Interiors And Interiority

The book explores the historical connections between the notions of architectural interior, subjective space, human interiority, and represented space including virtual space. The contributions examine models of understanding of "interiority" as these were developed in relation to the notions of space and spatial experience. The scope of investigations is the broadly understood modern period, from the 18th century to the present.

In interior design, the definition and popular perception of the interior has long been concerned with bounded spaces, and with the relationship between private and public realms. However, two issues have challenged traditional boundaries between interior and exterior, and private and public: first, the emergence of new technological practices, and second, a broader understanding of diverse cultures. Popular perceptions of public and private space are currently being revised, and the interior ...

On the unstable boundaries between "interior" and "exterior," "private" and "public," and always in some way relating to a "beyond," the imagery of interior space in literature reveals itself as an often disruptive code of subjectivity and of modernity. The wide variety of interior spaces elicited in literature -- from the odd room over the womb, secluded parks, and train compartments, to the city as a world under a cloth -- reveal a common defining feature: these interiors can all be analyzed as codes of a paradoxical, both assertive and fragile, subjectivity in its own unique time and history. They function as subtexts that define subjectivity, time, and history as profoundly ambiguous realities, on interchangeable existential, socio-political, and epistemological levels. This volume addresses the imagery of interior spaces in a number of iconic and also lesser known yet significant authors of European, North American, and Latin American literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries: Djuna Barnes, Edmond de Goncourt, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Benito Pérez Galdós, Elsa Morante, Robert Musil, Jules Romains, Peter Waterhouse, and Émile Zola.

The essays gathered in the present collection provide textual explorations of the theoretical borderland between interiors and exteriors, undertaken from a variety of perspectives and representing varying approaches and understandings of these terms. In the realm of theory, the distinction between what we choose to include and what we exclude remains a political choice, often fraught with dilemmas that cannot be resolved. How to discern between interiors and exteriors? Where do we draw dividing lines? Do we want to draw them anymore? Or, alternately, can we afford not to divide and discern between the inside and outside, between here and there, between “us” and “them”? If the binary divisions, so much discredited, no longer hold, if we must include multiplicity and plurality of readings, is any distinction between these dimensions possible? Essays collected in the present volume attempt to present a wide plethora of answers to these questions.

Interior design has shifted significantly in the past fifty years from a focus on home decoration within family and consumer sciences to a focus on the impact of health and safety within the interior environment. This shift has called for a deeper focus in evidence-based research for interior design education and practice. Research Methods for Interior Design provides a broad range of qualitative and quantitative examples, each highlighted as a case of interior design research. Each chapter is supplemented with an in-depth introduction, additional questions, suggested exercises, and additional research references. The book’s subtitle, Applying Interiority, identifies one reason why the field of interior design is expanding, namely, all people wish to achieve a subjective sense of well-being within built environments, even when those environments are not defined by walls. The chapters of this book exemplify different ways to comprehend interiority through clearly defined research methodologies. This book is a significant resource for interior design students, educators, and researchers in providing them with an expanded vision of what interior design research can encompass.

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.

Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors addresses the broad cultural, historical, and theoretical implications of interiors beyond their conventionally defined architectural boundaries. With provocative contributions from leading and emerging historians, theorists, and design practitioners, the book is rooted in new scholarship that expands traditional relationships between architecture and interiors and that reflects the latest theoretical developments in the fields of interior design history and practice. This collection contains diverse case studies from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century including Alexander Pope’s Memorial Garden, Design Indaba, and Robin Evans. It is an essential read for researchers, practitioners, and students of interior design at all levels.

The book explores the historical connections between the notions of architectural interior, subjective space, human interiority, and represented space including virtual space. In the 18th century the notion of "interiority" understood as a paradigm of human subjectivity came to be articulated in a sustained way in architectural and visual, rather than only literary forms. While the notion of the interior and the processes of "interiorization" were, as Walter Benjamin demonstrated, the defining features of 19th-century bourgeois culture, it is the different forms of conceptual assault on, or deconstruction of interiority that define the approach to space and self in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book examines models of understanding "interiority" as these were developed in relation to notions of space and spatial experience.