Proximities

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Mark Taylor and Julieanna Preston

The collection of texts contained in this volume stems from a proposition that as an emerging discipline interior design draws from a body of theory specific to its creative practice. Initial informal surveys of interior design/interior architecture and spatial arts university programmes revealed that not only do approaches, outlooks and pedagogical philosophy differ, but also the scope of theoretical texts rarely repeat or identify a distinct set of readings. Feedback from respondents indicated that most interior design programmes identify theoretical sources that span across several disciplines, including material from cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and gender studies. The material offers positions and insights that operate beyond architectural canons and interior design's marginalisation within that discourse. This is not to suggest the interior as an inside is possible without architectural context or another form of enframing, particularly as Elizabeth Grosz has discussed the impossibility of having an inside without some form of demarcation that distinguishes the outer from the inner.¹ Our search for theory related to the specifics of inhabitation and bodily presence confirms that the interior and its design constitute a wider field of cultural production.

There is a wealth of material about the interior spanning a spectrum of geographies and histories in the form of paintings, drawings, illustrations, film and other visual representations. Conscious of the close affinity between the way the interior is spatially conceptualised and visualised, many recent critical historical texts have explored the correlation between image and spatial conditions. While we made an intentional decision to place these issues outside the territory of this book, these artefacts offer a tremendous resource for future analysis and observation of the convention of interior design as decorated and inhabited rooms relevant to many disciplines.

However, one image in particular harboured virtual potentials pertinent to our inquiry.

Within the pages of Emily Post's book The Personality of a House, is a photographic plate attributed to New York architect William Lawrence Bottomley.² This seemingly unassuming image gently frames the prevailing issues, topics and texts of this volume.

A pale timber-panelled wall stretches across the image. It is articulated from the ceiling by a deep cornice moulding inscribed with cosmological signs. Garnished by an elaborate keystone, the centre of the image is marked by two figures sitting back to back, the

Gemini twins. Characterised as dual-natured, elusive, complex and contradictory, this sign aptly describes this masked space. Cancer, another star sign, is also visible to the right indicating that the remainder of the room might be aligned with the cosmos. Two arched doors peel open away from the surface of the wall in perfect symmetry with the ornament above. Their mirror-lined inner faces offer a vague reflection of the greater room.

The doors reveal a space behind the opaque panelling, a space within the wall occupied by a small vanity or dressing-table. Another mirror backs the niche which doubles the light, and the ruffles and tassels of swagged curtains are softly gathered at the boundary of this closet and cloister. A small clock is placed on a horizontal marbled surface next to a few indistinct trinkets, perhaps a dish, a perfume jar or bottle; the necessary artefacts for dressing and grooming. Cosmos becomes cosmetic. Equally poised, a lightly upholstered rectangular stool stands in front of the table and parted doors, ready to be slipped behind the table's flounced skirt before the doors are closed and the wall absorbs the secrets of the situation.

This pretty scene, this quaint proscenium, this decorated hideaway, provokes a myriad questions pertinent to the interior as evidenced in our collection of texts. For whom was this dressing-table made? Most certainly a woman, perhaps the lady of the house, who relished the activity of reviewing her dress and hair from multiple vantage points but who could not resolve its objectified presence in the room or refuse the architect's ingenious solution to clutter. As such female activities associated with beauty have been enveloped by the panelled wall, where has this female body gone? For the stool's skewed position indicates that she may have just left the frame, perhaps to select from her wardrobe across the room or attend to other household duties. Evidence of her presence is latently implied in the photograph. And what is it to sit in this aperture of space, dwelling in the margin of the room, looking outwards and inwards simultaneously? Do the curtains gild one's image in like manner to the interiority of intellectual musing? Is there a collapse and merging of philosophic values and physical virtues? The room seems to be dressed in parity to the self-reflective body that inhabits it.

And yet, it is a private space, a space for one, a space for an individual. The mirrors reflect very little of the greater surroundings, but the scale of the panelling and the floor-to-ceiling height help to extrapolate that this secret space occurs as an informality among the far more social and self-conscious home atmosphere. How might this 'PERFECT EXAMPLE OF DRESSING-TABLE HIDDEN BEHIND PANELING WHEN NOT IN USE' be physically, socially and theoretically constructed? How are the intricate details of curved timber work on the doors and stool indicative of current and historical values on ornament, surface, gender and politics? While the doors mask the presence of the dressing-table, the mirrored interior expands infinitely. What appears as a small enclosure is a mode of liberation. What one might assume to be self-indulgent or decadent

decoration may be found to be a sign of self-expression. While the architectural room is wrapped with abstract notions of time and space, this small alcove inhabits its periphery as a pocket where body is central, maybe even fluid, and space is temporal, perhaps even subjective.

What is being teased out here is a multifaceted dialogue between that which is theoretical in nature, abstract, knowledge-based and immaterial and that which is grounded, physical, phenomenal and concrete. Not wishing to pull these apart, but rather to encourage convergence, this book identifies a territory of emerging points that collectively register connections of understanding with reference to a field tentatively named as the theoretical domain of interior design. This conception forms a working method for searching and organising texts, and for mapping their locations as a relational matrix. Described in other theoretical discourse as rhizomatic, networked or diagrammatic, matrices foster the formation of connections among notions as opposed to defining or creating singular isolated entities.

This matrix or diagram mediates between the virtual potentials generated by the data (the field of essays/excerpts) and the actual book. The matrix is to some extent graphic shorthand used to declare latent structures of organisation. The diagram is also generative, and can be used to order possible readings.

This in hand, we sought theory informative to interior design by trusting that through the act of searching various sources/databases a range of associations and connections would verify an emergent practice. Such associations are fuelled by the abstract and diagrammatic quality of an organising tactical matrix in its flexibility to seek casual and coincidental links among related and sometimes assumed disparate disciplines. That is, we looked for correspondence between seemingly unrelated research and practice, moving laterally between existing systems and categories, not in a haphazard manner but through productive leaps generated by rules that had consequential and significant outcomes. This process enabled the gathering of material from several disciplines when the linear historical model seemed inapplicable, and thematic structures too constraining.

Coupled with its ability to engage the complexity of the real, the matrix assists in making sense of the found texts and their potential reformations. Conceptually, such order is made not towards the specificity or hegemony of a discipline, but rather to turn outwards and mobilise forces of action and imagination between matter and information. Pragmatically, the matrix positions each text relative to a disciplinary body of knowledge (social, political, philosophical, technological, gender and psychological) and then relative to prominent interior design practice issues (material, colour, light, space, decoration and furnishing). Within this methodology we acknowledge the interpretive role we played in ordering these texts and the multiple locations in which each text could be placed. The

matrix is intended to be used as a surveying instrument and ordering device with the purpose to catalyse cross- and inter-disciplinary insights.

An interdisciplinary database search using terms typically associated with interior design as a decorative craft, an architectural speciality, a spatial art or a physical articulation of social interaction located essays framed by a wide range of types of theory, genres of writing and sources of textual discourse. Many of the researched essays did not declare that they are concerned with 'interior theory', but instead they either operated critically on spaces, places and inhabitation of the built environment's interiors, or offered observations and abstractions of use and inhabitation that engender a criticality in this collection of texts. To include this material raises questions of what constitutes theory, and how theory relates to the critical study of the interior.

In their book Intersections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories, Iain Borden and Jane Rendell outline nine epistemological tendencies on which theory is constituted within critical discourse.³ Rather than champion a narrow definition or description, their categories are expansive and inclusive, and when considered relative to the scope of our book assist in substantiating numerous items that would normally fall outside the limits of architectural or design theory, most notably some that take the form of turn-of-the-century advice literature or historical analysis of a place or activity. We are also pointing to those texts that are observational in nature or assert new paradigms of dwelling in light of technology. In most cases, selection of such texts proved a matter of locating the speculative mode of inquiry within the written work, registering the inferences and extending them as conduits to other contemporary works or notions. In other cases, it became an exercise in dwelling in the period, revelling in the detail specific to when the text was written and recognising that theory and critical history have been defined and couched differently across time. For if theory is conditioned by inquiries and speculation about what occurs between events, situations, objects and actions, then the method of inquiry or the analytical device employed is of primary concern.

This matter was very apparent when we were faced with many texts across several disciplines that, despite fostering connective tissue between points, approached the manner of writing in very different styles and genres. Looking back, we should have expected this occurrence as it appears that many disciplines have, for various reasons, adopted a primary form and voice specific to the nature of their practice and audience. The nature of speaking theoretically in archaeology may necessitate the survey of cultural and geographical material, while the presentation of studies on social behaviour may include a review of statistical data gathered through direct observation. A theoretical discussion about colour from a psychological viewpoint may veer towards comparative analysis, while in architectural theory the text may rely on narrative or historical data from field studies or phenomenological discourse on perception and experience. While

these do not form an equal and level 'reading' field (it is often a challenge to read from one to the next without mitigating the difference of voice, tone, word usage, historical perspective and so on.), we felt that it was important to include texts of different writing styles and genres not only to demonstrate Borden and Rendell's analysis of critical theory but also to defend the field as plural, multiplicitous and interdisciplinary.

Establishing a field of potential connections and crossings as a fertile catalyst for intellectual inquiry is really only fruitful if it can be inhabited, tested and stretched beyond its own means. For example, an examination of the essays held within the matrix reveals several latent structures, issues, themes or traces that span several disciplines and territories. Surfacing as interconnected points, they operate beyond the stratification of disciplinary boundaries, revealing the complexity/extent of the interior when viewed as an interdisciplinary activity. Of these, the two following examples test this notion against the stereotypical image of interior design's short history, which often situates it as female, domestic and decorative; and the domain of objects and furnishing – a bias that can not be avoided. Most certainly, any book on theory surrounding interior design can not escape discussion about feminism, gender, race and sexuality, if not because of interior design's own history as a practice stemming from the upholsterer's trade then for its alliances (or stereotype associations) with domestic, residential and feminine decorative practice. While these are complex issues tangled with political and social events, and historical gender roles within Western culture including post-colonialism and racial affairs, evidence in the found texts indicates that such issues not only reside within designed works but are impacted by them.

The historical identification of women with the domestic interior, and subsequent cultural conflation of women, dress and the interior environment are subject to discourses on power. Whether enacted through metaphoric relations between women and the imprint of female character on the domestic room, or semi-autobiographic examinations of entrapment, they move beyond the structure/ornament dialectic that so fervently governs many architectural treatises. We acknowledge that there are a number of noteworthy publications within the discipline of architecture that address issues of architecture and feminism. These comprise both recovered histories and feminist readings of architecture as a gendered discourse of power, patriarchy and phallocentrism.

What is being provoked here is not just the suppression of ornament but the identification of the female body with the domestic and with the decorative, which forms a lingering and significant field of inquiry, and perhaps prejudice, towards what defines interior design historically. The exploration of such themes occurs through both gendered and sexed readings of architectural space as they intersect with discourses on power. Several critical theoretical essays in this book offer gendered readings of architectural history and the spaces associated with women. These essays characterise the impossibility of ignoring

the role feminism and feminist theory has in any discussion of the interior. In addition, recent developments in feminist and human geographic studies also investigate the relationship between particular bodies and their environment. Focusing on sexed corporeality, particular located bodies are examined through the ways a body's desires and capacities are produced or created by specific spaces. It is this identification of specific space to specific body that is relevant to any theorising of the interior that intends engaging with immanence, rather than masculine transcendent values. These critical theoretical essays use queer theory not to reify the lesbian or homosexual but to discuss complexities of public and private space and the containment of an identity. Positioning notions of 'other' or outside, they challenge traditional 'normal' ontologies of home, for example, home, privacy and publicity. This is not to substitute one universalising value for another, but to destabilise implicit homogeneities.

Although this example links numerous 'body' issues, it also veers in the direction of interiority – the conscious and reflexive awareness of self, identity, community and others within a social environment. Situated among philosophy and psychology, this cluster of associated points in the interdisciplinary arena of 'interiority' examines the innerness of interior design as that which is felt and projected upon and within the interior environment via body as a culturally lived organism.

An equally significant but not oppositional constellation of connections explores all that is concrete, material and objectified in the physical interior environment. Here the historiographic project that aligns interior decoration with furnishing generally operates through image-based texts and literary narratives that provide descriptions of great manors, castles and homes, inadvertently commenting on wealth, social status, worldliness and craft. A political and social engagement with all matters of style, taste and décor is enacted from positions of conformity or individuality. Moreover, rooms comprising plush textiles, gilded frames, polished floors and floriated wallpaper are indexical indicators of the infrastructure of inhabitation. As objects in space they are responsible for creating atmospheric effect but it is the latent effect that is seething behind the detail.

Among texts recording the historical development of the interior, including Mario Praz,⁴ Charlotte Gere⁵ and Peter Thornton,⁶ there is a tendency to perpetuate the style-manual documentation of furnishings and accessories. This propensity has contributed to the suppression and relegation of the decorative to a lesser understood architectural activity. Although primarily based on representation, and lacking a sense of criticality, such works model the predisposition for humans to decorate as an inherent impulse of self-expression. What lingers about this material is the manner in which things, objects and artefacts frame interior spaces, influence behaviour, reflect imagination and mark prevailing political and social notions of the time. Hence, this book includes several essays

that explore the constitutional understanding of furnishing over and above its representational or ergonomic value.

This anthology unabashedly includes texts that dwell on the core business of interior design practice as anything from the selection of cushions to the coordination of adjacent rooms measured in the light of popular style trends of the time. Such works speak to the ever-changing and elusive nature of taste, and its likely alliance to consumption and the acquisition of possessions as a symbol of social status. Several working definitions of what qualifies as tasteful and appropriate room design expose the extent to which such attributes may be subjectively grounded but socially influenced; issues of order and composition vacillate between unifying space via harmony and repose and charging the space with an array of eclectic objects. This wide range of approaches to decorating or furnishing the interior, the conventional practice of interior design, appears to extend through historical advice literature to popular interior magazines and journals of today.

Outside of issues to do with décor is a collection of texts that expose the various ways in which notions and principles of function form and inform interior space and, furthermore, inhabitation and behaviour. The functional characteristics of interior spaces prove as diverse as the acquisition of bodily comfort, aesthetic proportion and programme facilitation. Furniture, as a bodily interface, dictates posture and as a signifier of social gathering it indicates a performative event. We are made acutely aware that such interior objects are neither neutral nor nullifying. Consistent with issues of power, this collection of points in the matrix culls a portion of the field more familiar and less volatile than those surrounding body, gender and spatial and social interaction. For the most part, these issues and modes of inquiry related to concrete matter have acted as the mainstay of design and architectural practice. Even as physical things are inert inanimate matter, their power to absorb and exert influence over the spatial environment is exposed.

With a focus on specific spaces, some of these essays 'read' objects through ritual, metaphor and narrative as surrogates for technological progress and commodity, and conditioners of human behaviour. While some use historical and ethnographic methods of inquiry to examine social variables relative to ordering domestic space, others map social interaction as a space of specific inquiry. Here modernism and modernist paradigms are subject to cultural and aesthetic criticism. These essays subject transcendent metaphors of order and function to philosophical inquiry in order to engage the mundane and the ordinary and, subsequently, reframe the discussion through specificity and the implication of the body in space.

Declaring a field of inquiry that lies beyond disciplinary boundaries of design and architecture, all of the texts included in this reader establish generative and active exploration of interior design as a practice informed by the intellectual scholarship

surrounding its cultural production and creative practice. They are not foundational in that they do not recognise or declare an originary state or propose any fundamental canon. Collected in order to catalyse creative associations within this operational field, the texts in this volume are presented via an organisational strategy that refuses both chronologic and thematic structure. Connectivity to do with inhabitation and spatial presence as outlined in the examples above is at once distant, by discipline, and intimate, by content.

William Lawrence Bottomley, Architect. A Perfect Example of Dressing-Table Hidden Behind Paneling When Not in Use

Notes

Elizabeth Grosz, 'Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth', IDEA Journal, 2005, pp 15–28.
William Lawrence Bottomley, Architect, 'A Perfect Example of Dressing-Table Hidden Behind Paneling When Not in Use', (Plate 31) in Emily Post, The Personality of a House: The Blue Book of Home Charm, Funk & Wagnalls (New York), 1945.
Iain Borden and Jane Rendell (eds), Intersections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories, Routledge (London and New York), 2000, pp 1–24.
Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau [1964], Thames and Hudson (London), 1981. First published as La filosofia dell'arredamento, Documente, Libraio Editore (Rome), 1945.
Charlotte Gere, Nineteenth-century Decoration: The Art of the Interior, HN Abrams (New York), 1989; and Charlotte Gere, Nineteenth Century Interiors: An Album of Watercolours, Thames and Hudson (London), 1992.
Peter Thornton, Authentic Decor: The Domestic Interior, 1620–1920, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London), 1984.