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

Chapter 5

Inside out

Michael Webb

It is quite evident in most buildings that the surfaces should be considered as belonging to both the interior and exterior. In some of modern architecture’s weirder moments, however, this distinction is not quite so evident. Take the early design sketch that Le Corbusier made for the villa at Garches: it purports to show a large double-height interior space. But is it? What is that little squiggle in the middle of the ceiling that looks like a bird? If it is a bird, it’s a somewhat inept representation of one. But if we are looking at the sky and not the ceiling, does that make it an exterior space? Was this little sketch a progenitor of James Tyrrell’s famous ceiling at PS1 in Queens NY, a grand illusion shattered not by a bird but by UA 3245 making its final approach into LaGuardia Airport flying well below 35,000 ft.? Is that not a manicured lawn in Monsieur de Bestegui’s Parisian roof garden? If so, it must surely be an exterior view. Or is it a carpet, in which case it must be an interior view?

In one of the projects that SITE did for Best Products, the enclosed volume of the big box store shifted sideways off its base, so that many of the items for sale displayed in the sales area find themselves out in the open. SITE’s work represented the ne plus ultra of architecture for disaster movies.

With regard to the notion of interior architecture, let me now take another breath and describe two examples of my own work so that the above quoted masters and I are not mentioned at once. First, an unfinished oil painting of the Henley regatta: The landscape depicted in the painting (Figure 5.1) is that of the regatta course at Henley-on-Thames; namely, the volume of air, land, and water enclosed by a perspectival cone of vision, whose axis is parallel to the rowing lanes of the course, and whose apex is in the Cyclopean eye of the beholder. Nearby, in 1862, during “a leisurely glide on the river all in the dreamy weather of a golden afternoon” did the Rev. C.L. Dodgson, accompanied by Robinson Duckworth, first tell the Liddell girls of the Cheshire cat, et al.? I have allowed myself the notion that the air within the cone has magically solidified. It can thus be removed from the overall landscape and examined independently like an ice core. By this move, though, the contents of the cone become components of an interior space and the wall of the cone a window to the nothingness beyond. My easel is in a location other than that of the beholder. Depicted in the painting, however, is only what the beholder can see, meaning that only objects within his or her purview are rendered. What lies behind those objects (behind in terms of the view from my easel) will appear as negative “shadows” radiating from the beholder’s eye, voids slashing through the ice core and breaking through the exterior wall of the cone. If the beholder were to move, the voids would begin rotating like movie gala searchlights to create new gashes in the wall.

The drive-in house

Some background material might be helpful before getting to the gist of the project that just about merits its inclusion. And that’s what some of us in the UK felt upon reading Reyner Banham’s 1965 Letter from America, his new land. To the folks back home, Banham praised not the sort of corporate modern architecture purveyed by the likes of Paul Rudolph, SOM, and I.M. Pei. No, he wanted to bring to our attention the automobile-induced vernacular of mobile homes and drive-ins that represented a radical change in the basic programming of a building. His book was quintessentially

American in its seeming response to the needs of the restlessly mobile society that we had all heard so much about. Of the drive-in movie house, Banham writes:

Only the word house (theater surely?) is a manifest misnomer … just a flat piece of ground where the operating company provides visual images and piped sound, and the rest of the situation comes on wheels. You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car. You also bring Coke, cookies, Kleenex, Chesterfields, spare clothes, shoes, the Pill, and god wot [sic] else they don’t provide at Radio City.$^4$

Or, “the smoochy couple dancing to the music of the radio in their parked convertible have created a ballroom in the wilderness (dance floor courtesy of the highway department).” This latter vision of rapture in the wilderness presumably dissolves when the couple return to their car and the dance floor turns back into a length of highway … and silence replaces the sound of music. We now know what a drive-in movie theater or dance hall looks like … a flat piece of ground, etc., but what might a drive-in house look or behave like? Maybe this is a drive-in house (Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2 illustrates a horizontal section cut through a house (shown here by its sectioned spherical roof with rudimentary floor beneath). The purpose of the drawing was solely to explore the mechanics of how a car might be rotated into the house (via an intake tube) while at the same time maintaining seals that would prevent hot or cold external air from entering the house. At the time of the drawing’s execution, the design of the house itself had not been considered and is therefore depicted in rudimentary form. Solid material cut through is shown in grayscale. The house is nestled into the side of a hill.

The drawing is tripartite, comprising sequential images numbered one, two, and three – in dutiful compliance with that convention of architectural representation which requires placing the main entry of a building along the bottom edge so that our eyes can enter “up” into the

drawing. Here, our eyes must be usurped by the driver’s Cyclopean line of sight, his center of vision, which is likewise “up” in all three phases, meaning that the building must rotate around the driver, rather than the driver around the building. By such faithful adherence to the conventions, the original intention was to aid readability.

In part 1, the car has been driven through the intake tube into a clockwise rotating drum. The driver’s center of vision remains steadfastly vertical. A curving yellow line marks the path of the sun across the spherical roof. In part 2, the drum has rotated further, the volume of air contained within the drum warming or cooling to the internal temperature of the house. The driver’s center of vision remaining steadfastly vertical, the intake tube and the room must therefore follow and swing round. In part 3, the drum has rotated yet further so that its internal walls now align with those of the house. The car has become the gorgeous object within.

Figure 5.2 Michael Webb. Drive-in house. Horizontal Section Cut. 3 phase depiction of the rotation. Airbrush. Color-Aid paper and Solar Path diagrams. (1995)

The operational geometry of the drum was an attempt to emulate – albeit at a giant scale – the Wankel engine’s ingenious rotational harmonies; hence the term “intake” or “exhaust” with the car itself playing the part of the gas and air mixture. The analog only takes you so far! Figure 5.3 represents a work in progress although, as you can see, the word “progress” is what this drawing has not achieved. The mechanism is more compact, and as a result, the rotating car and its concomitantly opening doors seem (and seem, here, is the operative word) to sculpt a shape which is

a negative of the car from the solid material of the house. The interior walls of the house, then, are a distended negative of the car exterior. The outside is the inside distended, and thus, results in an interior architecture.

Figure 5.3 Michael Webb, Drive-in house, Roof Plan at night, Photostat with added Pantone color. (1985)

Notes

1. The airliner’s ceiling, while invisible, is very much an actuality … so is Tyrell’s ceiling.
2. The cone has been sectioned horizontally, thus making its top surface a parabola.
3. Taken from the prefatory poem that begins Alice in Wonderland.
4. The smart, self-driving car (rentable version only): drive it, leave it at the entrance to J.C. Penney and there’s another waiting for you when you exit … sure … after a 10 minute wait … at least has the potential for eliminating those pressed metal deserts more completely than ever the drive-in could.