Why this, why now? The case for interior architecture
(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)
Chapter 50
Why this, why now? The case for interior architecture
Gregory Marinic
The Interior Architecture Theory Reader offered its authors the opportunity not only to define the field of interior architecture, but also to explore and critique the margins between architecture and interior design. As a rising discipline that lives at the periphery, interior architecture represents an incremental maturation process motivated by intersectional inquiries surrounding spatiality. For interior design, interior architecture embodies an ongoing migration toward complexity, while for architecture, it seeks a deeper analysis of the interior parameters of building design. Interior architecture challenges the conventions of both disciplines and creates a new space of inquiry to provoke transformational change.
In practice, new capacities have significantly altered the means and methods of designing the built environment. As evidenced herein, emerging understandings of interior architecture view its discourse as breaking down boundaries and distinctions between the historically siloed – and generally contentious – territories of architecture and interior design. This blurring, in turn, has restructured how we work and how design
services are delivered, as well as how designers, clients, and fabricators collaborate. Furthermore, the agency of interior architecture loops back into the academy to challenge how we teach the next generation a broader knowledge base which supports higher levels of expertise in spatial design. From a pedagogical standpoint, innovative forms of teaching and scholarship in interior architecture endeavor to reform the longstanding biases of both architecture and interior design. Expanded engagement with adaptive reuse, historic preservation, resource remobilization, ecology, digital fabrication, and speculation has generated rich streams of research in interior architecture programs worldwide. This global new wave has begun to gain considerable momentum and prosper.
As a conceptual and methodological design philosophy, interior architecture fosters new potential for spatial networks, fields, systems, and gradients to be investigated, represented, constructed, and deployed. This mining of an interstitial zone between architecture and interior design has made some members of the established disciplines grow skeptical of the intentions and motivations of interior architecture. Yet the strength of interior architecture, in fact, rests in its current marginalization by both architecture and interior design. It is unfortunate that architects and interior designers often reject the binding potentialities which interior architecture offers to their shared, building-oriented field. In light of this, interior architecture is often viewed by conservative architects and interior designers through a lens of “otherness” representing an alternative, controversial, and resented form of practice. Advocates of interior architecture often confront pointed questions which seem defensive rather than constructive and inclusive. What are the specificities of this discipline? Who does it represent? Who is welcome to participate in its development, refinement, and stewardship?
Unlike architecture, in its desire for hegemony, or interior design, in its pursuit of autonomy, interior architecture offers a more malleable way to navigate contingent conditions via adaptive practices that acknowledge imperfection and temporality. Confronting deeply held expectations for interiors, the discipline gives resistance to normative practices by casting a
lens on overlooked opportunities for spatial design. When considered as a whole, the work contained in this book forecasts the future of interior architecture as a heterogeneous ecology of distinct attitudes and expertise. As an expansive field rather than a reductive discipline, it suggests how we can pursue specialized scholarship and practice in interiors ranging from domesticity to urbanity.
In closing, my personal belief in the limitless potential of interior architecture rests in its current marginalization. Interior architecture represents not simply a shift in nomenclature, but a unique approach and critique of the historically iconoclastic, purist, and paradigm-oriented tendencies of architecture, while simultaneously challenging the assumptions and underinvestigated boundaries of interior design. The more nuanced form of logic found in interior architecture—animated by its capacity to collect, collage, clarify, and reveal—renders disciplinary contradictions somehow compatible. This innovative, insightful, and enlightened discipline thrives at the periphery.
