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

Chapter 1

(Re)constructing histories

A brief historiography of interior architecture

Edward Hollis

I began my academic career in 1999 as a lecturer in what was, at the time, a relatively new subject: interior architecture. There was little for students, or for me, to read about interior architecture. The only comprehensive work of which I knew was John Kurtich’s Interior Architecture published in 1995. Since that time, however, there has been something of a publishing explosion around the subject.$^1$

This chapter critiques some of this literature and charts the theorization of the subject since the late 1990s. In addition to Kurtich’s foundational text, this chapter discusses John Pile’s History of Interior Design (2000), Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone’s Re-readings (2004), Fred Scott’s On Altering Architecture (2008), Penny Sparke’s The Modern Interior (2008), and Charles Rice’s The Emergence of the Interior (2007).$^2$ Not all of these books are explicitly about interior architecture. Scott, Brooker, and Stone, for example, addressed an audience of architects and interior designers (Re-readings being published by RIBA). Pile, Rice, and Sparke

focused on interior design and a more academic audience. All of them contributed significantly to discussions surrounding the new discipline. While books by Pile, Sparke, and Rice are strictly histories, Scott offers a theoretical disquisition; Brooker, Stone, and Kurtich deliver compendia of case studies. In each, however, a sense of history informs understandings about what interior architecture was, is, and could become.

How, then, were these histories of interior architecture constructed? What were their roots and precedents? Why were these books written when they were written? What did they conceive themselves as being histories of? What evidence did they use, and how was it welded into narratives? This chapter will specifically address these historical and historicized understandings of the discipline. It provides a lens through which the identity of interior architecture was constructed during this period. It attempts to show how history is not merely the record of things past, but, like interior architecture itself, a (re)construction of preexisting structures.

Why were these books written?

The turn of the twenty-first century was a time when one important aspect of interior architecture – the reuse of existing buildings – emerged in the form of Grands Projets like the Tate Modern (Herzog and De Meuron, 2000) and Berlin Reichstag (Norman Foster, 1999) to occupy the center ground in architecture. John Kurtich put it somewhat messianically:

The emergence of interior architecture as a new profession is an idea whose time has come. It is the link between art, architecture, and interior design. The professionals in this area have created this term to express a humanistic approach toward the completion of interior spaces. This approach, shared by many design professionals, has begun to produce a definition that is distinct from current practice.$^3$

Fred Scott was more modest, commenting, “That theory follows in the wake of the expedient.” There were, however, other agendas at work. Scott continued:

This book began from a partisan argument for the contribution of art school designers to be recognized as being valid in the alteration of the built environment as the more celebrated work of architects in making new buildings. It was, in the beginning, an argument against a widely assumed hegemony.

The works under discussion here were not written by architects but by studio teachers in art schools, such as Scott or Graeme Brooker, and theoreticians and historians of design, such as Sparke, Rice, and Pile. There was a political and professional dimension to their efforts. “Designers disdained the elitist architects for their compulsion for purity and maintenance of concept. Architects generally considered designers to be frivolous with no philosophical base of knowledge to guide their work,” explained Kurtich, but as Scott hinted, architecture was perceived to have a hegemony that design did not possess.

Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone’s Re-readings connected the emergence of interior architecture to postmodernism, though not the stylistic postmodernism of the 1980s. “The rise in the number of buildings being remodeled, and the gradual acceptance and respectability of the practice, is based on the reaction to what is perceived as the detrimental erosion of the city and its contents by modern architecture.” The very title of their book suggested a nod to literary postmodernism. “Many examples of modernist architecture,” they wrote, “were the product of a formal system that was essentially self-sufficient,” while the alteration of buildings offered opportunities to explore the aesthetics of the incomplete, the incoherent, and the layered.

Books about interior architecture arose, their authors claimed, in response to three main stimuli: the increasing volume of the practice on the ground, a long-standing political conflict taking place between the

professions of interior design and architecture, and a “second wave” of postmodern practice and theory.

What were these books about?

Having identified the existence of a new practice, Kurtich divided it into three practices:

First, it can be the entire building designed as an external shell containing integrated and finished interiors. Second, interior architecture can be the completion of space within an existing architectural enclosure. Finally, it can be the preservation, renovation, or adaptive reuse of buildings, historic or otherwise.$^9$

His book addressed itself to “architectural masterpieces from various historical periods,” including “well known modern examples,” and he felt the need to point out, “the examples presented are not limited to interiors.”$^{10}$

Pile’s history was conceived as a primer – a sort of Pevsner or Bannister Fletcher for interior design. “Professional interior designers,” he wrote, “are expected … [to] know the practices of the past in terms of ‘styles’ … the purpose of this book is to deliver in one volume of reasonable size, a basic survey of 60,000 years of personal and public space.”$^{11}$ The word space is key, for while Pile’s history is ostensibly a history of interior design, it takes an architectural approach to its subject:

interior design is inextricably linked to architecture and can only be studied within an architectural context … Enclosed spaces such as ruins, ancient sites, and open courtyards are given due consideration even though the sky may be their only ceiling and they are, therefore, not strictly interiors$^{12}$

At the same time, references to the other elements that comprise the interior – furniture, textiles, and so on – were limited to edited

highlights.13

Penny Sparke contributes to the discussion from a different perspective. Her starting point was Walter Benjamin’s famous comment on Paris of the nineteenth century:

for the private individual, the place of dwelling is for the first time opposed to the place of work. The former constitutes itself as the interior. Its complement is the office. The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions.14

Sparke continues to suggest that the modern interior has been formed out of the opposition between “two spheres”: the domestic interior, characterized by femininity, soft textiles, practices of decoration, and so on, and the public interior, characterized by hard surfaces and materials, male occupations, and architecture. “The boundaries between the ‘separate spheres’ were fundamentally unstable, and it was that instability, rather than the separation per se, that, I will suggest, defined modernity, and by extension the modern interior.” Her history documents episodes in this long-running boundary war: in the domestication of the public spaces of the hotel and café in the nineteenth century, for example, or the victory of the architectural interior in the Gesamtkunstwerk homes of the early twentieth century. “Art School” interior design – a sort of soft modernism was, she concluded, a sort of resolution between the two spheres that proved temporary by the current rise of interior architecture.

Figure 1.1 The modern interior as architecture: the cover of John Pile’s History of Interior Design (2009 Edition)

Image credit: Wiley

The Modern Interior

Penny Sparke

Figure 1.2 The modern interior as domestic occupation: the cover of Penny Sparke’s The Modern Interior (2008)

Image credit: Reaktion Books

What evidence did they use?

Sparke identified the interior as an unstable category, and even Pile, whose history of the interior is the most “architectural” discussed here, was forced to admit,

Interiors do not exist in isolation in the way that a painting or a sculpture does, but within some kind of shell … they are also crammed with a great range of objects and artifacts … this means that interior design is a field with unclear boundaries.”15

Those boundaries are temporal, as well as spatial. “Interiors,” Sparke argued, “are rendered even harder to discuss by the fact that they are constantly being modified as life goes on within them.” Sparke was referring to domestic interiors, but the comment has implications for any understanding of the history of interior architecture. An altered building is only ever in a temporary state, destined to be obliterated by history just like the decorative schemes of ephemeral homes. Nevertheless, Pile’s history presents interiors as if they possessed such clear boundaries. Interiors are predominantly depicted through photographs, as objects (albeit inside-out ones) largely denuded of that “great range of objects” he mentions in his introduction. The construction of these images is not discussed, as if they were transparent evidence of the interiors depicted.

In The Emergence of the Interior, Charles Rice disagreed with this approach: “Visual representations of interiors are not simply transparent to spatial referents, even if such spatial referents exist; representations construct interiors on a two-dimensional surface as much as practices of decoration and furnishing construct interiors spatially.” Furthermore, he argued the lens through which such images are constructed is in itself a temporary phenomenon:

The Oxford English dictionary records the “interior” had come into use from the late fifteenth century to mean inside as divided from outside, and to describe the spiritual and inner nature of the self and the soul. From the early eighteenth century, “interiority” was used to designate interior character and a sense of individual subjectivity, and from the idle of the eighteenth century the interior came to designate the domestic affairs of a state, as well as the territory that belongs to a country or region. It was only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, that the interior came to mean “the inside of a building or room.”

To compound the problem, the term “interior architecture” itself did not widely come into existence until, as Kurtich wrote, “some progressive design

firms began using the term interior architecture in the early 1970s.”20 Historians of the domestic interior addressed this problem by writing histories of a phenomenon created since the “separation of the spheres.” In his critique of earlier “traditional” histories, which trace interiors from ancient origins, Rice writes:

The traditional history … does not subject its conceptual and organizational structures to historical analysis. Each of these histories, in their desire for comprehensiveness, seeks to establish a domain of study wherein one can recognize the continually present themes of privacy and domesticity in relation to the stable categories of the interior and its inhabiting subject. These categories provide reference points against which representations, treated as transparent visual evidence, can be verified to changes in decorative style, and in understanding how the practices of inhabitation can be perceived as timeless, but also progressive.21

He might have been referring to Pile’s survey, which contains images of Minoan throne rooms, medieval cathedrals, and baroque libraries, none of which were designed by people who would have described themselves as interior designers. In the same way, for example, Kurtich, Brooker, and Stone might write about the ad hoc occupation of the Theater of Marcellus, or Michelangelo’s conversion of the Baths of Diocletian into the church of Santa Maria Degli Angeli as “interior architecture,” and present them as equivalent to works which, like Foster’s Reichstag or Herzog and Meuron’s Tate Modern, were conceived in an age in which the term was current. It is unlikely like that rapacious medieval nobility or Michelangelo himself would have agreed.

Rice’s own study, like Sparke’s, limits itself to that period in which the interior had been, or was being, conceptualized – the nineteenth century. His title addresses itself explicitly to the notion that the very concept of the interior is a time-bound one. This, however, is not necessarily an adequate approach for a historian of interior architecture, which addresses itself not

just to the ephemeral practices of interior occupation, but also the eternal verities of architecture. A comprehensive history of the alteration and occupation of buildings, if it is to be useful in practice, will have to deal with structures and practices that reach back well beyond the birth of “interior architecture” as it is currently conceived.

How did they tell their stories?

The problem of evidence leads us to the issue of narrative structure. Pile’s chronological catalogue of masterpieces in terms of “styles” describing “the nature of the contributions of those individuals who generated the most interesting and influential approaches to design” was primarily an authorial vision of both design and the interior. Scott identified two problems with this approach in respect to the practice of altering buildings. The first relates to narrative structure. To illustrate his point, he referred to a classic work of architectural history, Sir John Summerson’s Architecture in Britain 1530–1830, and to a very well-known building, Hampton Court Palace:

Firstly, the palace appears as the joint creation of Cardinal Wolsey and King Henry VIII, and secondly, two hundred pages later as the creation of Sir Christopher Wren. The consideration of architectural styles requires this ersatz purity of vision, a perceptual requirement to see buildings as discrete entities and complete unto themselves even when, as is the case with Hampton Court, the whole is a composite affair.

This sets an interesting challenge for the writer of a “survey” of the history of interior architecture, or architectural alteration. If history is to be presented as a sequence of “styles” (as the uses of history by practitioners – and a long tradition – might suggest it should), then what sequence should it follow?

One option is to present such a history as a sequence of individual alterations, in which case, Hampton Court would appear twice, as in Summerson’s work. Another would be to adopt a case study model, tracing Hampton Court through the many centuries of its development, which would allow what Brooker and Stone call “the inherent qualities of the place and its surroundings” to emerge through the repeated retellings of a singular place. Any sense of a general or comprehensive history would be lost by this second approach.

Scott also poses another problem, arguing the practice of altering architecture struck at the very heart of authorial aesthetics: “the work of intervention and alteration,” he wrote, “is … collective, across generations, whereas the work of architecture may often be considered to be individual.” If a building has been redesigned many times over centuries, to whom may we ascribe its authorship, and how? This returns us to the problem of representation, for architecture and the interior are themselves systems of representation, bound up in all those other systems of representation, both literary and visual. Interior architecture exists as much in its own histories as in built artefacts. Should, therefore, the history of interior architecture, like its products, be discontinuous, multiple, layered, and collaborative taking place across generations?

The idea of interior architecture emerged in response to new practices in the building industry and a new iteration of the old professional turf war between interiors and architecture. It also reflected a “postmodern turn” in both architecture and history: an interest in the intertextual, the relative and the denial of linear heroic narratives. The works under discussion here helped to define understandings of interior architecture that ranged from Pile’s or Kurtich’s conception of the interior as a quasi-architectural artefact, to Brooker and Stone’s or Scott’s understanding of the practice of alteration – and the consequent incompleteness of the interior as an ever-changing “open work.” Within interior histories, interior architecture was seen as another iteration of the unstable relationship between the private and public spheres. These understandings shaped the evidence and the narratives that were used to tell the story of interior architecture, from

the fixed and supposedly transparent “architectural” view of the photograph and the survey history, to a view of the interior itself as ephemeral space and image bound up in its own representation. Both approaches leave us with problems – of conceptual rigor in the former and narrative coherence in the latter.

Figure 1.3 A composite building: Jan Kip and Leonard Knijff, “Hampton Court” (1708) Image credit: Wikimedia commons

These are conditions shared with all those “herstories” that emerged alongside interior architecture itself in the late twentieth century. All of them share an interest in “deviant” practices or identities that challenge traditional heroic narratives. All of them rise in conjunction with “liberation” movements and assist in their self-identification. All of them, however, share the problem of evidence and narrative, for the very suppression and oppression of the suppressed and oppressed lay in the denial of their voices. These are problems shared by all historians. In

Memory, History, and Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur describes history as the construction of images of the past, which he identifies with Plato’s problematic of the “eikon”: “The eikon offers itself as the presence of an absent thing stamped with the seal of the anterior,” but it is also a thing in its own right, in possession of a life of its own. Such a paradox should trouble all historians. History is not just storytelling, nor the creation of images. “The final referent of memory remains the past,” writes Ricoeur, “whatever the pastness of the past may signify,” and in history, “the representation of the past is found to be exposed to the dangers of forgetting, but is also entrusted to its protection.”

If there are solutions to these problems, they will perhaps be found in the practice of interior architecture itself. The practice of altering existing buildings, after all, is in itself a historical practice, involving, like history, the reinterpretation of fragmentary pasts to give them utility in the present. Conversely, then, one might be able to say that interior architecture is constructed as much by its own history as recorded by it. If interior architecture is a process through which we represent the past, and its history is an analogous practice of representation, then how can we, in both spheres, acknowledge the pastness of the past, and be worthy of the protective trust that is placed in us as its interpreters?

Notes

1. John Kurtich, Interior Architecture (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995).
2. John Pile, A History of Interior Design (New York: Wiley, 2000); Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone, Re-readings: Interior Architecture and the Design Principles of Remodeling Existing Buildings (London: RIBA, 2004); Fred Scott, On Altering Architecture (London: Routledge, 2008); Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion, 2008); Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior (London: Routledge, 2007).
3. Kurtich, Interior Architecture, p. vi.
4. Scott, On Altering Architecture, p. xv.
5. Ibid., p. xv.
6. Kurtich, Interior Architecture, p. vii.
7. Brooker and Stone, Re-Readings, p. 10.
8. Ibid., p. 9.
9. Kurtich, Interior Architecture, p. vii.
10. Ibid., p. vii.
11. Pile, A History of Interior Design, p. 8.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 9.
14. Quoted in Sparke, The Modern Interior, p. 22.
15. Ibid., p. 11.
16. Pile, A History of Interior Design, p. 8.
17. Sparke, The Modern Interior, p. 12.
18. Pile, A History of Interior Design, p. 8.
19. Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, p. 19.
20. Ibid., p. 2.
21. Kurtich, Interior Architecture, p. vii.
22. Rice, The Emergence of the Interior, p. 29.
23. Pile, A History of Interior Design, p. 8.
24. Scott, On Altering Architecture, p. 12.
25. Ibid., pp. xv–xvi.
26. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, and Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. xvi, 7, xvii.