Becoming-Interior

Definition

Becoming-interior is Mark Taylor's process-definition of the interior, coined from Deleuze and Guattari's ontology of becoming: "In suggesting that a body is not defined by the form that determines it, one could say that room becomes interior in a molecular or atomic sense and that becoming-interior is ever-changing" (2001/2006, p. 341). The term names a triple displacement. From substance to process: the interior is not a thing (a room's inside) but an ever-changing becoming — "room becoming interior" — individuated like a haecceity rather than determined like an object. From molar to molecular: the room becomes interior "in a molecular or atomic sense" — interiority as the intensive, micro-compositional transformation of a room's given form, not its fulfilment. From noun to verb: "becoming-interior" grammaticalizes what the discipline's tradition had frozen into "the interior" — the interior as an activity of rooms, occupants, memories and hours rather than a state of spaces.

The concept has a documented historical enemy. Taylor's Alberti question — "Did Alberti cleanse the room and re-surface it white in order to arrest and mask the fluidity of becoming-interior?" (p. 342) — names whiteness, homogenous part-division (partitio, area, proportio) and ornament-as-attached as the instruments by which architecture's canonical tradition arrested the interior's becoming: the whitened, proportioned, ornament-attached room as the mask of a process the tradition could not write. And the concept's temporal texture is intimate: "this room is my life's wealth, it is 'decorated' by numerous things self-gathered and inherited, both consciously and unconsciously, it is room becoming interior; after all with a room of one's own, one is free to do this" (p. 341) — decoration itself reframed as the occupant's engine of becoming.

Key Thinkers

• Mark Taylor — the concept's coiner (2001/2006): "room becomes interior in a molecular or atomic sense and… becoming-interior is ever-changing"; the Alberti whitening question; the room "decorated by numerous things self-gathered and inherited" as becoming's everyday engine.
• Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari — the ontology borrowed: the body "not defined by the form that determines it" — "a discontinuous, non-totalisable series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations" through "the body without organs" (via Grosz's Volatile Bodies) — the source of "room becomes interior" (quoted pp. 340–341).
• Elizabeth Grosz — the transmission channel (not yet paged — see log): Volatile Bodies (1994, p. 164) supplies the body-without-organs quote; Space, Time and Perversion (1995) supplies the thinking-thesis ("a wrenching of concepts away from their usual configurations") and the inside-architecture history ("'inside' architecture and its history") that becoming-interior works to escape.
• Leon Battista Alberti — the concept's canonical antagonist: ornament "'has the character of something attached'" and the homogenous part-division — read by Taylor as the apparatus that "arrest[s] and mask[s] the fluidity of becoming-interior" (2001/2006).

Related Concepts

• Haecceity — the ontological register beneath the process: "Could interior be thought of as haecceity – an element of existence on which individuality depends?" — becoming-interior is how a haecceity-interior exists: indeterminately, ever-changing.
• Interiority — the cluster this concept extends: interiority re-posed from what the room shelters (Taylor & Preston's register) to what the room is doing — an innerness in process rather than in shelter.
• Whiteness — the arrest-instrument: Alberti's "cleanse[d]… re-surface[d] white" room as the tradition-level ancestor of the whiteness regime (Batchelor's Ripolin, Hitchcock & Johnson's stucco clause) — the mask of becoming.
• Temporality — the concept's medium: "it is day becoming night"; the evening light that "hides things in shadows and catches others in lingering rays" — becoming-interior is indexed to the hour, the season, the light.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the dualism becoming-interior displaces: "For architecture (to have suggested that the inside is also the outside and the outside is also the inside) fares no better, since 'Bisexuality is no better concept than the separateness of the sexes'" — neither the binary nor its simple dissolution, but the molecular process between.
• Trace — becoming's residue: "the emphasised traces that Benjamin asserts we leave behind in the interior along with everyday imprints on loose covers and protectors" — the room's becoming is legible in its traces.
• Occupant as Designer — becoming's agent: the self-gathered decoration as the occupant's engine of the room's becoming — "with a room of one's own, one is free to do this."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the concept's source: "one could say that room becomes interior in a molecular or atomic sense and that becoming-interior is ever-changing" (p. 341); "this room is my life's wealth, it is 'decorated' by numerous things self-gathered and inherited, both consciously and unconsciously, it is room becoming interior" (p. 341); the Alberti question — "Did Alberti cleanse the room and re-surface it white in order to arrest and mask the fluidity of becoming-interior?" (p. 342); the Laugier's-sister anticipation — she "would be tempted to see not objects and 'forms,' but relations of movement and rest, moments of walking, crying and singing that occur alongside things; becoming; a moment that sees room becoming-interior" (p. 343); and the D&G grounding — the body "not defined by the form that determines it" (p. 340).
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's book-length intertext and its building-scale audit. The blurb's binary-flip formula names "interior becomes landscape" as one of place identity's six slippages; Chapter 7 tests what the becoming-interior looks like when architecture performs it deliberately: Koolhaas "often designs interiors as if they were exteriors, importing the randomness of social encounter from exterior urban space into interior space. These interiors are often designed as 'fields of play' or 'artificial landscapes' which dissolve boundaries between inside and outside, between architecture and metropolis" (p. 105); the Educatorium's tilted plane — a 'social magic carpet' whose floor "folds upwards and back to become the wall and then roof" (p. 111) — delivers "a synthetic landscape open to individual choice" (Cornubert quoted, p. 111) but the fold stops at the examination rooms: "The fold of this building as it literally folds upwards is one of smooth folding into striation" (p. 114). The audit's verdict gives the concept its critical edge: the urbanized interior can be "a place for a particular kind of being more than it is open to new kinds of becoming" (p. 122) — becoming-interior as achievement (the Seattle Living Room, "one of the finest public interiors of its era") and as illusion ("programmatic innovation becomes congealed into form," p. 122). See interior-urbanism, becoming, smooth-and-striated-space.

Open Questions

• If "becoming-interior is ever-changing," what is the discipline's object of design — the room's capacity to become, the becoming's current state, or neither? The concept aligns interior design with hosting change rather than producing form; does any design method in the wiki (Odom's productions, Weinthal's movement-documentation) already operationalize that?
• Is the Alberti whitening a real historical operation (the tradition knew the becoming and masked it) or a polemical retro-projection — did Alberti's white room arrest a becoming that had not yet been thought?
• How does becoming-interior relate to becoming-interiority (Erdman's "degrees of interiority" as alterable states)? Is Taylor's process-ontology the missing foundation of Erdman's perception-state register — or a different claim (the room's becoming, not the perceiver's)?
• The concept's freedom clause — "with a room of one's own, one is free to do this" — ties becoming to Woolf's independent means. Is becoming-interior therefore only available to the room's owner, and what is the becoming of the confined room (Gilman's rest cure, the tenement)?
• Dovey's audit poses the concept's design question directly: Koolhaas's urbanized interiors deliver becoming as image ("freedom… as images they consume") while the everyday's becoming is practice. Can a designed interior be a becoming, or does the designed becoming-interior always congeal into "a place for a particular kind of being" (p. 122)? Taylor's occupant-decorator and Dovey's kicker: the same question at two scales.