Treadwell, Sarah

Bio Sketch

Sarah Treadwell is a New Zealand artist, architect, and academic (PhD). She was the first female full-time academic staff member in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland (Waipapa Taumata Rau), where her career spanned 1981 until her retirement in 2017 and where she influenced "several generations of architects, artists and thinkers" (Architecture + Women•NZ, whose Tātuhi / Drawing Architecture Archive holds a dedicated Sarah Treadwell Archive). Her writing joins architectural theory to literary and poetic practice — the chapter ingested here ("Oceanic interiorities," 2018) builds a theory of the interior from swimming, sea-writing, and mourning in the South Pacific.

Key Works

• *Oceanic interiorities* (2018) — Chapter 16 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic); the sea as the most extensive interior, oceanic interiority held by permeable membranes (skin and shore), and the domestic interior as oceanic.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• oceanic-interiority — her signature concept: the watery nature of interiority
• interiority — the parent concept, given its hydrological register
• sea-of-islands — Hau'ofa's expansive oceanic space, via her presentation
• poetic-image — the "written image… poised between the poetic and the accurate"
• inside-outside-dialectic — skin and shore as permeable membranes
• embodiment — immersion, floating, buoyancy, the swimming body

Relevance to the Core Research

Treadwell gives the wiki's interior cluster its hydrological and postcolonial-climatic extension: a theory of interiority written from the South Pacific that (1) radicalizes the inside/outside problem (inside-outside-dialectic) from wall to membrane — skin and shore; (2) connects interiority to the body's liquids (sweat, tears, blood, breaking waters), extending the embodiment cluster (embodiment, lived-body) into affect and mortality; and (3) brings climate change and the disappearing island states of Kiribati and Tuvalu inside interior theory, linking the interior-architecture corpus to the climate-change-and-architecture debate. Her literary method (the written image between "the poetic and the accurate") also connects interior theory to the poetic-image tradition and to writing-based design methods.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Oceanic interiorities (Treadwell 2018)