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

Chapter 27

Toward the immaterial interior

Frank Jacobus

Constructed space is, and has always been, a culturally reflective and communicative mechanism. Materiality delivers messages within interior spatial environments, reflecting a cultural sensibility and intelligence, but also compelling future actions and desires. While we rightly tend to think of the built environment as a mechanism that betters life and aids in human advancement, an underlying persistent desire seems to be the fabrication of spaces to embody human thoughts within material constructs. In this way, we can discuss interior architecture as a spatial and material construct meant to preserve cultural or personal beliefs. The core ingredient of this effort is material itself, the physical or nonphysical substance that makes space possible.

Generally speaking, in seeking permanence for human thought, we have moved from stone, to paper, and now to bits and bytes to write our story. Buildings and interior spaces, in addition to providing shelter and space for organized human activity, acted as the first primary human registers within which our stories and aspirations were communicated. Victor Hugo referred to buildings as “books of stone,” as pre-Gutenberg cultures wrote their most important stories in and on these monuments, exercising extreme effort that they be remembered for generations.$^1$ With the advent of the printing press and the birth of a mechanized and more literate culture, the book established itself as a new medium, which would gradually remove the building as humankind’s primary register. Physical,

“built” space was no longer able to compete with the comparative ease of production and transference of human thought that the book offered. Stories that were once written in stone were now written in books. Today is the age of the third register: digital technology.

Within the story of the evolution of these registers lies the story of the transference of human thought, from the corporeal and material to the present immaterial modes of production. With each new register, technological invention and evolution has provided a higher level of accessibility and transferability; these two critical components must be present when seeking endurance and permanence for human thought. As our modes of register become more ephemeral so do our modes of experience, affecting both how we perceive and how we create our built environment. Siegfried Giedion made clear in Mechanization Takes Command that this evolution of cultural registers has “confused the human environment” by splitting “our modes of thinking from our modes of feeling.” This chapter begins with the notion that there are three primary cultural registers of humanity, interior architecture, the book, and digital media. It interrogates the evolution of these registers as modes of transference of human thought, examining the impact they have had on the dematerialization of space.

The built environment as original primary cultural register

As stated above, Victor Hugo saw the built environment as an expressive form, very relatable to literature that used monuments to give “permanence to human thought.” To try to understand the effects of the dematerialization of human registers on the built environment and interior architecture specifically, we must make a distinction in the way buildings communicate or are embedded with a cultural language. Interior architecture can be thought of as embodying at least two paradigms in relation to its propensity to become a form of cultural communication.

In the first paradigm, interior architecture is a chiefly unconscious cultural expression. This occurs through spatial, material, and formal manifestations dictated by belief and by advances in material and building technology. In this paradigm, there is no conscious attempt to define one’s culture in terms of the built environment. Subtle ways in which it is at work in interior architecture, as it forms the language of culture, can be found in the spatial formulation and layout of individual buildings. Siegfried Giedion describes the organization of the great Egyptian temples of the New Kingdom as being laid out in plan in a direct corollary of the Egyptian belief of allowing no “standstill in life or death.” The temple’s rooms were intentionally designed to not allow a place of rest except in the dark cella (chamber), inside of which the “image of god was preserved.” In this way, the organization of interior spaces in the Egyptian temple was itself a materialization of cultural belief and value that can be read as a “specialized elaboration of culture.” This reading of space draws us nearer to an understanding of the inner workings of this phase of Egyptian culture. In creating the interior spatial layout of the temple, the Egyptians did not set out to transfer a cultural message, but did so simply by organizing the space in accordance with the dictates of their beliefs; an application of the first paradigm of cultural transference through interior architecture.

The second paradigm through which the built environment becomes a form of cultural communication has to do with a conscious expression of, or response to, culture through interior architecture. The Greek temple is yet another example of how buildings served as the books of pre-Gutenberg culture. The form and proportion of the Greek temple stood for the body of the god that was its dedication. For example, the temple of Zeus was the body of Zeus; the temple of Athena was the body of Athena. As an embodiment of the gods, and through its form, sculpture, and inscriptions, each temple became a chronicle of a particular aspect of Greek culture. In this way, the Parthenon is the body of Athena, but it is also the book of Athens. These monuments have not only served as generational concatenations or epochal points of reference for the stories of ancient civilizations, but also served dually as physical manifestations of cultural

belief and tradition. In this case, the Greeks sent a message to their contemporaries and future generations through an application of the second paradigm of cultural transference through interior architecture.

Every building contains traces of both paradigms and there is no possibility of excluding either paradigm in a built work. Both paradigms, always working in conjunction, make interior architecture a cultural mirror into which we can look to gain access to the beliefs and customs of past cultures. Only through the looking glass of these two paradigms can we map the substantive effect of technological dematerialization on the cultural – and thus architectural – realm.

The book intercedes

The advent of printing had profound effects on culture at large. The rise of the book meant the rise of the academy and a new type of learning: learning “by the book.” Knowledge gained by the reading of books was knowledge of events divorced from firsthand experience. No longer grounded in experience in relation to one’s own body, the book afforded an increasingly vast number of literate citizens to peek into and pull from knowledge gained by past cultures. As Lewis Mumford points out:

The printed page increased the safety and permanence of the written record by manifolding it, extended the range of communication, and economized on time and effort. So print speedily became the new medium of intercourse: abstracted from gesture and physical presence, the printed word furthered that process of analysis and isolation which became the leading achievement of eotechnic thought and which tempted Auguste Comte to dub the whole epoch metaphysical.

More than any other device, the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and local. Doing so, it contributed further to the dissociation of medieval society: print made a greater impression than actual events, and by centering attention on the printed word, people lost that balance between the sensuous and the intellectual, between image and sound, between the concrete and the abstract.

The built environment and interior architecture in the era of the book’s rise to power was not immune from this evolution of creative output, and during this period its formal changes embodied and represented the values of a changing culture. These changes to interior architecture happened over a long period due to the relatively slow advance of technologies that

would allow the book to be widely distributed and become what we would think of today as a mass medium. The rise of the academic tradition in the design disciplines, in large part made possible by the emergence of print media, was the vehicle by which the book altered constructed material environments. The academy as a means of training young architects began in the seventeenth century with the establishment of institutions such as the Academy of Architecture in Paris (which would soon become the École des Beaux-Arts), a forerunner of the modern system of educating architects and interior designers. Prior to this form of instruction, most designers and craftspeople were educated through the medieval craft guilds. If we compare the modern system to the craft guild, which was an apprenticeship-based approach, the major difference is the firm distinction that is made in the academies between learning and doing.$^2$ While the rise of the book was not completely responsible for this shift in cultural learning traditions, it certainly was a major player in their evolution. The new academic training of the seventeenth century, having blurred the distinction between book knowledge and knowledge gained by sensuous hands-on making, further differed from its medieval educational progenitor in that it focused on the study of classical precedents to establish a proper method of building, a method made possible by studying books that were now readily available to students and practitioners.

The effect and influence of this new academic, “book-learning” approach can’t be overstated when discussing how the built environment and interior architecture evolved over this period. In his book What Is Architecture, Paul Shepheard describes the gothic as representing “all the qualities that had been lost in paying too much attention to the mechanics of Rome and Greece.” In many ways, the rise of the book and its ease of dissemination can be seen as a collapsing together of previously fragmented histories. In other words, cultures and ideas that were previously disjointed by space and/or time were now being connected through books and book learning. In some ways, it seems that the introduction of the book as a mass medium is a point in history at which all cultural production becomes, at least in part, referential. Interior architecture transitions from serving a

preliterate culture, whose form was the result of a more insular, individual, and communal mentality, to serving a referential culture that learned to do by reading; happy to borrow their ideas from a former age. Surprisingly, it would take the benefit of four hundred years of hindsight before anyone was able to understand (or at least “put into words”) that the changes that occurred in the built environment over that period of time were in large part a result of the arrival of the book and its succession of buildings as humankind’s primary cultural register.

As the built environment and interior architecture gives over its cultural role to the book during this time, it becomes defined by the book in its spatial and material manifestations. Perhaps not surprisingly, interior architecture finds its raison d’être in the cultural phenomena that had arisen – or were propelled forward – due to the arrival of the book and the institution of “book culture.” The neoclassical tradition (at least in the form promoted by the École des Beaux-Arts) would advocate the use of past cultural prototypes in establishing a new culturally symbolic value for interior architecture. In these examples that permeated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, interior architecture becomes a symbolic historical stamp, whose form recreates an idealized past for a present world. These neoclassical interiors, though still retaining their physical mass and concreteness in the form of carved stone, were but a picture of a former age, which told a story no longer rooted in the culture they served. Their very physicality was denied by their lack of locality. More photograph than building, these interiors become a dematerialized postscript to gothic culture and the first examples of the effect of technological advance and dematerialization on interior spaces.

The Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève by Henri Labrouste is an example of a building that attempts to take its new spatial cues directly from books. In addition to the building’s exterior acting as a virtual card catalog, the entire interior space tells a story that unfolds page by page, as if the visitor is perusing a book. Upon arriving at the building, the entry leads to an interior garden space filled with marble busts of great historical thinkers. Here Labrouste is referencing an original human state of being and the

gradual evolution (in large part due to the historical intellectual figures presented) into inquisitive, intelligent beings. Within the entry hall, the names that were read on the building’s exterior are physically beginning to come to life within the stone effigies; they begin to be understood as three-dimensional, physical beings. Next, the visitor ascends a grand stair into the main reading room and is thrust, at the landing, into Raphael’s School of Athens painting. So begins participation in that great intellectual dialogue; a highlight both of renaissance neoclassical intellectual superiority and of the transcendence of human reason. Finally, visitors arrive in the main reading room where they can pull books from the shelves and complete the dialogue with humanity’s great thinkers, with whom they have been engaged since they arrived at the building. This abbreviated description of the spatial sequencing within Labrouste’s library tells the story of an architect trying to grapple with what space becomes with the advent of a literate society. Buildings had replaced books as humanity’s storytelling medium, and now interior architectural space was being defined and inspired by them.

Rise of mechanization: roots of dematerialization

The arrival of the book, and consequently a literate culture, was born out of a gradual process of societal mechanization. Lewis Mumford cites the clock, then the printing press, as supplying a prototype for the future developments of industrial society. With the clock arose the invisible umbrella of time, organized and structured on a mass scale, “giving human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine.” That time, this mostly invisible and abstract instrument, can so affect, control, and order the lives of so many collectively is testament to the notion that the effects of the immaterial are being strengthened in relation to the material during and leading up to the industrial age. Timekeeping, or the notion that we can divide, organize, and commodify that which does not have a physical existence and is merely a construct developed by sheer human will, is perhaps another of the first signs that the material is beginning to relinquish control during the late Middle Ages and into the Industrial Revolution.

Mumford further describes the effects of the clock in the following statement:

Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it.

When one thinks of the day as an abstract span of time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter’s night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gas lights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day. When one thinks of time, not as a sequence of experiences, but as a collection of hours, minutes, and seconds, the habits of adding time and saving time come into existence. Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, and it could even be expanded by the invention of labor saving instruments.

Just as the world after the rise of the book was “lightened,” in that information once conveyed through the weight of stone was now transportable by hand, the clock gave rise to new conceptions of abstract space, interchangeable and relatable over any distance, transportable in the minds of humans.

In the period from 1850 to 1890, the entirety of Western culture was trying to discover their relationship with new forms of mechanization. As society mechanizes, one by one, concrete entities are replaced by their abstract counterparts. Mumford points to the romanticism of numbers as resulting in the rise of capitalism, and the change from a barter economy, facilitated by small supplies of variable local coinage, to a money economy with an international credit structure and a constant reference to the abstract symbols of wealth: gold, drafts, bills of exchange, and eventually merely numbers.

The technological changes taking place in the world from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century is further evidence that the major shifts in cultural relations and perceptions always seem to tend toward the abstract and immaterial in their progression.

Interior architectural space conception also begins to change radically during the period of mechanization. In Mechanization Takes Command, Siegfried Giedion discusses the difference between medieval and nineteenth-century conceptions of space and spatial comfort. Spatial comfort in the Middle Ages, according to Giedion, was in large part determined by the unity of the proportions, materials, and form of the room’s shell. Furniture was still large, cumbersome, and expensive, so it was uncommon to fill the room with small furniture objects as we do today. Because of this, these small objects were not a dominating factor in the perception of the room’s spatial presence during the Middle Ages. The nineteenth-century conceptions of space, after having evolved for several hundred years during the age of mechanization, became defined much less by the plan and sectional volume and more by the objects within. The Industrial Revolution, with its fast, labor-saving production methods, has made smaller pieces of furniture (lamps, art objects, etc.) so attainable that there seemed to be a rush to fill spaces with them. Habitation areas no longer needed to be strongly defined spatial realms in order to elicit comfort. Space had become neutral, a backdrop for the smaller designed objects that began to dominate our lives. This phenomenological change in interior space conception is tantamount to the same trends taking place within other areas of culture. It seems standard that with the advance of technology and the replacement of hand power by machine power, a palliation of intricate interior spatial form occurs. By the middle of the nineteenth century, human perceptual comforts were no longer dictated by space that is bound in the physical. Through this evolution, we became accustomed to modes of creation that divorce the need for personal physical power and handcraft for object and even spatial production.

Figure 27.3 “Man in the Assembly Line”, Leblond, Romuald, and Jessica Vaillat. Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977).

By the late twentieth century, industrial production had reached its zenith. Modes of production, and consequently modes of spatial perception, had undergone a total evolution from the spatial conceptions of the Middle Ages, some five hundred years earlier. The corporeal had become too heavy and burdensome; it could no longer keep up with the excitement for the lightened load of the new spatiality of mechanized culture. The Industrial Revolution, with the clock and the printing press as its progenitor and exemplar, in substituting manpower for machine power, had driven material sensibilities to the brink of the immaterial.

The rise of digital media: the third cultural register

It is not for the current generation to know the overall impact that the digital age will have on interior architecture and the culture that it serves, though past trends in industrial and technological development help give clues to the possible effects. Digital media is to the book today what the book was to the built environment in the fifteenth century. The rise of digital media has already begun to give rise to new forms of cultural production – and consequently new modes of space production and perception. The transitioning away from the book as a research mechanism, and the digitizing of mass quantities of information, is a direct and blatant effect of the transition of modes of expression toward digital means, a further dematerialization of cultural space.

Siegfried Giedion argued that in the nineteenth century, mechanization had succeeded in mass replicating symbols that had been historically rarified through a difficult means of production. The result was that the original symbolic meaning was lost in the panoply, a dematerialization and devaluation of the symbols themselves. Eventually, the value within these symbols was no longer meaningful to the culture they were meant to communicate with, and so after lingering through the first phases of these new modes of production, they soon disappeared, giving way to new ways of thinking about the made object. A similar process may be occurring in contemporary culture, wherein ways of thinking about space that have been bound to ideas that originated within book culture are now beginning to disappear within a culture that is being infiltrated with an immediacy, rapidity, and constant newness that books cannot offer. The long-term effect of this, if it follows similar past trends, will be further dematerialization, until eventually the idea of material has been entirely severed from that which is physical. To use Giedion’s words, material may soon be completely “torn out of the frame within which it once had meaning.”

An abundance of contemporary work explores (consciously or subconsciously) this emerging phenomenon. In fact, it could be argued that most contemporary critical practices have accepted or are celebrating forms of dematerialization in the design disciplines in one way or another.

Transarchitectures, for instance, explore the relationships between virtual and physical space. Interactive surfaces are a direct and literal example of this phenomenon, wherein the wall as a static, physical artifact begins to deliver a deeper and more complex space than that of the physical interior itself. We’ve begun to expect more from the physical surfaces that surround us. Floor systems, for instance, that capture and store the energy created by human movement over the surface, are yet another example of a dematerializing of interior architecture; a conversion of the tactile into the overtly intellectual. Floors can no longer simply be a place to live or stand; what they deliver physically is now a given; their new value will arise from what they deliver virtually and intellectually.

More subtle examples of perceptual dematerialization exist as well. In projects like the Eberswalde Library by Herzog and de Meuron, the physical materiality of an exterior building surface disappears through a new graphic reading that hybridizes concrete and glass into a single unified envelope. Graphic surfaces have existed throughout the built environment’s rich history; however, many contemporary examples seem to eliminate the physical material entirely in favor of the new depth of readability in the graphic itself. A multitude of examples like this exist in interior architecture, wherein a graphic field replaces what would otherwise be read as physical (and knowable) material. Spaces like VitraHaus by Herzog and de Meuron are yet another form of dematerialization. This project uses the typological “knowable house form” and suspends and stacks replicas of itself at odd angles so as to reduce its physical material reading and have the participant rely instead on a historical and intellectual understanding of this phenomenon. “House” is here being delivered as symbol; its grounding is no longer a physical or material phenomenon, but is instead purely intellectually and culturally rooted.

Finally, at a base functional level, the vast majority of building materials today are lighter and reduced versions of their former selves. So even when we do not aim to dematerialize, technologies are forcing our hands in this regard. Stone, once a hulking, thick structural mass, eventually became a moderately thick surface that relied only on itself for support.

Now, stone is an incredibly thin veneer supported by an often invisible building frame; this again is an evolving form of dematerialization.

None of this writing is meant to paint a grim picture of these new forms of reality. Instead, designers must be as conscious as possible as to what motivates their decisions and attempt to understand how those decisions will affect life and experience. To know where we stand and at what we aim, we must continue to probe the potential effects of digital design and production on spaces and on spatial conceptions. Transarchitectures and hypersurfaces are to be seen as continuations of the ceaseless evolution of architectural space conception and perception from the Egyptian and Greek temples to today. As tools have developed in such a way as to slowly divorce the corporeal aspects of the human body from the process of production, imagination has been victorious in shifting sensibilities away from a particular kind of awareness of material, toward an acceptance of the immaterial as a new purveyor of reality.

Notes

1. Victor Hugo, Notre-dame de Paris, trans. Alban Krailsheimer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 192–206.
2. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. v.
3. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, p. v.
4. Siegfried Giedion, The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Architecture (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1964), p. ix, 349–398.
5. Edward Twitchell Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books and Doubleday, 1982), pp. 1–6.
6. Ibid.
7. Vincent Scully, Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 39–64.
8. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1934), p. 136.
9. Thomas Fisher, “The Past and Future of Studio Culture”, Arc Voices, 15 October 2004.

10 Paul Shepheard, What Is Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 12. 11 Neil Levine, “The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Interior Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve”, in The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 139–173. 12 Fisher, “The Past and Future of Studio Culture”. 13 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1934), p. 17. 14 Levine, “The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Interior Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve”, pp. 139–173. 15 Fisher, “The Past and Future of Studio Culture”. 16 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. v. 17 Levine, “The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Interior Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve”, pp. 139–173. 18 Marcos Novak, “Transarchitectures and Hypersurfaces: Operations of Transmodernity”, Architectural Design 68, no. 5 (1998): 84–93.