto conference of Architecture, Art and Image (AAI) series that took place at the Casa das Artes and the work that followed with the authors.

in Interior Design and Architecture: Critical and Primary Sources. Edited by Mark Taylor, UK: Berg Publishers

2013 •

Suzie Attiwill

This paper eddies around two concerns or ideas – a repositioning of interior design as a process of interiorization and a desire to open up the concept of interior from one of enclosure which equates interior design with the inside of something, such as buildings, bodies or other containers. The essentialist nature of contemporary interior design thinking is evident in the use of the term ‘The Interior’, with its implication of something inherent and immutable. In contrast, ‘an interior’ effects an opening up and hence, the potential for a multiplicity of interiors. Both terms can be understood as a process of interiorization. The Interior is characterised by a container and space which frame an inside and outside; The Interior is either positioned as a holistic whole or located within the subject as Being. The Interior is an independent entity which is in a dialectical relation with the exterior. A different concept of interior as the production of many interiors highlights process – interiorization – and shifts in emphasis to time rather than space as a composing force. Interiors are always in the making and there is no privileging of The Interior as a subject or being who experiences or a pre-existing container but rather the process of making/designing. Tactics and tools are therefore vital to think differently and to shift embedded concepts. The tactical move of this research is a focus on exhibitions as spaces of experimentation concerning the same kinds of issues as those raised in contemporary interior design discourse and practice, i.e. the relation(s) between people and environment. This paper considers tactics employed in three early twentieth century exhibitions which affirmed movement and transformation, as distinct from positioning and identification, to shift from dominant and dominating Cartesian and phenomenological models of representation and reflection; to open the potential for a different concept of interior in relation to exteriority and in the process, provide a platform for new thoughts and practice. The writings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze are used as a tool throughout to shape these ideas. Previously printed in Interior Tools. Interior Tactics. Debates in Interior Theory and Practice, edited by in Joyce Fleming et al, UK: Libri Publishing, 2011, 159–169 - see attached

Introduction to the Interior The purpose of the subsequent discussion is to look for connections between things and images, and finally, to answer the question of why have the selfies of people with virtual bunny ears become so popular.1 * It was the 17th century, the Dutch Golden Age. After their successful rebellion against the Spanish dominion, the Netherlands had established itself as a new global mercantile superpower. Their flourishing entrepreneurship and a steam of new money created an unprecedented wave of social mobility. A rise in social status is accompanied by moving from less prestigious living environments to more prestigious ones. As there were not enough impoverished manors available to be bought up by the newly enriched bourgeoisie, a new type of living environment was invented: a new private house. It is not an exaggeration to say that it was a revolutionary invention which changed the history. What was so revolutionary about the new private houses? Traditionally, a person had been one with his habitat: intact, from the cradle to the grave. The birthplace and inheritance determined one's life and survival while the "landlord's" actual reach over the household was relatively small. Major changes in the living environment, let alone the change of habitat, were almost always associated with catastrophes and tended to be devastating. Accordingly, one's material world had been predetermined - home, household items, tools, furniture, status symbols, all were obtained as an inheritance, and were, when the time came, passed on, in a well-maintained condition, to the next generation. 1 “Beyond the Selfie: With the new Face Filters, Snapchat Dives into Augmented Reality", Wall Street Journal, 4/18/2017 The defining difference between the heritage property and the new estate is that the new estate is empty. Whoever has, at some point in their lives, dealt with acquisition of real estate, is well familiar with this anxious feeling, a horror vacui created by the new, inhabited home. One thing the 17th-century Dutch bourgeoisie definitely did not lack, was courage. They quickly recovered from the first shock and discovered that this existential emptiness can effectively be filled with furniture. One just needs things, a lot of new things. And so it began. The demand created the supply,2 the expanding market of consumer goods pushed the production which resulted in industrial revolution which lowered the prices, allowing even more members of the society to increase their consumption, which expanded the consumer goods market, stimulated the production, etc. Having been born in the Netherlands, the consumption culture then spread to England, France and beyond.3 ** One could summarize now that the capital created emptiness which then gave birth to consumerism - but then it would sound utterly negativist which would be unfair against the people and unfair against the things. In fact, consumerism became the tool of modern emancipation. Populuxe4 effectively blurred class distinctions, while being both imitating and individualizing. 2 The traditional Marxist economic history focuses on production relations, largely bypassing consumption as a by-product of production. A more contemporary socio-historic approach places a much more important role to the consumer culture. See, for example, De Vries, Jan: The Unemployed Revolution: Consumer Behavior and Home Economics, 1650s, Cambridge. 2008 3 Obviously, the debate around defining the birth of consumer culture remains open. See for example: Ryckbosch, Wouter: Early Modern Consumption History: Current Challenges and Future Perspectives, BMGN, 2015. 4 The term was first introduced to mark the space-futurism inspired consumer goods in the United States during the 1950s-60s. In general, populuxe is a cheap product that imitates luxury. In the context of the current text, see. for example: Fairchilds, Sissie: The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in the Eighteenth-Century Paris, Routlege, 1994. Once they had learned how to furnish their homes, they soon also learned to design it. The home then becomes the interior - a carefully orchestrated display of the private world. The primary task of the interior is to expose in order to conceal. The latter is particularly well illustrated by the fact that one of the first mass trends in home decoration, a trend which in the 18th century spread even to the poorest households, were – the curtains. Simple and affordable, yet highly effective visual filters to control the image about private life one shares with the public. Thus, the most fundamental changes in everyday life that came with the emerging consumption culture, were that the living environment was divided into two: the public and the private sphere. The border between these two was the interior, built from consumer goods. The social debate of the 18th and 19th centuries was characterized by the obsessive search for the "right balance" between the public and the private spheres.5 The guarantor of the balance was a well-guarded border, a highly regulated and fetishized material culture. On one hand, the Victorian era declared its sacred integrity of the home and private life; on the other hand, the strict and complex moral code characteristic of Victorian times expanded even to the furniture and other household items (for example, exposed table legs were considered immensely amoral). The tension between the private and the public sphere was so great that the border between those, the interior, was in some more modest households, pressed as thin as a facade, a curtain, a family image. It's no wonder that the truism about the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie derives from the very period. *** 5 Jürgen Habermas, for example, has called the Victorian era “the golden age of the balance between the private and the public”. See also: Kumar, Krishan; Makarova, Ekaterina: "The Portable Home: The Domestication of Public Space", Washington, 2008. A delicate balance persisted, a fine curtain faded until, at the beginning of the 20th century the Staatliches Bauhaus6 tore it down – only to spread it over the whole world as a cerecloth. At least according to Jean Baudrillard. In the Le Système des objets (1968) and The critique of the economic critique of the political economy of the signe (1972), Baudrillard argues that Bauhaus's doctrine of universal functional aesthetics, which "made it possible to design everything from a spoon to a whole city", was actually the second Industrial Revolution, the semiurgical revolution. The one that completed what was started by the first, 18th-century metallurgical industrial revolution: it transformed the whole world into an interior. The Bauhaus's functional aesthetics meant nothing more than the conversion of the use value of all objects into aesthetic style. The celebrated functionality of the modern environment was merely an excuse to conceal the all-consuming political hegemony of the style (in the same discussion, Baudrillard argued further, saying that the reality is dead, nature is an illusion and the objects have been replaced by signs - but this is not important here). Through a disciplined design, in the 20th century, object culture transformed into visual culture. Since the recent past is more or less familiar to all of us, there is no point to extensively describe here, how industrially produced and stylistically crafted visuals began to dominate the modern living environment, and how image/imago has become the main merchandise of the market economy. Suffice is to say that, despite the centuries past, despite political, technological, and semiurgical revolutions, image economics has remained true to its early-modern-day roots. Visual culture continues to focus on interior furnishings, meaning, it exposes in order to conceal: the more stylish is the image, the more certain one can be, that it is a carefully planned display. As virtually the whole environment has been transformed into an interior, the process is being accelerated. While the haute couture aesthetics of style icons are traditionally extremely complex and costly, affordable only to a few, the demand for attractive visuals has pushed the image industry which at the end of the last century resulted in a digital image revolution, greatly reducing the cost of image 6 Bauhaus is the German school, active in 1919-1933, which greatly influenced modernist culture, especially design and architecture. production. The simple image editing software has brought image-making to the masses, enabling us now to talk about the visual emancipation, as the economics of imitation and individualization, concealment and exposure has become available to everyone. If nothing else, at least you can afford the virtual bunny ears.

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Introduction to the Interior

Introduction to the Interior

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