Fabricating interiority
(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)
Chapter 9
Fabricating interiority
Marc Manack
fab·ri·ca·tion
- the action or process of manufacturing or inventing something.
- an invention; a lie.
In order to situate itself as a unique field with its own disciplinary parameters, interior architecture must create a distinction from architecture – a field with its own equally problematic and conflicted record of establishing disciplinary autonomy. As theorist John McMorrough has noted,
architecture’s history and legacy – maybe its very meaning – is to be found in the creation of reasonable explanations for its existence, its raisons d’etre made in the midst of a series of preservative justifications, in leaps of faith and defensive postures.
Perhaps rather than explanations, architecture’s best claim to reinforcing its own discipline lies in the fundamental act of design in the creation of space, making distinctions from “amorphous” and non-architectural environments.4
For interior architecture, its disciplinary claim may be tied to the creation of finer distinctions within architecture – as a subspecies. Unique among the design disciplines, interior architecture is contingent upon another field for its existence. The interior is derived from architecture, and in every instance, architecture is a precondition for interior architecture, yet the same claim cannot be made in reverse. Interiors are far less deferential to architecture than architecture is dependent on the environment. Considering parallel histories between the two fields, architecture has progressively sought to diminish distinctions from the environment, while interiors have sought to intensify distinctions from architecture. Rather than a submissive or subservient stance suggested by its relationship to architecture – by articulating its disciplinary autonomy in association with technological advancements in design and construction – interior architecture has developed the techniques to produce some of the most powerful transformative effects available to designers engaged with space.
Although the common principle between architecture and interior architecture is that each field is animated by organizing relations between exterior and interior conditions, differences between the disciplines emerge once we consider the means, methods, and position under which the exchange between inside and outside are made distinct. Architecture begins with the exterior, on the outside. Architectural projects come into being through a dialogue between an external context with an internal use, from which an interior will be defined and constructed. This process moves from outside to inside given that the exterior environment is an existing condition; architecture must first create a distinction from it. As such, the methodologies of architectural production are primarily concerned with this mediation of external and internal influences to construct a threshold that articulates distinctions and relationships between natural and fabricated worlds. Consequently, a work of architecture often establishes its identity
primarily through its exterior presence, with the interior serving to authenticate the architecture’s attitude toward, and relationship to, its exterior environment.
As its name suggests, interior architecture exists inside. While interior architecture may affect or influence the threshold between inside and out, its creative preoccupation lies in the production of an alternative environment within architecture, a designed world within a designed world. Interior architecture is contingent upon a constructed environment; its possibilities and limits are defined by a built and consequently artificial world. As a spatial practice, interior architecture emerges through the imagination of the space between interior and architecture, a space far more autonomous – and less constrained – than the relationship between architecture and site. Given that interior architecture is a construct within a construct, its relationship with architecture is at once less interdependent and more relaxed, expanding the field’s potential for pure invention. It is under these terms that interior architecture defines its territory and intensifies its distinction from architecture. Ultimately, the interiority of interior architecture is a complete fabrication, an artifice embedded within an edifice.
If the narrative and ethics of fabrication are inextricably linked to the discipline of interior architecture, it is through the developments of modern design and building technology that the identity of the field has been constructed and where its principles become evident. In terms of building construction technology, the interior was historically more autonomous than its modern counterpart. Its perceptual and experiential distinctions are inherent in the technical capacities of construction methods. In premodern building, the distinctions between exterior and interior were often better defined by the composite effects of load-bearing exterior walls, creating envelopes of solid construction that, despite creating a direct relationship between enclosure and structure through a monolithic section, allowed for a wide array of articulations. The massiveness and opacity of the construction enabled expressive, unique, and often counterintuitive distinctions in the formal presences, spatial qualities, and surface effects
between inside and outside, establishing unique identities between architecture and interior through the use of poché and ornamentation to create character. By coupling the technological and qualitative characteristics, solid construction creates distinct exterior and interior through a single act of architectural design, within a single discipline. In modern building, as solid construction gives way to layered filigree assemblies and systems as new building typologies emerge, interior architecture finds its agency as a discipline. As an established profession, the design of interiors comes into being through the modern tall building. This building type, whose novel scale (at the time) and repetitive pro forma, worked together to seduce architects into a simultaneously unbalanced attention to the composition and appearance of exterior vertical surface and collective disinterest in the interior space beyond the ground floor lobby. Most of the interior volume of skyscrapers was given over to the interior designer.
The paradox for interior architecture is that the skyscraper both challenged and reinforced the discipline's nascent identity. As modern filigree construction of the steel frame and curtain wall construction progressively dissolved the building envelope through the transparent material, the possibility of distinction for the interior architecture was equally diminished. The seeming loss of the interior identity by its perceptual seamlessness with exterior in the glazed curtain wall is dramatically counteracted, however, by the sectional dynamic of the skyscraper. The repetition of uniform, undifferentiated, horizontal floors connected by elevators at once prevents spatial experiences of vertical continuity between floors and promotes horizontal expansion of space. This effectively turns each floor into an isolated distinct world in relation to the flattened “wallpaper” of the surrounding urban panorama on its perimeter vertical surface. While the architecture of the building may have but one static design by a single author, the skyscraper initiated the evolution of multiple, episodic interior architectures by multiple authors. Regardless, it is a moment where the modern interior is completely indifferent to, and largely unaffected by, the architecture it is housed within, free to fabricate its
own identity and position of interiority. This freedom coincides with the emerging independence of the construction of the modern interior. Suspended ceilings, raised floors, demountable partitions, and flexible, reconfigurable office furniture systems (the kit of parts of the modern corporate interior) all operate with an impermanence and literal detachment from the architectural envelope within which they are housed. These elements become the means for the interior to assert its autonomy. The decoupling of the interior from architecture, in technological terms, not only provides the means for generating an independent interior architecture, but also emancipates the field to invent the disciplinary logic of interiority. Here, a complete and alternate world apart from the architecture, with unique authorial expression and embodied spatial effects, embodies a presence and identity that rivals architecture.
Effectively, the discipline of interior architecture seeks to recapture the distinctions between inside and outside inherent in premodern architecture, but with modern technologies, and from a point of view that privileges interiority, developing discrete spatial experiences with unique identities from the inside out. For interior architecture to achieve a distinct identity requires legibility and a trajectory toward singularity, one which takes its fundamental design techniques – namely the development of an interior spatial envelope, the subdivision or demising of interior space, the articulation or treatment of surfaces, and the placement of objects within a space – and begins to merge them into singular emphatic elements that define the spatial design as distinct from the architecture. The effect has been for the interior architect to consider spatial design as a unified atmosphere in a direct manner, with a limited vocabulary but a high degree of dynamic quality. Under this conception, floor, wall, ceiling, furniture, lighting, and beyond can be conceived not as distinct elements or layers, but rather as a singular expression.
As interior architecture has expanded venues for its expression, as well as technologies at the designer’s disposal, its capacity to produce these singularities has increased, and its disciplinary position has intensified. This apotheosis may be evidenced in contemporary digital design and fabrication
technology. Digital fabrication processes translate information from a digital model or drawing to a computer-controlled fabrication machine, transforming immaterial design content into a material product. The technologies that seamlessly integrate design software and digital fabrication hardware (including computer controlled 3D printers, laser cutters, routers, mills, drones, and robots) have profoundly affected the design disciplines, reinvigorating not only an interest in making and material exploration, but also in the discourse and ethos of preindustrial eras. The efficiency with which customizable, non-identical elements are designed and serially mass produced has made the deployment of bespoke elements viable in the construction industry by mitigating the premium cost for custom components and assemblies.
As a result of digital fabrication, the repertoire of visually complex forms or patterns available to designers has expanded, while the range of construction materials currently capable of working with digital tools in any given technology has remained fairly limited. It is this combination of increased modes of spatial articulation within a delimited palette that has reinforced contemporary interior architecture’s ability to assert its unique identity.
Interior architecture can achieve – and perhaps even exceed – the autonomy of “inside-from-out” inherent in monolithic premodern construction methods because current digitally fabricated work deploys the cutting, carving, folding, and stacking of a singular material rather than assemblies of multiple materials. The Crystal Bridges Museum Store by Marlon Blackwell Architects provides such an example (Figure 9.1). Built within the Crystal Bridges Museum by Moshe Safdie, an architecture of distinct sculptural expression and material quality, the museum store creates autonomy for the interior architecture by dramatically refiguring the interior profile with an undulating spatial envelope composed of digitally fabricated wood sections.
Using the analogy of a lamella (the rib-like structure that forms the underside of a mushroom cap), the architects create the powerful perceptual effect of a continuous surface that wraps ceiling and walls through the sequence and spacing of the wood fins. Continuity is achieved
through the digital modeling process that slices a singular solid shape to create the splines and profiles, which ultimately become the cutting paths and templates used to extract the wood ribs from nominal panels. By sectioning the shape, two-dimensional materials are laminated in series to construct a three-dimensional volume of space, but in effect, the multiple sections recede in the service of articulating the legibility of the singular element and the experience of the singular space.
The spaces between the ribs are equally important in establishing the distinctions between architecture and interior. As one moves closer to align with the short edge of each rib section, one not only sees the thickness of the rib, but its separation from the adjacent architecture. The thickness of the construct is visible, an experience that was once only available through the abstraction of section drawing. The space of poché is now embodied in the material perception of the digitally fabricated rib. The detailing and curvature of the museum store only heightens the separation of the interior architecture. The wood ceiling and wall envelope never touch the surrounding construction, with continuous reveals at the perimeter creating the effect that this element hovers within the space. At moments creating affinities and alignments without deference to the architecture, the smooth
geometry of the interior appears as a delamination from it, yet borrows the logic of the architecture to establish independence and distinctions from it. In the museum store, the combination of digital design and fabrication reveal the processes and techniques of the interior architecture’s philosophy and development in the final product. This creates an increased awareness between conceptualization and effect, at once strengthening its disciplinary position and experiential quality.
If the technique of sectioning available through digital fabrication has the possibility of rendering explicit the space between interior and architecture, then digital patterning and tiling uses surface effects and superficiality to implicitly animate distinctions between inside and out. Digitally fabricated patterns generated from computer-controlled cutting and carving tools have dramatically expanded the capacity of interior architects to generate unprecedented ornament and material surface articulation. The fact that these patterns can emerge out of information established in relational criteria from a project’s architectural context is perhaps the digital technologies’ most important contribution to the development of interior architecture’s discipline.
SILO AR+D’s North Presbyterian Church in Cleveland demonstrates how a relational pattern developed through the techniques of digital fabrication can transform the space between architecture and interior to create a radically alternative environment (Figure 9.2).
Set within an existing industrial building and a much larger renovation project, the limits of North Presbyterian Church’s volume were highly constrained by the existing structure and infrastructure. Additionally, programmatic requirements of the church and other users in the building demanded the sanctuary space be scalable and multipurpose. The interior architecture worked to exploit the inherent contradictions in the project: to create a single sanctuary with the qualities that often characterize religious architecture (symmetry, axiality, volume, and indirect natural light) while allowing that same space to be subdivided into multiple rooms with asymmetrical entries (due to the constraints of a corner site).
By simultaneously working with concepts of volume and subdivision, the spatial design of North Presbyterian Church was conceived as a hybrid canopy/cathedral, a singular ceiling surface that continuously inflects to create a series of pyramidal vaults that delineate multiple scales of space, concealing the appearance of hardware and headers required for movable partitions. Using digital design tools, a sequence of design operations began by testing space plan and volume limits against the material dimensional constraints. The resultant form is derived as the interior applies pressure to the exterior, in effect, vacuum forming to its architectural limits. Clad in a durable bamboo resin material used in the construction of skateboard parks, the faceted ceiling panels are subdivided into an animated triangular pattern that accommodates lighting, HVAC, and sprinkler systems. This digitally fabricated pattern evolved by coupling a desire for visual complexity, nonstandard repetition, and material efficiency with the desire to create a spatial effect that would have local asymmetry and nuance within each face of the ceiling geometry. It does not sacrifice visual coherence, regardless of the spatial configuration and point of view. In addition to aesthetic considerations, to make the pattern feasible given the extremely tight budget constraints, material economy and fabrication time had to be maximized. Thus, a limited amount of standard triangular tile shapes are determined computationally by subdividing a standard,
rectilinear sheet of the ceiling cladding. These elements are repeated in various configurations to achieve the desired spatial effect.
This design process reveals a unique potential of digital fabrication for interior architecture: to develop a highly controlled, yet nondeterministic, spatial configuration and surface effect emerging out of resituating the autonomous interior in relation to an existing architecture. By exploiting the competing logics of complexity/economy and existing/new building technology for architecture and interiors made possible by digital fabrication, SILO AR+D’s North Presbyterian Church creates an interior architecture using a singular dynamic element born out of those tensions. Its vicissitudes are registered on its surfaces, transforming the existing building into a distinct and immersive interior space.
As a product of pure invention, or fabrication, interior architecture’s claims to disciplinary distinction may lie in the appearance of autonomy expressed in the arguments and effects of recent spatial designs. It is not enough, however, for an interior to simply look different from the architecture it is housed within. Instead, interior architecture must articulate its position in relation to architecture by revealing the means and methods in which those distinctions are manifested. The evolution of building technology throughout history has made possible the constructional separation between architecture and interior, which has evolved to the current moment through digital design and fabrication. The interstitial zone between disciplines can be subjected to finer and increasingly complex relationships which release the interior to establish its existence as absolute. Ultimately, digital fabrication has begun to actualize interior architecture’s disciplinary imperative to, quite literally, fabricate distinctions from architecture through interiority. In doing so, it has activated the spatial designer’s capacity for speculative imagination.
Notes
1 Fabrication definition excerpted from Google, www.google.com.
2 For more on architecture’s search to define its disciplinary autonomy see Robert Somol, Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America (New York: Monacceli Press, 1997).
3 John McMorrough, “Ru(m)inations: The Haunts of Contemporary Architecture”, Perspecta 40 (2008): 164.
4 Distinctions and the production of design worlds form the basis for William Mitchell’s definition of “architecture” in William J. Mitchell, The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
5 An in-depth and elegant comparison between the historical, conceptual, and technical distinctions between solid and filigree construction methods is available in Andrea Deplazes, Constructing Architecture Materials, Processes, Structures, a Handbook (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2005).
6 Two books that offer substantive introductory surveys into the techniques, processes, and effects of digital fabrication: Lisa Iwamoto, Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009) and Branko Kolarevic, Manufacturing Material Effects: Rethinking Design and Making in Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2008).
7 For more on the implications of authorship, mass customization, and the role of identicality in architecture’s disciplinary foundations, see Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
8 Sectioning is a term borrowed from Iwamoto, Digital Fabrications, pp. 8–17.
