Weinthal, Lois
Weinthal, Lois
Bio Sketch
Lois Weinthal is a Professor in the School of Interior Design at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson), where she has also served as Chair; educated at Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design (MArch, BArch), with previous teaching at Parsons The New School for Design and the University of Texas at Austin and honorary professorships at the Glasgow School of Art and Middlesex University. Her practice "investigates the relationship between architecture, interiors, clothing, and objects, resulting in works that take on an experimental nature," and her scholarship is one of interior design theory's chief institution-builders: editor of Toward a New Interior: An Anthology of Interior Design Theory (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011; IDEC Book Award 2014) — the anthology that envisions "a future where interior design is treated with parity to architecture and industrial design" — and co-editor of After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design (2012), The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design (with Graeme Brooker, 2018), Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure (with Jonathon Anderson, Routledge, 2022), and the journal Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture. Her chapter "A Pirouette on the Orthographic Hinge" is the twenty-sixth chapter of Gregory Marinic's Interior Architecture Reader (2018).
Key Works
- *A pirouette on the orthographic hinge* (2018) — chapter 26 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge); probes the orthographic projection system to find "where it loses its grip," using Woolf's Orlando, the pirouette, Pavlova's stage-light, and Callaghan & Palmer's space-shapes.
- Toward a New Interior: An Anthology of Interior Design Theory (2011) — edited anthology (Princeton Architectural Press) assembling interior design's independent theoretical foundation; plain text (not yet ingested).
- After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design (2012) — co-edited with Kent Kleinman and Joanna Merwood-Salisbury (Princeton Architectural Press); plain text (not yet ingested).
- The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design (2018) — co-edited with Graeme Brooker (Bloomsbury); plain text (not yet ingested).
- Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure (2022) — co-edited with Jonathon Anderson (Routledge); plain text (not yet ingested); see anderson-jonathon-lovell-anderson-laura.
- "Drawing the Dotted Line" (2016) — chapter in The Routledge Companion to Design Studies (eds. Sparke & Fisher); the dotted-line motif of the 2018 chapter's "moment of disbelief" developed at length; plain text (not yet ingested).
- "Interior Atmosphere" (2019) — chapter in A Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945 (ed. Anne Massey); plain text (not yet ingested).
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- orthographic-projection — the drawing system probed to its fracture point: "true data" that excludes the temporal
- representation — the "unifying form of representation" whose still-life requirement fails interior design's fleeting object
- temporality — "Time is a variable inherent to the temporal, but absent from this drawing type"
- light-tracing — light as "a replacement for the body," the moving body's admissible surrogate
- space-shape — Callaghan & Palmer's interpolated models of the body in action, relayed and theorized by Weinthal
- interior-design — the discipline "responsible for designing the temporary and fleeting"
Relevance to the Core Research
Weinthal gives the wiki's interior cluster its representational-temporal register: the demonstration that the discipline's shared drawing convention is structurally biased against the discipline's own object — the temporary and fleeting interior. Her chapter connects the Reader's representation strand (La Coe's perspective, Webb's ice-core cone, Spankie's unrepresentable consulting room) to its temporal strand (Hedges's waiting drawing, Taylor's real-time interior) through a single hinge: what the drawing cannot hold. She also matters as an institution-builder of interior design theory itself — her Toward a New Interior (2011) is the sibling anthology to Taylor & Preston's Intimus and Marinic's Reader, and her co-editorship with Jonathon Anderson ties the wiki's computational strand (autogenic-design, the-gyroid) to interior design's theory-building generation. Her closing gesture in the chapter — Orlando's gender hinge, "one that bridges male to female and opens up discussions in multiple disciplines" — links the representation cluster to the wiki's gender-and-the-interior research area.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
