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

Chapter 10

Territory and inhabitation

Amy Campos

This chapter proposes a development from the nineteenth-century territorial idea of a politically and geographically located landscape to a more nuanced understanding of territory as a defined, but placeless, field of action. Territory evolves from a fixed place to a nomadic system of occupation. Using historical examples that suggest varied definitions of territory, as well as contemporary interiors that engage modern conditions of placelessness, nomadism, and transience, this chapter describes a reciprocal, rather than hierarchical, relationship between territory and the inhabited interior.

The frontier

From the vantage point of the nineteenth-century American frontier, territory connotes the promise of ownership of land and resources and simultaneously suggests an affirmation of self. During the westward territorial expansion of the United States, settlers were allowed to stake claim to land under the notion of Manifest Destiny, a belief that American citizens had a fundamental right to own land and a duty to steward it.

claimed landscape was seen as a resource-rich, culturally blank slate upon which owners could pursue new ideals, beyond the persecution of feudal hierarchies and “Old World” values. In the Jeffersonian sense, the enculturation of place was dictated by the will and self-realization of the free individual who staked claim to that territory. Ownership of a landscape territory provided the social freedom for an owner to construct one’s own inhabitation of that place. Territory, as a located place, became the hierarchically dominant component of a complex spatial and cultural system. In this case, the land itself provides the structure for inhabitation and the cultural context that might emerge from it.$^3$

Constructed territories

Neolithic Southern Anatolia represents an inversion of the frontier’s territorial hierarchy. The construction of habitations produced a fabricated territory upon which a public culture was defined. Çatalhöyük was one of the earliest and most unique urban settlements.$^4$ It was occupied between 7400 and 6200 BC on the Southern Anatolian Plateau in present-day Turkey. In this densely populated settlement, individual houses were built directly adjacent to each other. The houses were built from mud bricks reinforced with wooden posts, made up of a large single room with smaller storage rooms built around the periphery. Interior walls were plastered and decorated frequently; platforms for various uses were built within the main interior. The only means of egress was provided through the roof via a wooden ladder and openings to the exterior. In Çatalhöyük, there were no streets or squares separating independent buildings, only an aggregate of dwellings entered through rooftop hatches. The city was built as a single, agglomerated structure. In fact, the roof of this megastructure was the thoroughfare, the public square, and the entry point for interior dwellings. Over many generations, houses were rebuilt on previous layers of demolition. Sometimes, as many as eighteen layers built the city mound’s topography, making the roof structure stepped to provide shady places to gather outside and a vertical surface for small windows providing light to

the interiors. The roofline acts as the territorial marker between interior and exterior – private and public – space. The spatial hierarchy of the American frontier is reversed in Çatalhöyük’s monolithic city. Here, the constructed interior produces a public space that defines the territory of the city.

Where the frontier and the aggregate cityscape suggest various intersecting relationships between territory and interior, the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant exemplifies a complete disconnection of the interior activities from the exterior environment in which it resides. After the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese at the end of 1941, the United States enlisted Colonel John F. Ohmer to deploy camouflage and decoy techniques to help protect key military sites in California. Ohmer had witnessed the success of military decoys at the Battle of Britain in 1940: by placing full-scale decoys of military equipment on the ground in the countryside, including tanks, aircrafts, and buildings, the British misdirected surveillance from enemy planes flying above and forced the enemy to expunge massive amounts of bombs on these decoy targets. In Burbank, rather than strategically directing enemy attention to another unpopulated location using decoys, the United States wanted to camouflage existing military locations. In order to deceive the Japanese in much more urbanized areas in California, Ohmer would have to deploy this decoy strategy at the scale of an entire landscape. At the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant in the suburbs of Los Angeles, teams of set and prop designers, decorators, stage managers, and other experts from Hollywood’s production stages were recruited to take on the massive project of hiding a military operation the size of an entire neighborhood. An enormous scrim roof was constructed to cover the entire plant, including all of its buildings, streets and parking infrastructure, aircraft hangars, and runways. The scrim was erected to look like the American suburbs that surrounded the plant. Paper thin fake houses, streets with rubber cars, trees, and shrubs, even laundry lines complete with drying clothes and fire hydrants made up the elevated horizontal decoy. This exterior space, seen only from above, produced a new horizontal facade built as a peripheral diversion for a series of precise and enclosed actions. The decoration of the exterior, as a decoy landscape, acts an architectural

distraction from the covert operations of the plant inside, becoming the antithesis to the adage “form follows function.” The interior of the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant is created and enclosed by an artificial suburban landscape that blends into the actual surrounding suburban landscape, neither of which is integral to the internal operations of the plant itself. Interiority exists independent of territory as a located condition. The plant is a hidden, placeless island within an intentionally inconsequential landscape. The landscape of this false suburb, the camouflage scrim, allows the interior to be liberated from place, suggesting a potential for it to exist in any location or no location.

The liberated interior

An excellent historical example of an interior condition that migrates from place to place is provided by the use of tapestries. Tapestries were prized possessions, taking much skill, time, and capital to produce. The large-scale manufacture of tapestries increased significantly at the end of the Middle Ages, simultaneous with the advancement from wooden fortresses to defensive stone strongholds in northern Europe’s colder climates. As territories became defined by more permanent architectural outposts, the tapestries developed as equally valuable tools for indicating dominion and power as rulers traveled from one location to another. The tapestries served two primary functions: to ease the chill of the interior of these massive stone constructions by acting as an applied insulation, and to depict the power and wealth of those who owned them through the scale, complexity, and narrative depictions of each tapestry. The Redemption of Man Series from the early sixteenth century, for example, is made up of ten 26-foot-wide panels. Only a hall or space at least 260 feet long could accommodate the series, and as tapestries are meant to travel, the implication here is that the owner of such a masterpiece could only have such vast wealth and property as to accommodate such a large series in multiple locations. Tapestries were easily transported and quickly installed, moving with the owner from fortress to fortress and even onto the battlefield. Wherever their owners took

them, tapestries marked territory. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tapestries often depicted realistic scenes of distant or fantastical places. The tapestries became a virtual window to another highly embellished narrative territory regardless of the actual environment within which it resided. They typically passed between multiple generations, reinforcing family mythologies through their narrative depictions. It was the mobility of the tapestries that rendered them strategically more valuable, precisely as a result of their itinerant quality.

Today, such value is amplified in the context of increasingly nomadic economies and populations. Recent and ongoing global crises in resource scarcity, skilled labor, climate change, and shifting industries have resulted in mass migrations of markets, resources, and people. In the United States, people relocate frequently at an average of every five to seven years over the course of their lifetimes. The ability for the liberated interior to move redefines territorial occupation as a materially and culturally transient condition.

The design for Titlecase, a typography studio in San Francisco, is approached as a spatial puzzle that can be reconfigured indefinitely. Titlecase is a joint venture between two independent typographers who had moved from New York at different times, met in San Francisco, and are partners in the space and various events within it while maintaining independent practices. Both partners plan to eventually expand into separate spaces. Faced with this situation, the choice is often relatively disposable, temporary interior products meant to be consumed for a single space and discarded when locations change. With increasing resource scarcity and population mobility, however, this is a progressively untenable approach to the way we live today. At Titlecase, this temporary condition was addressed through the development of permanent modular components (shelving, desks, benches, and cabinets) proportionately designed in dimension and detail for easy reconfiguration within their current location and transferrable to any new space (Figure 10.1). The scale of change exists in daily or weekly cycles within a single location. Here, work space for the two partners and their temporary staff becomes instructional space for hosting

workshops, instructional space becomes lounge space, and everything can be moved to the perimeter to act as backdrop for social gatherings, lectures, and parties. Designed for a permanent state of flux in program, this project produces a permanently nomadic plan for a single space that can be transferred and expanded into a new space; spatial informality and flexibility are necessities. The clients participate in the making of the space every day and use the framework of the design as a platform for their own experimentations in occupation.

Placemaking for tools of their vocation became highly specified: organization and creative space on the desks articulated through the specific location of pen holders, accommodations for right- or left-handedness, preference for notebook or trace roll racks, and foot rests are all part of the desk designs. Territory is staked out at the scale of furniture rather than at the scale of landscape. Semi-permanent installations provide a consistent identity to varying events and configurations at Titlecase: an homage to Fred Sandback in the form of a string installation ten feet above the floor, a painted datum that coincides with the height of the desks and cabinets, and a custom-made, vacuum-formed, translucent, backlit ceiling feature made using the client’s vocational tools. The lack of commitment to the space itself, but acknowledgement of the need for specificity in environmental identity and function, afforded a free experimentation as a series of ongoing physical and programmatic installations. This interior provides new ground for the exploration of mobility and impermanence in the context of any spatial environment.

Similarly, the Migrant Interior residential project in San Jose, California, straddled spheres of interior design, curation, installation, and organizational planning. This client knew they would move multiple times over the life of the design, so most of their financial and emotional dedication to the project went toward what we normally think of as the least permanent, most migrant components. Similar to Titlecase, the clients knew that the place they inhabited would likely change before the things they put in that space would. They were building a family and a home together and wanted to start that process before settling in one location or space, as is increasingly the case for contemporary populations. The project was approached as a set of usable environmental guides to be deployed within this space and built upon within any other space they might inhabit in the future. The interior as a set of inhabitable elements, from their point of view, defined a much more permanent sense of place than the architecture or location – very much like the example of the tapestry. What was

ultimately provided for this client was a plan of action, a designed timeline for use and change from location to location.

Aesthetic decisions for the furnishings and materials had to be coordinated throughout the project so that items rearranged in a new space could match. Specific consistent color and material strategies that could shuffle as their family grew provided a long-term foundation for the quality of their home in any location and in any configuration. A movable, custom installation of a floating field of glass spheres was commissioned as a long-lasting investment in their notion of home because of its mobility. Consisting of almost 100 hand-blown glass spheres suspended from seven different colors of monofilament that would catch the natural and artificial light existing in the space, the sculpture is designed to adjust volumetrically to new spaces as the family moves (Figure 10.2). The design also had to specifically address the process of installation in multiple locations so that the final piece could be installed and hang with no two glass balls touching each other once in place. In this case, the piece floats over the dining room, lowering the perceived verticality of the space and casting bubble-like shadows on the walls. The opportunity to embrace transience as a design strategy is inherent to the impermanent character of the interior, being more fixed to this family’s evolving scale, location, and eventual dispersion than the architecture or place. Fixed location is seen here as a changing scaffold for a durable but nomadic interior condition.

Territorial transience

In the twenty-first century, occupying a situated place becomes less significant than the ability to sustain multiple and simultaneous conditions in one space or location. The design of the interior and its objects can be defined as processes of occupation rather than as artifacts of a specific location. The design of the Tailored hair salon and art gallery, in downtown San Francisco, seeks to balance flexibility and transformability with economy, accommodating multiple spatial configurations using a set of modular furniture components in a single temporary location. The 1,200-square-foot space simultaneously houses the everyday workings of a salon, including a retail display, with the ability to transform into an art gallery and venue for special occasions. Because of the transient nature of the

project, a singular design solution could not provide for the many simultaneous activities required in the space.

A modular system of components was designed for the project that could move, aggregate, stack, and disperse to produce multiple, varied, and at times simultaneous inhabitations of the space (Figure 10.3). The “toggle stool” is a multidirectional furniture piece designed to stack and cluster as lounge and party seating, tables, counters, or shelving that can hang from the wall or rest on a grid of pegs. Styling stands contain concealed lighting at the top of the mirrors to illuminate clients; they can be rolled into place for various styling configurations or pushed into gallery wall combinations for art openings. At the top of each mirror is a groove that can receive a picture rail hook so that art could be hung in front of the mirror and lit by internal led lighting. The styling stands can be plugged into any location within a grid of power outlets in the ceiling above. The stands house all styling equipment, including holsters for hairdryers and flat irons that float above a power trough in the base of the stands, omitting the usual trail of cords from the floor. The design of the interior becomes an integral part of the company’s growing mobile aesthetic. The salon’s modularity can accommodate the expansion of their business in the current space and in new spaces as they grow and build their brand. The flexibility of the modular system acknowledges diurnal processes of use to orchestrate multiple uses at the same time. At Tailored, the employment of modular objects enables the structuring of movements, cycles, and simultaneous occupations in space, regardless of location.

Liberated interiors, like the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant and the Migrant Interior project, suggest an inversion of the nineteenth-century territorial idea, allowing the interior to be defined as an inhabited – if placeless – territory. Transient interiors, exemplified by the tapestry, Titlecase, and Tailored Salon, introduces mobility and simultaneity as an evolution of territory in a twenty-first century, resource-scarce, nomadic context. Inhabitation locates territory within a placeless, modern social context. Territory as occupied space, and interior as defined inhabitation,

have evolved into a singular field of designed action, equally and reciprocally defining each other.

Figure 10.3 ACA Amy Campos Architect, Tailored Salon (2013)

Image credit: Amy Campos

Notes

1. Portions of this chapter were previously published in the International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design 1, “Autonomous Identities” issue (2013).
2. John O’Sullivan, “Annexation”, The United States Democratic Review (July–August 1845): 5.
3. Thomas Jefferson, “Louisiana Purchase Treaty”, Paris, 30 April 1803.
4. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Neolithic Site of Çatalhōyük”, 2015, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1405 (accessed 1 July 2015).
5. Lockheed Martin, “Lockheed During World War II: Operation Camouflage”, 2015, www.lockheedmartin.com/us/100years/stories/camouflage.html (accessed 3 July 2015).
6. Louis H. Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”, Lippincott’s Magazine, March 1896: 403–409.
7. Anna G. Bennett, Five Centuries of Tapestries (Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, Japan: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1976).