Spatial therapies: Interior architecture as a tool for the past, present, and future
(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)
Chapter 4
Spatial therapies
Interior architecture as a tool for the past, present, and future
Ziad Qureshi
Profound change is driven by technological and social developments impacting a multitude of conditions and mixed feelings in the present: trepidation about an uncertain future versus nostalgia for the past. Current technological and social changes represent potential for advancement and fundamental disruptions to our traditional way of living and functioning in social, economic, and spatial realms. This is not an entirely new phenomenon, however, as the disruptive effects of sociotechnological change have been a consistent theme throughout modern history. In earlier eras, understanding the relationship between past and present was essential to navigating a path to the future. This strategy offers a valuable historical reference for addressing the dynamic conditions of today.
The emerging field of interior architecture represents a unique and valuable opportunity to apply an historical strategy. Through its motivations, interior architecture inherently reconciles the engagement of
the existing with the new – a critical amalgamation of the past and present through spatial design to enable the future. Distinct from the notion of the tabula rasa architecture, this discipline establishes how space within existing buildings can serve as a means of addressing and stabilizing our contemporary conditions. It achieves this by literally combining the existing physical past with the new interior installation of the present. Thus, interior architecture is a spatial therapy for critically understanding and connecting the past, present, and future through design actions responding to profound changes. This chapter examines contemporary opportunities for interior architecture to illustrate the critical potential of this emerging discipline. It demonstrates how interior architecture is among the most relevant design tools of today – where history, theory, and design unite to address the most imperative issues in an era of disruptive change.
Future beginnings Attitudes toward the future have varied throughout history, with a consistent connection between these perceptions and resultant design perspectives. Interior architectural design is an inherently productive and constructive activity. During the transformative era of the Industrial Revolution, mechanized society produced capital, manufactured goods, and leisure time for the masses that directly impacted the built environment. Social and environmental transformations were experienced on an unprecedented scale, resulting in variant attitudes about the future direction of design. Industrialization, technological development, urbanization, and social change resulted in fundamental questions on how to reconcile mass production with human culture. Designers’ reactions ranged from nuanced romanticism, to traumatized post-war expressionism, to unabashed futurism. While the romantics of the nineteenth century proposed the sublime landscape as a counterpoint to mechanized rationalism and scientific understandings, illustrated by luminous works such as Pugin’s Contrasts and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Italian futurists such as architect Antonio Sant’Elia violently resisted the limits of the past. Sant’Elia
celebrated the potential of the machine alongside revolutionary change, restlessness, and the ephemeral conditions of a modernity.
Contemporary discourse has once again echoed this historical precedent, with design working as before to express varied philosophies reacting to fundamental social changes in technology, production, consumption, and connectivity. The recurrent theme of structural economic and social change via technology was discussed by theorists such as sociologist Daniel Bell in the 1970s. In his seminal essay, “Teletext and Technology,” Bell makes the case that structural change is inevitable and relevant to the past, present, and future. He posits that lessons may be learned from history that can be applied to the future. Bell claims that human society has consistently adapted through “creativity and surprise” in face of great challenges. Supplemental to this perspective, optimistic contemporary futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, have embraced a social vision of human needs satisfied by unprecedented abundance, enabled by innovative new technologies from cognizant computing to driverless vehicles and cloud-based data analysis.
Alternately, traditionalist conservatives have maintained that in order to navigate the uncertainties of the future amidst change, we must respect our past and build on its rich layers. The recent exponential growth of Waldorf Schools globally over the last decade attests to similar motivations. Their early education philosophy is based on theories of mysticism and architect Rudolf Steiner that privilege spirituality, empathy, and social adaptivity through traditional means, while deemphasizing the early use of technology. Although not without controversy, these schools have grown in response to perceptions of the relative alienation of contemporary society, preferring to reconnect with traditional arts to build the future. Radical and cautionary examples further guide design toward alternatives. Famously rendered devoid of the preexisting, spatial context, and human occupation, the architecture of Sant’Elia presents a referential vision of tabula rasa design and its imposed results. More recently, technological and social caution and balance have become recurrent themes. For example, prominent thinkers Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Noam Chomsky, and Steven Hawking have pondered the potential existential danger of unlimited artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons in military applications.
Responsive to this broader historical and theoretical context, the discipline of interior architecture philosophically and spatially represents a critical path between the hindrance of stagnant nostalgia and the brazen aggression of the naked future. In an era of increasingly extremist sociopolitical and spatial realities, interior architecture is uniquely poised to offer an alternative perspective of balance between past, present, and future aligned with the dichotomy of traditional vs. progressive. The design tactics of sustainable adaptive reuse, an embrace of the contextually preexistent, intervention by interior spatial installation, and technological innovation through fabrication and material combine the physical past with the newly
introduced present. This modus operandi enables the discipline to manifest its philosophy and relevance to realities, while offering various emergent opportunities as our society and environment experience profound change.
Productive shifts and infrastructural opportunism
As the inevitable inverse of industrialization, deindustrialization provides extensive opportunities for interior architecture and its allied design disciplines to respond to the increasing availability of post-industrial space. Beginning in the 1960s, the fundamental shift in Western societies from a production to a service-based economy simultaneously created social and environmental trauma, as well as spatial obsolescence. With a current estimate of over 500,000 brownfield sites in the United States alone, at a variety of spatial scales, the adaptive reuse of post-industrial spaces is an acute design issue of the contemporary era. As urban environments continue to densify and greenfield sites become increasingly scarce or undesirable from socioeconomic and environmentalist perspectives, vast potentialities present themselves for responsive therapeutic design. The means and methods of interior architecture balance these needs, while capitalizing on industrial, historical, and cultural inheritance. Landscape architect Richard Haag provides support to the idea of spatial therapy in the face of traumatic change, stating in 1982 with regard to his innovative Seattle Gas Works Park project (1975), “I accepted these gifts, and decided to absolve the community’s vindictive feeling toward the gas plant. This vanishing species of the Industrial Revolution was saved from extinction through adaptive reuse.”
As spatially oriented disciplines, both landscape architecture and interior architecture demonstrate the potential of engaging postindustrial environments to enable a nuanced approach that embraces existent tradition and progressive innovation. From the “urban archaeology” of James Corner’s High Line (2009) to Vienna’s massive Gasometer City (2001), post-industrial environments have represented valuable opportunities to creatively and innovatively engage the existing. The rehabilitation and retention of the
existing context, both physical and spiritual, are the hallmarks of design disciplines that balance a variety of interests and temporalities, while undergoing deep-seated and often traumatic social change.
Consumptive crossroads
The continual restructuring of contemporary consumptive patterns represents a profound challenge to society, the economy, and space. Fundamental changes in retailing have occurred inclusive of a shift of consumers to shopping online, declining overall consumption levels, and a shift from physical to digital goods inclusive of 3-D printing at home. These conditions have created a large supply of underutilized commercial space in our urban landscape, embodied by the closure of countless major and minor retailers in the last decade. These activities reveal the emergence of a potential “post-retail” reality. An estimated one billion square feet of retail/commercial space is currently vacant in the United States alone, evidenced by environments marked by obsolete malls, big box stores, and strip shopping centers. Traditional retail environments in the context of the United States have been and will continue to be in steep decline. The inherent strategies of interior architecture enable potential responses to this crisis. Simultaneous to its decline, this unfolding “post-retail” era has opened up a variety of new design opportunities for spatial reuse and reinvention by means of interior architectural practices.
The reinvigoration of obsolete retail and commercial spaces through adaptive reuse has the potential to bring these environments back to social and economic relevancy, reconnecting the preexisting and historical with new purposes. Architect and social theorist Victor Gruen envisioned the essential importance that retail space would achieve in the post-war American (and eventually global) consciousness, with the regional shopping mall described by him as “the Heart of the City.” Building on Gruen’s innovative designs, for post-war America the mall became a social center and cultural icon deeply ensconced in national identity via spatial form. Invoking Gruen’s original ideas, Rem Koolhaas chose to engage shopping as
the essential means to understand urbanity in his Projects for the City series. He proposes that retail spaces remain profoundly important to the city despite the emergence of the “dead mall” condition.
In the midst of a profound and critical change, the reinvigoration of obsolete retail space is an interior architectural exercise that can transcend simple adaptive reuse and inspire critical perspectives on social history and heritage. The reinvention of post-retail space is a vibrant contemporary issue that remains grounded in the shared history of the past, considering new needs with retrospective meaning. Underutilized retail sites have already been transformed into civic, municipal service, healthcare, education, and other spaces. An example of the direct expression of the ongoing change from physical retail to digital activity is the proposed adaptive reuse of Sears Auto Centers, discrete retail pad sites often located next to “dead malls” that are spatially and infrastructurally ideal for interior redevelopment, by Ubiquity Critical Environments, as internet data centers.
The adaptive agency of interior architecture allows for a more nuanced response that enables economical, sustainable, and historically contiguous environments for potential futures.
Digital directions
As we proceed further into the twenty-first century, newly emergent digital technologies are transforming the spatial expectations of our environments. Beyond the post-industrial developments at the end of the previous century, further shifts illuminate the dichotomy between the physical and the digital, with the increasing presence of a “post-analog” reality. In a world that prioritizes time as a premium, fundamental changes in consumptive and productive patterns are leading to a deprioritization of the physical – profoundly changing social conventions and representing an existential crisis for architecture. New technologies, such as consumer level 3-D printing, geospatial mapping with GPS, autonomous aerial drones, and virtual reality, have already begun to impart a profound shift in perceived necessities and the role of the physical, as well as a general reassessment
regarding need for physical space. New generations that identify with internet-based identities demonstrate a growing preference for online personas that are both spatially and perceptively virtual – fundamentally redefining the very idea of “space” and buildings. Mobility, efficiency, and transportability enable the search for increasingly fleeting economic opportunities, further distancing the connection with the physical. In this current environment, designers are being presented with a challenging reality that raises fundamental questions about the role of physical space. This new charge provides for innovation and fresh opportunities that interior architecture is naturally poised to envision and mobilize.
Figure 4.2 Victor Gruen – Brookdale Center, Minneapolis MN USA, 1965 (Demolished 2011) Image credit: author (2009)
As critical questions emerge about the nature of the exclusively physical, interior architecture again uniquely offers potential design strategies for response. Inherent to interior architecture is its application of technological innovation, particularly through digitally produced fabrication of interior installations and the application of advanced material specificity at a level which is often not realized in other design disciplines. Building on the ideas of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, architect and materials expert Blaine Brownell discusses the idea of “disruptive application,” where conventional solutions are unexpectedly replaced by new ones leading to innovative and advantageous developments. The contemporary shift from the physical to the digital, as well as the critical interface of interior architecture with fabrication and material design strategies, represents this disruptive potentiality. As we transition toward an increasingly digital future from the physical past, in both occupancy and fabrication/construction, the blended coexistence in both realms has become typical. Interior architecture presents a perspective where other forms of spatial hybridization have been the norm, and it is ripe for the disruptive application of digital technologies fomenting innovation and advantage.
The translation of spatial installation and material innovation by digital means has begun to manifest itself on a larger scale with the development of consumer-level augmented reality. Currently utilized by first-generation prototype products such as Microsoft’s HoloLens and Google’s Glass, augmented reality projects hybridize and amalgamate the preexisting context with new spatial installation. Unprecedented applications of hybridized digital/analog space, no longer solely defined as adaptive reuse by existing context and new installation in the solely physical sense, reveal an emergent potentiality in augmented reality and interior architecture that is neither alien nor outside the normative practices of the discipline. The vision of augmented reality to hybridize imposed digital and existent analog space, and even the past/present/future via their dynamic combination, can be enabled with strategies of interior architecture as a bridge between these worlds. As technologies and the discipline move
toward the future, augmented reality represents a realm of possibility and potential offering solutions to ongoing change.
Interior architecture as therapy
Current technological and social changes represent both powerful possibilities for innovation and fundamental disruptions of our traditional means of living. They are deeply impacting the social, economic, and spatial realms. As a means of navigating this profound change, the historical strategy of connected relationships between past and present was essential in discovering a successful path to the future. The critical amalgamation of past, present, and future by means of interior architecture holds the potential to establish how space can serve as a means of addressing and stabilizing our contemporary conditions.
Through a discussion of three varied contemporary crises/opportunities of the post-industrial, post-retail, and post-analog, this chapter proposes how interior architecture and its strategies and philosophy of spatial therapy demonstrate a critical potential to respond to some of the greatest current challenges facing society via design. Interior architecture represents a path of balance between stagnant historicism and brazenly radical futures. Extending beyond just space, the ideas of interior architecture are an inherently social act that enable meaning and resilience. Interior architecture is a unique and powerful philosophy where history, theory, and design unite to position it among the most relevant design tools in a time of profound and disruptive change.
Figure 4.3 Microsoft HoloLens Minecraft Augmented Reality Image credit: Microsoft Sweden (2015)
Notes
1 Daniel Bell, “Ch 2: Teletext and Technology: New Networks of Knowledge and Information in Postindustrial Society” (1977), in Daniel Bell, The Winding Passage: Sociological Essays and Journeys (London: Transaction Publishers, 1991).
2 Ray Kurzweil, “This Is Your Future”, CNN, www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/business/ray-kurzweil-future-of-human-life/ (last modified 26 December 2013).
3 Emily Chertoff, “Is This Grade School a Cult? (And Do Parents Care?)”, The Atlantic, www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/is-this-grade-school-a-cult-and-do-parents-care/265620/ (last modified 30 November 2012).
4 Michael Rundle, “Musk, Hawking Warn of ‘Inevitable’ Arms Race”, Wired Magazine, www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/27/musk-hawking-ai-arms-race (last modified 27 July 2015).
5 Peter Reed, “Beyond Before and After: Designing Contemporary Landscape”, in Peter Reed, Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
2008), p. 25.
6 Richard Reep, “The Future of the Shopping Mall”, New Geography, www.newgeography.com/content/00501-the-future-shopping-mall (last modified 31 December 2008).
7 Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities – the Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965).
8 Rem Koolhaas, ed., Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping: Project on the City Volume 2 (New York: Taschen, 2002), p. 202.
9 Shane McGlaun, “Report: Sears May Convert Some Auto Centers Into Data Centers”, DailyTech, www.dailytech.com/Report+Sears+May+Convert+Some+Auto+Centers+into+Data+Centers/article33760.htm (last modified 15 November 2013).
10 Blaine Brownell, Material Strategies: Innovative Applications in Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), p. 9.
