Flexible Interior

Definition

The flexible interior names the design strategy of achieving spatial variety not through more rooms but through reconfigurable boundaries — partitions, screens and furniture that convert one space into several. Its founding published instance in this wiki is the Beechers' movable screen of 1869: "The large room on the left can be made to serve the purpose of several rooms by means of a movable screen. By shifting this rolling screen from one part of the room to another, two apartments are always available, of any desired size within the limits of the large room" (p. 46). The screen is a hybrid device — partition, wardrobe and storage wall in one ("On one side, and at the top and bottom, it has shelves with shelf boxes… The central part of the screen's interior is a wardrobe," p. 46) — engineered for economy ("shelves with shelf boxes, which are cheaper and better than drawers," p. 46), stability ("so high as nearly to reach the ceiling, in order to prevent it from overturning," p. 46) and ease of use: "The pivots of the rollers and the parts where there is friction must be rubbed with hard soap, and then a child can move the whole easily" (p. 46). The concept's stakes: the boundary as a furnishing rather than a wall — space differentiated by movable, occupant-operated apparatus, with the weakest occupant (a child) as the ergonomic datum. It connects the nineteenth-century economy of the small house to the twentieth-century transformable interior (Schröder House, furniture-based room subdivision) and to today's actuated, responsive partitions (interactive-architecture) — the historical line of the boundary that moves. Croft's audit of the Schröder House adds the concept's critical weight: transformability's "reality is about control, not freedom" — flexibility as a social programme whose costs (privacy, schedule, family strain) fall on its occupants.

Key Thinkers

• Catharine E. Beecher — with Stowe, the screen's designer and theorist: flexibility as the economy of the small house; the screen as partition-wardrobe-storage hybrid; the child who "can move the whole easily" as the ergonomic standard (p. 46).
• Catherine Croft — the concept's social auditor: the Schröder House (1924) as the transformable interior's canonical instance and its critique — flexibility's "reality is about control, not freedom"; the partitions that "do not make sense unless all are closed or all open"; "ultimately, Schröder craved greater privacy" (2000/2006). See schroder-house, privacy.
• Amy Campos — the nomadic descendant: the transferrable modular kit (Titlecase, Tailored) as furniture-scale territory — "Territory is staked out at the scale of furniture rather than at the scale of landscape" — flexibility designed for the next deployment, not only this room (2018). See territorial-transience.
• Mark Taylor — the technological descendant: the actuated wall (Aegis Hyposurface, T-Room membrane) whose variability "question[s] the seeming solidity" of the boundary (2018) — see interactive-architecture.
• (Related, not yet paged — see log: Gerrit Rietveld, the Schröder House's architect, whose commitment to the sliding screens Croft calls "questionable"; Charlotte Perriand and the interior's equipment-based flexibility.)

Related Concepts

• Boundaries — the concept's substrate: the screen as a boundary that is a rule made furniture ("a set of rules to determine… who shall occupy that space," Ardener) — here moved by hand.
• Partition of Space — the literal partition inside Ardener's analytic sense: the plan as ordering system, re-executed hourly by the occupant.
• Interactive Architecture — the technological continuation: the responsive surface as the motorized screen; the dynamic interior's historical ancestor.
• Domestic Interior — the site: flexibility as the small house's strategy for multiplicating domestic space.
• Domestic Economy — the rationale: one room serving several is the economy of labor, time and expense extended to construction.
• Adaptive Reuse — the family resemblance: both work by reconfiguring the existing rather than building anew — here within a single room.
• Prefab Interior — the industrial descendant: space-making elements manufactured off-site and "plugged into the house at the building site" (Lustron's built-ins); interchangeable add-ons reconfigurable "over time as necessary and/or desired" (su11); the manufactured unit as the screen's factory-made cousin. See add-on, kit-of-parts.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the founding specification: the rolling screen converting one large room into "two apartments… of any desired size" (p. 46); the parlor/bedroom double-face (p. 46); wardrobe interior and shelf-box storage (p. 46); soap-lubricated rollers and the child-standard (p. 46); screws rather than nails "as the screen is too large to pass through a door" (p. 46); the sliding-window piazzas convertible "by glazed sashes… into green-houses in winter" (p. 44) as the seasonal register of the same strategy.
• Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the technological descendant: the actuated, responsive surface as the motorized boundary; the dynamic interior "not constrained by built form" (see interactive-architecture, boundaries).
• Fabricating interiority (Manack 2018) — the corporate-industrial descendant: "Suspended ceilings, raised floors, demountable partitions, and flexible, reconfigurable office furniture systems (the kit of parts of the modern corporate interior) all operate with an impermanence and literal detachment from the architectural envelope within which they are housed" — the screen's rolling boundary scaled to the office tower and upgraded from hand-moved furniture to full-layer infrastructure; and at North Presbyterian Church, the fabricated ceiling "conceal[ing] the appearance of hardware and headers required for movable partitions" — the subdivision-serving surface of a sanctuary "subdivided into multiple rooms with asymmetrical entries." See skyscraper-interior, adaptive-reuse.
• Territory and inhabitation (Campos 2018) — the nomadic descendant: flexibility that survives relocation. Titlecase's "permanent modular components (shelving, desks, benches, and cabinets) proportionately designed in dimension and detail for easy reconfiguration within their current location and transferrable to any new space" produce "a permanently nomadic plan for a single space"; Tailored's components "move, aggregate, stack, and disperse to produce multiple, varied, and at times simultaneous inhabitations of the space," structuring "movements, cycles, and simultaneous occupations in space, regardless of location." Where the Beechers' screen converted rooms within one house, the transient interior's kit converts any future space — and stakes "territory… at the scale of furniture rather than at the scale of landscape." See territorial-transience, liberated-interior.
• Movement and Myth (Croft 2000/2006) — the concept's canonical built instance and its first sustained social audit: the Schröder House's sliding partitions as the Modern Movement's promise ("space could be demarked, reformed and reconfigured with the aid of kinetic architectural elements or mobile furniture units") realized and reversed — "The Schröder House's mythology might place an emphasis on a pioneering form of modern free living, but the reality is about control, not freedom. It could even be said to resemble life in prison, with its proscribed actions at proscribed times" (p. 75); the bathroom that must be made "by pulling out walls around the bath" (p. 75); the partitions that "do not make sense unless all are closed or all open" (p. 75); and the client's verdict on her own flexibility — "Ultimately, Schröder craved greater privacy" (p. 77). Also the lineage's retro-correction: the transformable interior read as "closer to the Arts and Crafts creation of spaces within spaces" than to modernist openness (p. 75). See schroder-house, privacy, static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
• Inside the prefab house (Schneiderman 2018) — the industrial prefab descendants: the Lustron House's interior elements as "a system of prefabricated modular units that not only act as dividing or space-making elements, but also function as programmed space, shelving, cabinetry, closets, and vanities" — "manufactured as complete units and plugged into the house at the building site" (Wolfe and Leonard, quoted); su11's add-ons "designed to be interchangeable, providing the ability to reconfigure elements over time as necessary and/or desired," the units "a habitable puzzle consisting of several functions, including object, furniture, and space" — flexibility not as a moved boundary within a fixed envelope but as the element that moves between envelope and program. And the structural limit case: the Furniture House's furniture is space-defining but load-bearing — the flexible interior's element here fixed by its own structure. See prefab-interior, add-on, structural-furniture.
• Thing-Shapes (Dubbeldam 2002/2006) — the folded descendant: flexibility achieved without moving elements at all. The Aida Hair Salon's smart wall is "a smooth wrapper enveloping all functional requirements and leaving the space free of clutter" — storage, music, lighting, heating and cooling encapsulated in the wrapper, "all evenly distributed: a free zone" — and its flexibility is localized in the fold: "creases allow for local insertions of cutting stations, desks and seating elements" (p. 100). Where the Beechers' screen moves and the corporate kit detaches, Dubbeldam's wrapper is continuous and fixed — reconfiguration happens at the crease, in place. See crease, interactive-architecture.
• Time travel (Massey 2018) — the exhibition-space ancestors: two flexible systems serving the same room. Paintings from Haiti (1951) hung on screens Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry designed "on the unit system so that they can be used singly in twos or to form groups of alcoves" — double-sided, blue-fabric-covered, individually lit, on "solid laminated legs," moved into storage when the program demanded (for Parallel of Life and Art, 1953, they were "moved… out" to clear the view). an Exhibit (1957) then took flexibility to its limit: standard Perspex sheets (1.2 × 0.6 m) "hung at varying heights using nylon thread in a loose grid formation of 16 inches," "not precious about how the sheets should be arranged," "ordered differently for the Newcastle and London shows" — "reinstalled in an endless distribution of divisions and boundaries to create a myriad of mazes." Where the Beechers' screen divides for dwelling, the exhibition system re-divides for showing: flexibility as curatorial apparatus, reconfigured show by show (see populable-art-work, ephemeral-interior).
• From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — the textile ancestor: flexibility achieved through cloth rather than through moving parts. The 1900 Paris room's oversized appliqué ornaments — "the traditional appliqué embroidery technique of embellishing furniture coverings, cushions, upholstery, and drapery… was extended to cover the walls as well" (pp. 157–158) — revealed a growing interest in "textiles and traditional handwork not only as decorative objects to be incorporated into designed rooms, but as models for the organic, flexible dressing of an interior space" (p. 158). Where the Beechers' screen re-divides rooms mechanically, the Viennese dressing re-dresses them sartorially: the boundary as garment, "a flexible, organic, fiber material" (p. 160; see interior-as-garment) — flexibility as drapery, the room's outfit changeable as a costume is.
• Inside-out and outside-in (Vanucci 2018) — the mid-century demand and its paradox: "In a mature phase of modernism in the 1960s, flexibility became a desirable architectural quality. The increasing complexity of the built environment in a rapidly changing society demanded more sophisticated responses than the form-function relationship. The need for schools, hospitals, and housing projects for the new capitalist (affluent) society offered an opportunity to test the resilience of modern ideas in their ability to adapt to increasingly complex design briefs." Flexibility's instrument was programming — "systematically collecting project-related data… analyzed and interpreted in the form of graphic representation and computational iterations" — and its outcome, via Hashim Sarkis, the paradox: "while programming sought to elucidate a scientific approach to functionalism, it paradoxically helped to uncover a higher degree of indeterminacy. In short, it helped unleash new formal possibilities beyond its suitability to function." Where the Beechers' and Schröder's flexibility is furniture-moved, the 1960s register is data-processed — and its legacy is not resolved flexibility but the indeterminacy from which the performative envelope's "reinvent[ing of] function" grows. See form-vs-program, performative-envelope.
• Social, Spatial and Temporal Factors (Lawrence 1987/2006) — the flexibility demand stated as the modernist audit: "although modernism brought aesthetic resolution to the kitchen and dining room, it failed to address a need for these rooms adapting to demographic shifts in family constitution and population" (editors, p. 184) — the flexible interior's brief named negatively, as the adaptation the resolved modern form missed; the dwelling's condition stated as the concept's ground: houses "ordered by long-standing habits in building and living patterns" that "remain responsive to social influences in ways that have the potential to remake and reform them outside of a static framework of living standards" (p. 184). Where Croft's audit tests flexibility's realized instance (schroder-house), Lawrence's frames the demand the concept answers: rooms whose occupants — family constitutions, populations — change around them. See kitchen, dining-room, habit, static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
• The Apartment (Perec 1974/2006) — the concept's ironic audit, the negative case: the modern open plan as flexibility that changes nothing. Perec's nycthemeral timetable "would not be modified in any practical way if, instead of having, as here, spaces separated by partitions delimiting a bedroom, a sitting-room, a dining-room, a kitchen, etc., we envisaged, as is often done these days, a purportedly single, pseudo-modular space (living-room, sitting-room, etc.). We would then have, not a kitchen but a cooking-area, not a bedroom but a sleeping-area, not a dining-room but an eating-area" (p. 262). The pseudo-modular space is the partitions removed and the program untouched — flexibility as renaming. The concept's standing question (flexibility "about control, not freedom," Croft) gains its sharpest form: the open plan is control's completion, not its relaxation — the day's sequence runs the same in one room or six (nycthemeral). See dining-room, kitchen, machine-for-living.
• The Construction of a Suburb (Røe 2015) — the mass-housing register, and the concept's social-engineering audit: the flexible dwelling as 1970s planning discourse's material form — the inhabitants' handbook giving "guidelines for how the dwellings could be altered (refurnishing, moving of both interior and exterior walls, etc.)" (p. 543); the modular cubes valued by inhabitants ("You may build 9 m² at a time… You may build three or four of these without problems. It is possible to have a bathroom in each storey, because you may grow old and need to stay at one floor," p. 545); the resulting heterogeneity ("there are no two houses that are the same," p. 546); and the programme's demographic scripting — dwellings to change "when children grew into teenagers, or when the children left home… to develop a 'natural' mix of generations," interpretable "as an act of social engineering, and a form of the much criticized architectural determinism" (p. 543). The verdict formula: "The houses were flexible but people were told how to be flexible, in a paternalistic fashion, to maintain the overall modernist architectural style and the ambience of the project" (p. 544). Where Croft's audit is room-scale (the Schröder partitions), Røe's is estate-scale: flexibility as welfare-state policy, at once genuinely used and socially scripted. See taet-lav, user-participation, architectural-determinism.
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the production-housing register, the concept's market imperative and its life-cycle form: "Houses designed for the mass market need to provide flexibility" — observed in occupied houses "invariably they've done so in many different ways" (p. 152); the flex-space examples across the household life-cycle (the nursery that becomes "a private sitting room, separate bedroom, or office"; the first-floor office that "may become a mother-in-law suite"; the first-floor master suite for occupants "less enamored with climbing stairs," pp. 152–153); the half-rooms as flexibility's fine grain (lofts, alcoves, window seats, "secret rooms" — semiprivate spaces "still connected" to household life, pp. 151–152); the plan tested by furniture ("furnish the rooms on paper," p. 147); universal design's adaptability — "fixtures… used by owners that want to 'age in place'" with clearances, grab-bar provisioning, adaptable rooms (p. 149); and the open-plan caveat — closable partitions against whole-house noise (p. 143). Where Røe's case audited flexibility as scripting, Wentling's is flexibility as market survival: plans must "adapt to and accommodate diverse types of households" and the household's own life cycle (see user-participation, domestic-interior, dwelling).
• source-notes/hadjiyanni-2018-interiors-as-global-constructs
• source-notes/lupton-miller-2006-streamlining

Open Questions

• The Beechers' screen makes "two apartments… of any desired size within the limits of the large room" — is flexibility always flexibility within an envelope, and does the strategy therefore presuppose the generosity of the room it subdivides? What happens to flexibility where the base plan is mean?
• The ergonomic datum is striking: "a child can move the whole easily." Is occupant-operated transformation the genuine egalitarianism of the flexible interior — or does flexibility transfer the labor of architecture from builder to inhabitant (cf. the Segal system's self-build)?
• The screen is simultaneously partition, wardrobe and shelving — does the flexible interior dissolve the category of wall into that of furniture, and if so, what discipline owns it (architecture, interior design, industrial design)?
• Is there a genealogy from the hand-moved screen (1869) to the actuated surface (2018) — or does motorization change the concept, replacing the occupant's embodied decision with the system's sensing? See static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
• Manack's kit of parts adds a third stage to the genealogy — the corporate layer that operates "with an impermanence and literal detachment from the architectural envelope." The Beechers' screen converts rooms for their occupants; the corporate kit converts floors for their tenants. Is flexibility's occupant (the child who "can move the whole easily") ultimately a tenant's facilities manager — and does the kit of parts' "literal detachment" make the flexible interior a lease-term phenomenon rather than a design strategy?
• Croft's audit adds the social constraint the genealogy lacked: the Schröder partitions "do not make sense unless all are closed or all open." Is the flexible interior's flexibility ever per-occupant — or does reconfigurability always encode a rhythm (the all-open day, the all-closed night) that the designer, not the occupant, sets? And if the client for whom the most famous flexible interior was designed "ultimately… craved greater privacy," is flexibility something occupants can only want before they have lived it? See schroder-house, privacy.