Disciplinary Frontiers

Definition

The disciplinary frontier is the outer limit of a discipline reconceived as a zone rather than a line: "a frontier is the outer limits or boundaries of a country, territory, or discipline… a frontier is, in fact, a liminal zone; it has thickness. We often assume there is a hard line between each design discipline, but in reality the defined edge is imaginary" (Teston 2018). The concept re-describes the geography of design disciplines — interior architecture (the human experience of the interior volume; space privileged), architecture (external, scalar, formal), urban design (political and geometric forces; the public grid), interior design (individual and aesthetic influences; the haptic reading nook) — as territories with thick, traversable edges where "political-spatial meets individual-experiential." Its operative claim: "Each discipline should make use of the broader frontiers of its neighbors" — innovation happens where work "traverses the territorial membrane of these disciplines."

Key Thinkers

• Liz Teston — the concept's author: the frontier thesis and the appropriation program built on it (Augé, Situationists, human rights borrowed "across the disciplines").
• Terry Meade — "Interior Design, a Political Discipline" (2013): the sociopolitical neglect that the frontier thesis explains — interior designers lacked urban theory because they policed their own edge (not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• interior-architecture — the territory whose frontier with urban design the chapter traverses; "the blurred edge between the territories of interior architecture and urban design."
• boundaries — the spatial form of the same problem: the disciplinary frontier is Ardener's bounded territory at the scale of knowledge domains, gate-keeping replaced by appropriation.
• politicizing-the-interior — what crossing the frontier is for: interior architecture appropriates urban and anthropological political theory.
• everyday-life — the everyday as the transversal field all the territories share and none fully theorizes.
• Interdisciplinarity — the general concept of which the frontier is the architectural-geographic version.
• Natural Finishes — the palette as boundary-marker: the natural/neutral convention "helps to define the boundary between the two practices, to explain what is and is not architectural" (Braham).
• interior-design — the sibling territory: the individual-experiential pole of the disciplinary scale (urban: political/geometric → interior architecture: human experience → interior design: individual/aesthetic).
• non-places — the concept borrowed across the frontier from anthropology (Augé) into interior architectural theory.
• psychogeography — the method borrowed across the frontier from Situationist urbanism into the interior.
• terrain-vague — the urban void as another thick frontier zone between city and interior.
• everyday-life — the everyday as the transversal field all the territories share and none fully theorizes.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/teston-2018-politicizing-the-interior — the founding source: the frontier as "a liminal zone; it has thickness"; the imaginary defined edge; the award-jury evidence (AIA spatial experience vs Interior Design magazine placemaking aesthetics); the program that "each discipline should make use of the broader frontiers of its neighbors."
• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the thickness metaphor's architectural counterpart, at the scale of the built edge: the boundary "not a surface but a thick edge, a five metre deep in-between zone"; the Intimus editors' framing of the chapter as interior design's confrontation with "boundary crossing in the form of both literal and theoretical thresholds" — the discipline "long… relegated to the domain of the 'inside'" crossing toward the urban, with Borden's apparatus (Lefebvre, Simmel, Augé, Foucault) as the borrowed theory the frontier thesis calls for. See thick-edge, boundaries.
• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the frontier's material marker, a decade before the frontier thesis: the natural/neutral palette "everywhere visible in contemporary architecture and interior design and even helps to define the boundary between the two practices, to explain what is and is not architectural" (p. 56); the excision mechanism — "When decorative elements are deemed artificial, they and their advocates are excised from mainstream architectural practice, and displaced into interior design" (p. 57); and the shared-work challenge — "Why are similar terms used in the opposition between two disciplines whose actual work so often overlaps and coincides?" (p. 59). The palette boundary shows the frontier has a chromatic thickness: what separates architecture from interior design is a convention of finishes, not a line of work. See natural-finishes, interior-design-vs-architecture.
• On technological limits (Olsen 2018) — the transdisciplinary-method register (Mark Linder, via Olsen): disciplinary identity "without the associated posturing and siloing," with working at the "border" of the discipline "produc[ing] new knowledge and an expansion of disciplinary expertise" — whether "through cross-disciplinary collaboration or borrowing tools, discovering new ways of seeing through explorations 'outside' can inform new methods of working." Linder's inversion gives the frontier an instrumental value the Teston chapter implies but does not state: "it is at the limits 'where we become most aware and in need of the tools, techniques, and technologies of the discipline'" — the frontier is not just where disciplines meet but where their tools are forged ("Advances arise by harnessing disciplinary expertise associated with the technologies of production to push against disciplinary boundaries"). See technological-limits, interdisciplinarity.
• Why this, why now? The case for interior architecture (Marinic 2018) — the frontier thesis generalized to the whole discipline: interior architecture as "a rising discipline that lives at the periphery," whose object is the interstitial zone itself — "This mining of an interstitial zone between architecture and interior design has made some members of the established disciplines grow skeptical of the intentions and motivations of interior architecture" — and whose operation is boundary-dissolution at field scale: "breaking down boundaries and distinctions between the historically siloed – and generally contentious – territories of architecture and interior design." The chapter's paradox converts the frontier's cost into the discipline's engine ("the strength of interior architecture, in fact, rests in its current marginalization by both architecture and interior design") and its geography into a span — scholarship and practice "ranging from domesticity to urbanity." The frontier is no longer the edge of one discipline but the discipline's whole location. See identity-of-the-interior, interdisciplinarity.

Open Questions

• Does the frontier thesis generalize to the wiki's other disciplinary boundaries — ornament vs purity (architecture's edge to the decorative), or the domestic-science prehistory (the household as a discipline erased at the professional frontier)?
• If "the defined edge is imaginary," what work do the professional definitions (legislation, accreditation — "fourteen percent of CIDA programs") still perform? Teston brackets professional legislation; the wiki's interior-design-vs-architecture debate shows the imaginary edge is enforced by real institutions.
• Is the frontier's "thickness" the same as Ardener's boundary-crossing rules (who may traverse, with what credentials) — i.e., does the discipline's edge have gate-keepers?