Hollis, Edward
Hollis, Edward
Bio Sketch
Edward Hollis is a British architect, academic and writer who has taught interior architecture in Edinburgh since beginning "my academic career in 1999 as a lecturer in what was, at the time, a relatively new subject: interior architecture" (chapter, p. 1) — at Edinburgh College of Art, now part of the University of Edinburgh, where his work centres on the alteration, reuse, and afterlives of buildings. He is the author of The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (2009) and The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors (2013), both of which treat buildings as composites modified across generations rather than finished works of individual authors. His chapter for Marinic's reader is the historiography of that position: an account of how the books that founded interior architecture constructed their evidence and narratives, and a claim that altering buildings and writing history are cognate practices of reconstruction.
Key Works
- *(Re)constructing Histories: A Brief Historiography of Interior Architecture* (2018) — chapter 1 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge); the historiography of interior architecture's founding literature.
- The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (2009) — thirteen building biographies from construction through ruin, alteration and myth.
- The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors (2013) — a history of interiors that no longer exist, from cave paintings to the present.
- Thinking Inside the Box: A Reader in Interiors for the 21st Century (Middlesex University Press, 2007; co-edited with John Gigli, Frazer Hay, Graeme Brooker, Andy Milligan, Alex Milton and Drew Plunkett) — the interiors reader cited in Brooker's Reader chapter (note 2) as a source for the interior's "slippery" characterization; Brooker's companion anthology to Marinic's.
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Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- interior-architecture — the discipline whose founding literature he historiographs; the artefact-vs-alteration split
- adaptive-reuse — alteration as the discipline's central practice and as historical practice
- historiography-of-the-interior — the field his chapter names and surveys
- authorship — alteration as "collective, across generations"
- history — history as "(re)construction of preexisting structures"; Ricoeur's eikon
- representation — "Interior architecture exists as much in its own histories as in built artefacts"
- separate-spheres — interior architecture as another iteration of the private/public instability
Relevance to the Core Research
Hollis supplies the historiographic backbone for the wiki's interior cluster and a bridge between it and the iconic/everyday clusters. Three contributions stand out. First, his account of the discipline's founding literature (Kurtich, Pile, Brooker & Stone, Scott, Sparke, Rice) gives the wiki's interior pages their genealogy — including the mirror-image of Taylor & Preston's Intimus: where Intimus constituted interior design's theory from outside architectural canons, Hollis shows how interior architecture constituted itself against architecture's hegemony. Second, his Grands Projets observation — Tate Modern and the Reichstag carried adaptive reuse to architecture's center ground — links the interior cluster to the wiki's iconic-architecture and adaptive-reuse analyses. Third, his reflexive thesis (history and alteration as mirrored reconstructions, both indebted to the past's "protective trust") gives the wiki's historiographic pages (history, memory, authorship) an architectural counterpart, and aligns with the everyday/vernacular critique of single authorship.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.
