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

Chapter 49

Altered (e)states

Architecture and its interiority.

David Erdman

If interiors are merely a category of professional work that occur on the inside of buildings, “interiority” is the state of mind and perception induced by an architectural environment that is inwardly focused. An environment of this nature may have varying “degrees of interiority” but is not limited to whether it is physically within or outside of a building. Interiority, a concept of increasing importance in urban centers today, allows architects to consider how to alter the state of various environments. It opens up a productively disciplinary way to design interiors, while still considering them explicitly architectural.

Interiors are episodic in nature and often designed in vignette-like formats that are understood as autonomous “rooms.” Because interiors are disjointed from the exterior, the autonomous design of interiors contradicts five hundred years of architectural theory about part-to-whole relationships – the holy grail of rules driving architecture. In aggregate, these treatises and theories have repeatedly suggested, until the late twentieth century, that

the exterior and interior of architecture need to be integrated and unified into an architectural whole. Consequently, architects have seen the interior as the inside (merely the other side of a building enclosure) instead of seeing its potential interiority.

Young architects and architecture firms are often biased toward an overt preference for “ground-up” work rather than interior-based work, suggesting an obsession with the “architectural whole.” This, in turn, perpetuates difficulty for small independent offices in contemporary cities, where much of the work available is interior oriented. Some are compelled to develop an exploratory attitude, prowling the planet to look for new frontiers, such as China, where a gold rush of projects and contexts can situate a larger project. Yet this compulsion to address the whole exhausts resources and capital – and to what end? Is wholeness really the penultimate goal of architecture?

As populations increase, cities become denser, resources diminish, and economies sober, architects will need to confront new methods of space making. One could argue that the “topological city” with its highly continuous, centrifugal qualities (and the economies and politics that drive them) is a rare and dying breed. In the not-so-distant-future, cities will have to consider how to adapt and alter their existing structures to grow inward, to reconfigure their interior, and to design for the discontinuities and temporal layering of their urbanity. These trajectories are already emerging, with competitions and awards increasingly involving adaptive reuse projects. A focus on interiority is an essential conceptual element of the twenty-first-century architect’s tool kit because it offers new ways to alter the perceptions of architectural environments within the context of contemporary urban and economic trends.

The concept also allows for a nimble practicality where interiors and adaptive reuse projects can fall into the scope and ambitions of experimentally oriented architectural practices. The emergence and increasing prevalence of “alterations and additions” work – often limiting the architect’s scope to only the exterior or interior – is the type of work that most contemporary practices must take on if they want to engage the city. This is certainly true for Hong Kong. Recent

projects like Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Architects and Partners’ Asia Society Hong Kong Center and Herzog & de Meuron’s Police Central Headquarters are among several notable projects in Hong Kong that are more interventionist in nature and comfortable spanning the gamut between ground-up construction, conservation, landscape, and interiors. These projects showcase a largely adaptive/alteration framework in their conception and execution (Figure 49.1).

Unlike most contemporary Asian cities, Hong Kong experienced its growth period more than sixty years ago. It now has a mature and highly dense building fabric and is one of the most expensive regions in the world to build in. In many ways, it is more emblematic of a city of the twenty-first century (built out, episodic, layered, and interiorized) than it is of a late-twentieth-century city that is open, smooth, continuous, and free to grow outward. Hong Kong and other twenty-first-century cities like it amplify the discordances between exterior and interior conditions more so than twentieth-century cities do. The interior and exterior spaces of the twenty-first-century city may be entirely different from and at odds with one another. Driven largely by the desire to minimize risk by involving more than one designer, style, and brand, contemporary practices in development/financing (with its associated project briefs) call for this opposition. These are trends perpetuating environments that are intentionally and architecturally unresolved.

Taken as a psychoanalytical corollary, the perception of a twenty-first-century city’s interiority contrasts with the perception of its exteriority. This correlation could equally apply to the psyche of the contemporary urban subject, with their highly mediated and constructed exteriors (think Instagram, Facebook, etc.), that allow for a heightened contrast between their interior and exterior selves. The twenty-first-century city and its inhabitant subjects, it could be said, no longer expect part-to-whole relations to necessarily resolve themselves. If anything, the thirst for urbanity that is driving populations to move into cities (and the way those related architectures are being financed and marketed) could be precisely a desire for this discordant texture of experiences. Learning from Hong Kong, it

could be presumed that the future of the city is one where the topologies of interior and exterior will no longer need to be smoothed out, and where architects will no longer concern themselves with resolving part-to-whole relationships. Instead, design will play a greater role in giving cohesion to experiences that are currently disparate – making new types of wholes – while allowing for the semi-autonomy of interiors and exteriors to coexist.

Figure 49.1 Two projects showing the interventionist and interiorized capacities of architecture in contemporary Hong Kong. Both projects are emblematic of projects in dense urban cities where a

multitude of disciplines and approaches are required of the architect. They also (in different ways) articulate larger urban interiorized spaces. Top, Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Admiralty Hong Kong, 2012. Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects | Partners. Aerial photograph of Asia Society showing new structures and existing renovated structures layered on top of and beside one another. Photo Credit: © Michael Moran/OTTO Bottom, Central Police Station Compound, Central Hong Kong. Under construction. Herzog & de Meuron. Rendering showing one of two “infill” intervention/additions on top of and surrounded by renovated existing structures articulating the corner of the courtyard. View from within the courtyard.

Image credit: © Herzog & de Meuron

Alteration Mid- to late-twentieth-century obsessions with digital technology often relied on biological models to resolve how architecture could adapt to its changing context. This applies to both the interior and exterior spaces of architecture, from the endlessness of Kiesler to the metabolic capacities of architecture, as seen in Japan.$^8$ While there have been some notable advances in this subject manifested in a host of formal, parametric, and geometric experiments, it is difficult to ignore the role of adaptation in the profession through ideas of “adaptive reuse.” Used more often as a marketing ploy than a conceptual opportunity, adaptation is, however, ripe for theoretical expansion and tectonic interrogation – particularly in relation to ideas of interiority. For the most part, architectural “adaptation” projects are conceived from the ground up, introducing a comprehensive and whole architectural system into a context. The contemporary field of architectural software favors this continuous, smooth, singular, and fully integrated approach. “Alteration,” on the other hand, opens up fresh discursive territory that builds upon the ideas of adaptation by affronting standardization – with a few distinctions. It is an approach that is somewhat more restrained, fine grained, and interiorized. Alteration could be called a more “centripetal,” rather than “centrifugal,” approach to design, one that pulls and tucks architecture into shape, rather than deforms a structure to adjust it to adjacencies.

Because of its episodic characteristics, strategies of alteration are not only in line with the emerging qualities of twenty-first-century cities, but they also open up the potential to reconsider the theories of disjunctive or fragmented architectures prevalent in the 1980s. To a large extent, those theories are absent from digital architecture today due to an obsession with continuity and an intellectually stubborn insistence on designing the whole. From a postdigital perspective, however, disjunctive theories offer a limit for testing. To what extent do alteration and an emphasis on interiority allow us to rethink the architectural whole? Can strategies of alteration be pushed close to the disjunctive extreme of fragmentation while maintaining enough cohesion to be understood as forming new types of architectural wholes? Does alteration allow for a way to engage new ways of thinking that embrace, rather than exile, interiors-based work from architecture?

Objecthood and centripetal qualities

Issues of interiority and the subject of alteration might become central to the work of many contemporary architects. To a large extent, the necessity to engage the subject creatively and theoretically is circumstantial. Increasingly architecture practice takes on projects that are a mixed bag of scope involving one part architecture, one part interior, one part conservation, one part landscape, and one part product design (or some variation thereof). It is equally important to seek out ways to theorize these types of opportunities while also working to understand them within the context of their urban landscapes. The concept of alteration stems directly from these observations in my own experience and practice with davidclovers while I resided and taught in Hong Kong. The distinction between adaptation and alteration has shaped this interrogation in two key ways: through the objecthood of interiority and through its related centripetal qualities. When discussing the architectural whole, we are effectively talking about degrees of “objecthood.” Traditionally, architects consider objects as fully integrated entities; interior and exterior, structure and skin, and so on. Where adaptation is about objects adjusting to their

surroundings, alteration is about reconfiguring the object’s interior. To what extent that reconfiguration can detach itself from the original object and form new objects, or refashion the original into a new collective object, is where alteration holds its promise. Alteration has both the potential to maintain a degree of objecthood, and yet, in itself, is fragmentary and episodic. Altering is an exercise in adjusting select, disjointed areas – not the entire original object. In the numerous projects I worked on and designed with davidclovers, trends and techniques emerged that led to my understanding that alteration is a critical part of any contemporary practice. In those projects, objects are inserted within objects at some scales, while at other scales a multiplicity of objects (interior and exterior) are instrumentalized to collectively imbue a large-scale degree of objecthood (Figure 49.2). Each technique, I realized, invokes degrees of a perceptual interiority, which is not always manifested through an intervention on the inside.

Hong Kong, as an incredibly dense and pressurized city, has little room to stretch out (partly for financial reasons found in GFA calculations and partly for physical reasons); there simply is not enough space or land. The move toward working with interiorized objects therefore came naturally to the work because of being immersed and practicing in that context. The quality of objects in that context shifted; seeking out ways to pull experience into them rather than showing off their qualities exuberantly up front – or on the exterior. The use of minor and major forms of involutions ranging from subtle, concave facades to deep, thick, figured interiors, was a method of spinning context inward. What I began to understand across these projects is that what distinguishes them are these interiorized objects and their centripetal qualities, a quality that breeds a semi-autonomy reinforcing the episodic and interventionist characteristics between them. In a number of cases where the projects were physically larger, the opportunity to understand how those interiorized objects were both disparate and at the same time form a cohesive landscape; (collective of interiorized objects) became of increasing interest.

The Repulse Bay Complex The Repulse Bay Complex, one of the largest projects we designed, exemplifies some of these principles. The Repulse Bay Complex is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hong Kong Shanghai Hotels, who also own and operate the famed Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. The original, mid-eighties complex containing four towers of mid- to upscale unfurnished rental units is an Arquitectonica “knock-off,” infamous for the gaping hole between the third and fourth tower. Each tower is standardized and homogeneous, surrounded by a series of landscape and club elements that were disconnected architecturally, diminishing the complex’s experiential identity.

Image credit: Almond Chu Photography and courtesy of plusClover

The renovation was atypical and unique in Hong Kong, among the first comprehensive “gut” renovations of a tower, coupled with a revamping of the podium and complex at large. The project is in many ways a direct reflection of the twenty-first-century characteristics of the city as detailed previously. The maturing building fabric, the sobering economy, and diminishing amounts of land underpinned some of the necessity for the renovation.

The Repulse Bay Complex is a collection of interventions within one site that includes a residential tower, recreational areas, and collective spaces (Figure 49.3). Designed and completed incrementally between 2011 and 2013, the project brief aimed at amplifying the heterogeneity of the tower units while simultaneously imbuing the property at large with a greater sense of cohesion. In the simplest terms, we proposed a series of interventions in the form of a physical alteration of an existing structure. These interventions focused on changes to the common areas of a housing complex that altered the inhabitant’s perception of, and interaction with, these spaces. The project illustrates the potential of the disjunctive to produce a new type of spatial fabric that is cohesive yet agile and formed out of a series of disconnected interventions. To this extent, the project is different from an adaptation, which strives ardently for the production of a singular, autonomous whole.

While each intervention in the Repulse Bay Complex altered existing structural, mechanical, and visual arrangements significantly, each also has its own discrete limits and could not be conceived a continuous whole. The convergence of technological approaches and the parallel streaming of design techniques in each of the interventions proliferates a high degree of specificity, dexterity, and heterogeneity, while avoiding episodic fragmentation. A composite of technological approaches are deployed, ranging from digitally prefabricated construction to algorithmically generated graphic design and coloring techniques. The designs alter a series of autonomous landscapes, interiors, and architectural objects into a rhythmic texture that appears and disappears throughout the site. Working in this manner developed a finely grained yet open system. Each intervention pulls inward and simultaneously alters existing structures

and relationships. Each intervention is a result of a disciplinary plurality, integrating techniques from product, graphic, and landscape design and further altering the stable “reading” or perception of any single technique. The ensemble of interventions never fully integrates or makes the site whole, yet incrementally they produce enough pressure and tension to tether remote and unconnected experiences to one another.

Speculative realisms

In many ways, alteration is a call to be more resourceful as designers. There is the obvious advantage of recycling an existing building fabric and limiting the resources of development, both of which underscored the opportunities in the Repulse Bay Complex. Alteration may also unleash other types of resources, from the conceptual to the experiential. Learning from the disjunctive theories of the eighties and transforming them in new, innovative ways (including the direct embrace of interiority and its objecthood) allows room to build resources for architecture, and bring into the scope of architecture, work that is in danger of being done by others and/or pejoratively and arrogantly tossed to the side as unworthy of an architect’s attention. Architectural practices need to embrace the realities of the cities in which they practice, and at the same time speculate on how to transform them and subsequently to transform our understanding of the architectural whole.

Experimenting with the limits of continuity and fragmentation through alteration allows for a greater degree of compatibility with existing architectural systems, as well as an even greater plurality of experience and effect. The Repulse Bay Complex serves as an interesting testing ground in this context, where diverse material assemblies and moods augment heterogeneity in experiences, while also producing enough cohesion to give the property a new identity. Alteration can be seen as a way to resituate interiority in architecture, highlighting disjunctive capacities of alteration, while ushering postdigital themes relevant to the academy and cultural trends in the industry. If we can employ alteration to rethink the

architectural whole, the future of interiority and its related praxes may open up fertile speculative realities.

Acknowledgement Portions of this chapter appear in AD’s “Mass Customized Cities” and the DADA 2014 exhibition catalogue both written in collaboration with Clover Lee, Director, davidclovers, now plusClover.

Notes

1. The Interior Architecture Reader is a case in point, being among the first Readers to focus on the subject of interiors. Mark Taylor and Julieanna Preston, eds., Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (Wiley, 2006) is perhaps the first and only a few others have been published to date including Lois Weinthal, Toward a New Interior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011).

2. From Vitruvius’s “Ten Books on Architecture” (1500s – precise date of publication unknown) to Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture (Toward a New Architecture – 1923), the architectural whole is reasserted as a primary goal for the beauty, function, and pleasure of architectural design. Arguably, it was not until CIAM 9 (1953) when the Smithsons critiqued Le Corbusier’s Athens Charter (1933) and subsequently formed Team 10, that ideas about fragmentary and disjointed cities and architectures emerged. Readers on those theories and architects do not appear until the late twentieth century. Examples are Joan Ockman’s Architecture Culture 1948–68 (Columbia: Columbia Books of Architecture, 1993) and K. Michael Hays’s sequel Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia: MIT, 1998). Each of these expose theories that counter the architectural whole.

3. This observation draws heavily upon Sylvia Lavin’s reading of architectural discourse in her book Kissing Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011) and in particular the chapter “Current Kisses”, pp. 65–115.

4. See United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs World Urbanization Report – 2014 Revision, http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Highlights/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf; see also United Nations DESA Development Policy and Analysis Division “World Economic Situation and Prospects” report at [www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wesp/].

5 See Asia Society Hong Kong Center, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects/Partners (2012). This project was incredibly complex in its planning, preservation, conservation, landscaping, and interiors and took over ten years to design and execute. It was the first of its kind in Hong Kong, followed by an onslaught of similar projects like the Police Married Headquarters and Western Market, which reuse obsolete colonial structures (as well as other types of property) to reinvent the cultural landscape of HK. These projects are often federal/private joint ventures of the Build Operate and Transfer typology emerging in Asia. Asia Society HK exemplifies the blurring between various practices and the interventionist nature of design. Technically, it is an addition to an existing property. The Central Police Station Compound, Central Hong Kong (under construction) incorporating two additions by Herzog & de Meuron has a similar sociopolitical and economic structure and resolves itself in an architecture of episodic interventions.

6 Hong Kong’s population increase occurred from 1931 to 1961, roughly forty to fifty years earlier than cities like Shenzhen, Beijing, or Shanghai (Sources Figure 01, Wendell Cox “The Evolving Urban Form: Hong Kong”, New Geography, 2012, www.newgeography.com/content/002708-the-evolving-urban-form-hong-kong). See also Figure 03, Wendell Cox “Pakistan: Where the New Population Bomb is Exploding”, New Geography, 2012, www.newgeography.com/content/002940-pakistan-where-population-bomb-exploding), making it among the most mature modern cities in China. It is the third densest region in the world (Source UN Demographia – “Population Density” chart) and the most expensive city to build in (Sources EC Harris and Langdon & Seah 2013, International Cost Comparison chart ranking the average of the cost of construction).

7 This practice is common even among the top developers in Hong Kong, like Swire or Hong Kong Shanghai Hotels – both of whom are distinguished by their devotion to design and who have worked with notable architects and interior designers such as Frank Gehry, Kengo Kuma, and Peter Marino. Tenders are increasingly broken up in this manner, which is in part a democratic effort to spread the wealth to the design community (and not bias any one practice), evident also in recent Urban Renewal Authority projects in Hong Kong. This practice is also in part a method to capitalize opportunistically on a spectrum of markets and styles within any one property. This is most prevalent in private residential housing estates. The Pacific Century Premium Development’s Bel-Air On The Peak development in Pok Fu Lam is an example, which shifts from faux neo baroque interiors (phase four) to the sleek curvilinear modernity of Norman Fosters’ 8 towers that form phase six (branded separately as Bel-Air No.8).

8 See Friedrick Kiesler’s Endless House project (1950) and the Nakagin Capsule Tower by Kisho Kurokawa (1972), both of which can be seen as benchmark projects using the subject of biological adaptation to underpin their form, geometry, and massing.

9 In particular here I am referring to Deconstruction (see the exhibition of this title at MOMA 1988), its predecessors like Aldo Rossi’s seminal book Architecture and the City (Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and MIT, 1982) and perhaps most importantly its antecedents like Bernard Tschumi’s book Architecture and Disjunction (MIT Press 1996). Largely formed in a predigital era, the projects associated with these theories were explosive fields of objects that were syntactically related but conceived as separate autonomous follies. With the advent of digital computing, continuity and wholism became increasingly important; think single-surface Yokohama Port Terminal (FOA 2002) among numerous other projects. The benefit of looking back at this work after twenty years of smooth and continuous digital projects is to embrace the agility of the fragment and the disjunctive while trying at the same time to explore how those interventions do not remain entirely separate follies but instead form new types of more complex architectural wholes.

10 I am specifically drawing upon Michael Fried’s article “Art and Objecthood” (Art Forum 5, June 1967) as a means to understand the architectural object. Of particular importance is that Fried’s definition of objecthood is distinguishable from the current interest in Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology. This is because Fried’s article discusses objecthood as a predominately perceptual and sensual idea within the practices and aesthetics of art – something more directly aligned to architecture and its potential praxes when compared with Graham Harmon’s Triple O, Meillasoux, and philosophical discussions of Kant’s object of knowledge. While Fried has a direct relationship to Harmon’s work, Fried’s discussion of objecthood is explicitly more experiential and architectural.

11 Ockman, Architecture Culture 1948–68, Hays Architecture Theory Since 1968. See endnote 2.

12 Ground Floor Area (GFA) calculations limit the economy of buildings in Hong Kong, which tend to prioritize the monetization of floor plate areas over design. As such, one sees an intensively Fordist production of housing throughout the city and over many decades limiting the extent to which architects can “branch out.” While Hong Kong occupies only one-third of its total land area, the remaining two-thirds are seen as both an asset and economically unfeasible to develop. These areas provide the city with a robust network of country parks and recreation which are difficult to develop due to their intensively steep terrain. Ongoing debates about whether to release this land for development

continue; however, they are unlikely to resolve themselves in a sea change of land releases, reasserting the idea that Hong Kong has very little land to build upon.

13 While de Ricou Tower is among the first A+A projects of this nature, it appears that these types of projects are becoming more common in Hong Kong as evidenced by Pacific Place with its commissioned interventions by Thomas Heatherwick (2011) or several recladding projects undertaken by developers since the 1980s.