(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)

Chapter 41

The dialectics of appropriation

Graeme Brooker

The diverse processes of appropriation inform the basis of the descriptions of the discipline of interior architecture. This elemental feature of the subject means it is often assigned a “slippery” status. At its most extreme, this perception manifests itself in the derivative view that the subject lacks a historical, theoretical, and regulatory foundation. In response, this chapter positions two things: first, that the “slippery” quality of the interior is of paramount importance; far from being a negative condition, it is a unique and fundamental feature of the subject. Second, that the substance of this spatial, disciplinary, and professional ambiguity manifests itself primarily as a composite construct – a history, a theory, a space that is built from a number of differing ideas, objects, edifices, and other appropriated elements. This chapter will explore the idea that this ambiguous or unfixed quality manifests itself principally as an issue of semantics, and then as an intrinsic and essential spatial ambiguity. In opposition to negative associations, I would suggest that these qualities are elemental to interior architecture; they are fundamental to many aspects of the subject because appropriation and reuse – process-based approaches to formulating interior architecture –

ultimately create a particular design language: one that is explicit to the thinking about and the making of “architectured” interior space.

Because of this condition, the ambiguous nature of interior architecture can be understood and advanced through the exploration of a series of dualities. In this chapter I suggest that these dualities, or the dialectics of appropriation, give interior architecture its unique verbal and visual language. They are ideas and processes that inform the subject’s distinctive cultures of research, practice, and education. These dualities might often be viewed as at odds with each other, yet, I suggest that dialectical conflict, the dichotomy of one idea superseding another, and thus rendering itself obsolete, is a redundant notion in this context. Instead, the dialectics of appropriation forms the basis of the composite construct of interior architecture; a set of processes that give the subject a dynamic resonance and ultimately its distinctive attributes.

Reuse and appropriation

Reuse and appropriation form the basis of all aspects of the subject of interior architecture. That is, they are processes that signify the repurposing of an object, edifice, or idea, all of which have been removed from their traditional contexts and deliberately repositioned into a new one. Julia A.B. Hegewald and Subrata K. Mitra clarify this position in the book Reuse: The Art and Politics of Integration and Anxiety, in which they suggest:

Reuse essentially refers to using an item again. This can be an object, an edifice, building materials, a style, a law, a concept, a form of governance, an idea or anything else. It is a deliberate and selective process in which existing elements are borrowed and taken out of their former surroundings to be applied to a fresh context. For this to happen, a disruption and a break have to happen, favoring confrontation with something new. Reuse does not imitate and replicate; it is a creative combination of old and new elements which aims to take the item or concept further. $^2$

When reuse and appropriation are used as the critical instruments of formation for architectured interiors, a fundamental change occurs in the materials used for the adaptation. Hegewald and Mitra suggest that an inevitable part of these changes are evident in the disruption to the normal qualities and conditions of any existing elements. These methods of instigating changes to any material implies that the dynamism, engendered by the processes of recombining differing elements, or the amalgamation of things that were never intended to be put together, can provoke a frisson. This disruption embodies resonance, a dynamic force that stimulates new value and hence significance in appropriated and reused elements. In other words, it forces matter to be reappropriated and reinterpreted in order to be read and understood in a new and different way.

Hegewald and Mitra also suggest that these processes encapsulate a disruptive component, a break in meaning, a rupture that is central to all appropriation techniques. They propose that reuse, and therefore appropriation, embodies disruption in order for old values to be assessed and for new meaning and understandings to be constructed with the newly reconfigured materials. At its extremes, these processes of change border on the brutal and can even be considered transgressive. Dale Kinney restates this forcefulness in Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture From Constantine to Sherrie Levine. He suggests, “There is always violence implied in appropriation; and the violence of the cut is always accompanied by the aggravated wound of separation.” Kinney goes further and suggests that appropriation can also exemplify power:

As with reuse, particular acts or practices of appropriation can acquire positive or negative charge according to circumstances. Often the charge is political and in contemporary discourse it is frequently determined by the direction of the appropriation in relation to perceived distributions of power.

However reuse and appropriation are utilized in the built environment, it is the role of the interior architect to direct and manipulate this distribution of

forces, maneuvering the power or the resonances of appropriation. Whatever the changes to appropriated matter, during the processes of their reuse there is a clear shift in meaning as elements undergo a significant change in the way in which they are utilized; a change that can also ultimately result in their demise. A point emphasized by Hegewald and Mitra when they state, “A significant aspect of reuse is that it is discerning and choosy, and that whereas some elements are adopted and filled with a new significance, others get deprived and emptied of meaning or even destroyed.”

Discourses of appropriation Along with my rudimentary positioning of reuse and appropriation as primary elements in the production of interior architecture, I would argue that the conception and formulation of the subject consists of processes where ambiguity is a significant and vital condition. This is because architectured interiors are primarily composed of matter that is being placed into new contexts that they were never intended for. Another source of these ambiguous – or unfixed – qualities is found in the discourses surrounding the processes used to describe reuse and appropriation. In Michael Guggenheim’s Formless Discourse: The Impossible Knowledge of Change of Use, the author suggests that there is a theoretical shortcoming in the literature surrounding the discipline of reuse and therefore, by association, interior architecture. $^6$ He suggests there are numerous reasons for this deficiency, and in particular he relates this weakness to the absence of the user in architectural thinking. Guggenheim proposes that up until the 1970s, the occupants of buildings were often merely used for the purposes of scale, particularly in representations of the built environment, and he suggests that a central concern of any interior discipline is human occupation. Therefore, this situation has ensured that the interior has not been suitably represented in earlier twentieth-century spatial discourses – in particular Modernism – where the nuances of occupation and use were often overlooked. He also notes that the authors of the existing literature on change of use appear to be

confused about what they see; “They see only typological change in the buildings and are unable to grasp the process related changes.”

Utilizing Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Guggenheim explicitly connects change of use to the user or occupant of space. Latour identified three methods of understanding for working with existing architecture: he described buildings as technologies, signs, and interactions. Guggenheim developed these three approaches further. He described them as technological, semiotic, and sociological. Technologies describes the understanding of the building through function, and how a particular use affected the user. In other words technologically oriented thinking positions the building through type or use. In contrast, a semiotic approach focuses on the sign or symbol of the building, rather than its material aspects. The semiotic properties of a building are described as signs that prompt the user to assume a particular response. Guggenheim used the example of a church spire as a symbol of the use of the building. Its appearance instructs the user to congregate and worship beneath it. The sociological (or interactive) approach reversed the technological and semiotic determination of use, and instead informed the user to act on the building regardless of its technological or semiotic implications.

Throughout the change of use processes, or the building’s reuse and appropriation, Guggenheim suggested that the sociological or interactive properties were dominant. The building was to be defined by its new use. He explains that this is because:

A building is erected and in our perception, its technological and semiotic properties are more or less intact, stable, and guide users. By changing use, which can happen without any material change to the building, the sociological properties take command: the building is now largely defined by its uses.

He goes on to say,

This does not mean that technological features no longer play a role, or that in the process of change of use architects and builders are not materially altering the building. However, the material properties become relatively less important to the sociological ones. $^{10}$

The use of the terms “sociological” or “interactive” is useful. In the processes of creating interior architecture, forms of occupation are inevitable, as opposed to types of “function.” In twentieth-century discourses such as Modernism, a functionalist approach to the design of the built environment is effectively rendered useless where the construction of a building is transformed via reuse or appropriation. As Fred Scott says in On Altering Architecture, “In a functionalist model, all works of architecture stand in danger of being considered, at some time or other, by some agency or other, as a waste of space.” $^{11}$

Guggenheim suggests that during change of use the typological classification of the building becomes ambiguous, primarily because matter is disrupted and meanings are shifted through the processes of a change of use. For instance, what was once a building created for a particular function, such as a courthouse, is unable to adequately express its change of use to, for instance, an apartment block, or say an art gallery. In Guggenheim’s view, the literature or discourse on change of use fails to adequately describe this process, especially when only articulated through type-based categorization. He states, “Change of use itself simply does not fit the established classificatory order of architecture. It cannot be classified into categories such as building type, style, structural method, regional origin, name of architect, or materials used.” $^{12}$ Guggenheim succinctly states the problems with adequately describing reuse and appropriation as a fundamental aspect of interior architecture. The lack of language available to adequately express the processes of reuse leads to the slippery conditions ascribed to the subject referred to earlier in this chapter. Guggenheim positions this as a problem, a failing that can only be remedied by inventing a language that is based around process, in order to ensure that buildings and their change of use

make certain an understanding between buildings and society. As he says, “the architectural discourse on change of use is a result of this inability to see, recognize, and talk about the processes of change, even when looking at changed buildings.” More importantly, he states, “Besides failing to establish a set of terms, the literature on change of use fails to classify its object. To classify means to introduce an ordering device by selecting and categorizing objects according to defined features.” Defining these features is a task that assumes a position of power; it creates order in an otherwise disorganized world. Rather than a failure to establish a recognized discourse, I would suggest that there is an opportunity for the development of language in interior architecture. Anything that is yet to be defined allows for openness as to how narratives might be framed, discourses can be positioned, and knowledge can be formed, critiqued, and established. This open quality of interior architecture discourses ensures that it remains fluid and flexible. Concomitantly, when something is fully codified, it is completed. It could be argued that in the processes of the completion of an element such as a building or space, something is lost, as Alistair Bonnet suggests:

When the world has been fully codified and collated, when ambivalences and ambiguities have been sponged away so that we know exactly and objectively where everything is and what it is called, a sense of loss arises. The claim to completeness causes us to mourn the possibility of exploration and muse endlessly on the hope of novelty and escape.

The failure to “clarify its object” is instead a positive and dynamic quality endorsing a continuous attempt to redefine interior architecture and its references. This open-endedness ensures that the architecture of the interior remains open to a multiplicity of voices and ideas. If reuse is uncodifiable, then the processes of making architectured interiors are invaluable and capable of expressing nontraditional ways of presenting interior space. As

Kinney states, “Reuse is noticeably nonconformist, exceptional, and ideological, rather than systematic and neutral.”16

Appropriate dialectics So, if ambiguity is fundamental to the subject, what discourses may be useful to develop to assist understanding in the discipline of architectured interiors? In The Emergence of the Interior, Charles Rice described the doubled quality of the interior utilizing the “Two-fold Room,” a poem by Charles Baudelaire:

Doubleness is manifest in the semantic development that marks the emergence of the interior… The interior thus emerged with significance as a physical, three dimensional space, as well as an image… Significantly, doubleness involves the interdependence between image and space, with neither sense being primary.17

He described the numerous possibilities of the fluctuations between the image and the reality of a house. In A Topology of Everyday Constellations, George Teyssot afforded the interior a dual dimension when he suggested, “The history of the house, oscillating between an ideal of transparency and the need for establishing certain forms of opacity, manifests a double, sometimes contradictory ambition.”18 He suggested that domestic space contained a doubled undulation, one that constantly vacillated between private and public. All aspects of the subject of the interior can contain these dual aspects. In the distinct discipline of interior architecture, I suggest that the term dialectic can be used to describe elements, concepts, and ideologies that may be considered violently at odds with each other. Rather than doubled, I would suggest the dialectic is a useful device as it is intrinsic to interior architecture because traditional notions of dialectical variance, the dichotomy of one idea superseding another, are an unnecessary diversion. Instead, I suggest that the dialectics of interior architecture are very particular and connected entities formed through the appropriation and

explicit combination of elements that are not only at variance, but are often in diametric opposition to each other as well as the buildings that are being transformed. The dialectics of appropriation are spatial counterpoints, elements, and ideas; processes that are joined, stitched, or forced together in order to form a composite. This is a construct that affords interior architecture a number of fundamental attributes namely a dynamic resonance due to the forces of resistant and unfamiliar elements being incorporated together.

The emphasis that I am placing on the dialectics of appropriation is manifest primarily in the form of this spatial composite construct. This assemblage is an amalgam of matter that incorporates and is fabricated from a number of ideas and adapted elements. Composite constructs are formed from ideas and entities that can be described through the origins of a series of dualities, each of which is a particular description that is very specific to the comprehension and the realization of the architectured interior.

Old/new, in/out, space/place

What might the dialectics of appropriation be? The combination of both new and old elements is a familiar trope in the formation of interior architecture. Hegewald and Mitra explain that, “The meeting of opposites, for example the modern and the traditional, is not always a scene for peaceful accommodation. Dualities are sometimes overcome through converging affinities, leading to the creation of novel and hybrid forms.” The resonances created between the deliberate placement of something contemporary against – or within – an element of differing chronology, will always create a very particular spatial dialectic.

A threshold, such as the one between an interior and an exterior, creates a significant rupture in a continuous or possibly seamless spatial condition. According to Joy Monice Malnar and Frank Vodvarka in The Interior Dimension:

One of the most fundamental divisions in design is that of interior from exterior, volume from mass. As the interior and exterior are perceptually separate, sustaining coherence between them is a difficult task. It entails a significant divergence in design approach, despite many shared theoretical assumptions and techniques. $^{20}$

The problematic assignment of sustaining this division and the emphasis placed on the separation and materialization of these two conditions, ensures that the dialectic of in/out can be celebrated and condensed in a physical or cerebral element. The dichotomy inherent in the processes of appropriation, through the slippage and shifting of meaning in all kinds of matter, is particularly evident in edifices when change of use transforms them from redundancy to reoccupied buildings. Alistair Bonnet suggests that:

Figure 41.1 Old/New: FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkerque; Lacaton and Vassal. The existing Halle building was “doubled” to create a new exhibition and event space.

Figure 41.2 In/Out: Red Bull Academy, Madrid; Langarita-Navarro. The threshold between interior and exterior was obscured when the old warehouse was reoccupied with a series of rooms in which to make music.

Space sounds modern in a way that place doesn’t: it evokes mobility and the absence of restrictions; it promises empty landscapes filled with promise. When confronted with the filled-in busyness and oddity of place, the reaction of modern society has been to straighten and rationalize, to prioritize connections and erase obstacles, to overcome place with space. $^{21}$

These processes of conversion ensure that the dialectic of space and place becomes constructed through changes in use as well as the processes of decay, obsoletion, and reoccupation, and then the same again.

The processes of making sense of what is extant and how it will be utilized requires a very particular sensibility, one that is predisposed to working on-site, and one that is concerned with a multiplicity of processes of reuse and also of appropriation. Hegewald and Mitra state:

Reuse is a conscious and selective process in which existing elements are borrowed or salvaged and taken out of their former environment in order to be applied to a new context, or they are left within their old milieu but filled with new meanings, or they get manipulated and react to new external influences. This also includes resistance to certain elements. For this to happen a disruption or change has to take place, favoring a confrontation with something different. $^{22}$

These processes form the basis of the interior architectural sensibility: a predilection for the extant and a profound curiosity for working with what is already there. The loss or change of meaning that occurs when things transform their original identities during the processes of reuse and appropriation means that those ambiguous, or dialectical, conditions are of paramount importance, as well as elemental to the languages used to describe it. The dialectics of appropriation are a set of ambiguous conditions, circumstances that are inherent in the semantics of interior architecture but which are elemental in the development of a composite construct; a space formed from counterpointed elements that are brought together through the processes of reuse and appropriation.

Notes

Henry Hildebrant, “The Gaps Between Interior Design and Architecture”, Design Intelligence (2004): 1–8, www.di.net/articles/the-gaps-between-interior-design-and-architecture/ (accessed 8 May 2015 at 16.06);
John Gigli, Frazer Hay, Ed Hollis, Andy Milligan, Alex Milton, and Drew Plunkett, eds., Thinking Inside the Box: A Reader in Interiors for the 21st Century (London: Middlesex University Press, 2007), p. xi;
Clive Edwards, Interior Design a Critical Introduction (Oxford: Berg, 2011), pp. 2–8; Paul Rodgers, eds., Interiors Education Futures: Contemporary Insights (Oxford: Libri, 2012), p. 1.
Julia A.B. Hgeewald and Subrata K. Mitra, Reuse: The Art and Politics of Integration and Anxiety (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2012), p. 3.
Richard Brilliant and Dale Kinney, eds., Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture From Constantine to Sherrie Levine (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 9).
Brilliant and Kinney, eds., Reuse Value, p. 8.
Hgeewald and Mitra, Reuse, p. 4.
Michael Guggenheim, “Formless Discourse: The Impossible Knowledge of Change of Use”, Candide Journal for Architectural Knowledge 4 (July 2011): 9–36, www.candidejournal.net/back-issues/ (accessed 5 July 2015).
Ibid., p. 13.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

9 Guggenheim, “Formless Discourse”, p. 17. 10 Ibid., p. 17. 11 Fred Scott, On Altering Architecture (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), p. 5. 12 Guggenheim, “Formless Discourse”, p. 19. 13 Ibid., p. 33. 14 Ibid., p. 19. 15 Alistair Bonnet, Unruly Places, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2014), p. xiv. 16 Brilliant and Kinney, eds., Reuse Value, p. 3. 17 Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (Oxford: Routledge, 2007), p. 2. 18 George Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), p. 24. 19 Hegewald and Mitra, Reuse, p. 2. 20 Joy Monice Malnar and Frank Vodvarka, The Interior Dimension a Theoretical Approach to Enclosed Space (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), p. xi. 21 Bonnet, Unruly Places, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies, p. 13. 22 Hegewald and Mitra, Reuse, p. 49.