Historiography of the Interior

Definition

The historiography of the interior names the body of history-writing through which the interior — and, later, interior architecture — was given a past, and therefore a disciplinary identity. Hollis distinguishes its models. The survey of styles: Pile's History of Interior Design, "a sort of Pevsner or Bannister Fletcher for interior design," a chronological catalogue of masterpieces in terms of "styles" that presupposes what Scott calls, via Summerson's Hampton Court example, an "ersatz purity of vision" — the requirement "to see buildings as discrete entities and complete unto themselves even when… the whole is a composite affair." The genealogy of the concept: Sparke's and Rice's histories, which limit themselves to the period in which the interior was conceptualized (the nineteenth century), because the OED record shows "interior" only came to mean "the inside of a building or room" from the early nineteenth century. Against the traditional model, Rice objects that "the traditional history… does not subject its conceptual and organizational structures to historical analysis" — it treats the interior and its "inhabiting subject" as stable categories and its representations as transparent visual evidence.

Two structural problems haunt the field. Evidence: interiors "do not exist in isolation" (Pile), are "constantly being modified as life goes on within them" (Sparke), and are known chiefly through photographs and representations that construct what they claim merely to record — "Visual representations of interiors are not simply transparent to spatial referents" (Rice). Narrative: a history of alteration cannot be sequenced as styles without falsifying composite, multi-authored buildings (Hampton Court would have to appear twice, or be traced case-by-case, losing generality). Hollis's resolution is reflexive: history is "not merely the record of things past, but, like interior architecture itself, a (re)construction of preexisting structures"; the discipline's history should perhaps be, like its objects, "discontinuous, multiple, layered, and collaborative taking place across generations" — judged, with Ricoeur, against the eikon problem: the image of the past that is both "the presence of an absent thing" and "a thing in its own right."

Rice's own essay (2004/2006) — the primary text behind the position Hollis reports — names the field's essentialist wing and its alternative. The named targets: Praz's Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, launched from "an observation of the timeless qualities of 'human nature'" and modelled as "the published equivalent of… a retrospective exhibition of furnished rooms in a chronological sequence"; Thornton's Authentic Décor, cued by Macaulay's wish for the "humble topographer" who would record "how the parlours and bedchambers of our ancestors looked" — the interior's history as supplement to grand narrative; and Gere's album of interior watercolours, "a history of the decoration of the nineteenth-century interior evidenced through its representation" that nonetheless "hides an essentialist view." The shared fault: a "post-nineteenth-century way of seeing" that "authorises a general historical retrospection which is itself not appreciated within an historical context." The alternative is Foucault's effective history: "the emergence of the interior, in its doubleness, can be cast as an event in the schema of effective history" — and the verdict on the tradition: essentialised histories of the interior, privacy and domesticity "have produced a sleep of historical consciousness." See effective-history, bourgeois-interior, doubleness, interior-view.

Key Thinkers

• Edward Hollis — the field's historiographer: shows how each conception of interior architecture shaped its evidence and narrative, and mirrors history-writing with alteration.
• John Summerson — the style-survey tradition whose Hampton Court double-entry becomes Scott's exhibit against "ersatz purity of vision."
• Anne Massey — the field's temporal re-methoder: against the frozen architectural image and the "before and after" narrative, she reads one interior through a plurality of installation photographs, so that interior history is written from the room's use outward — "beyond styles, technical innovations, and authorial tropes" (2018).
• Charles Rice — the field's methodologist: the essentialist tradition named and diagnosed (Praz's timeless human nature, Thornton's Macaulaian supplement, Gere's evidence-through-representation — the "post-nineteenth-century way of seeing" they share), the interior's emergence cast as an effective-history event, and the verdict that essentialised histories "have produced a sleep of historical consciousness" (2004/2006). See effective-history.
• (Discussed in the sources, not yet paged — see log: Penny Sparke, boundary-war history of the modern interior; John Pile, the survey primer; Fred Scott, narrative and authorship problems of alteration's history; Mario Praz, Peter Thornton, Charlotte Gere — the essentialist interior histories Rice critiques.)

Related Concepts

• History — the general concept this historiography instantiates; Gadamer's effective history and Benjamin's dialectical image are the wiki's wider frame for the non-transparent past.
• Representation — the evidence problem: interiors are constructed in representation "as much as practices of decoration and furnishing construct interiors spatially."
• Architectural Photography — the photograph as the "transparent evidence" whose transparency Rice denies.
• Authorship — the narrative problem: alteration is "collective, across generations," so style-surveys falsify by attributing composite buildings to single visions.
• The Decorative — the earlier style-manual historiography (Praz, Gere, Thornton, via Taylor & Preston) that "perpetuate[d] style-manual documentation" and helped relegate decoration.
• Interior Architecture — the discipline whose identity these histories constructed.
• Advice Literature — the archive Ferry's method elevates: the decoration handbook as "both narrative discourse and historical documentation on design and taste" — the genre that gives the interior's history its densest vernacular evidence, with reader-figures and prescriptions as constructed rather than transparent sources.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Historical Tradition (Wharton & Codman 1898/2006) — the field's earliest wiki-source act of interior historiography, and the discipline's first critique of its own historicism: the "survivals" thesis reading the modern interior as a stratigraphy of "earlier social conditions" whose features are "preserved in obedience to that instinct that makes people cling to so many customs the meaning of which is lost" (p. 387 — the room as the record of past social conditions); the "archaeologizing spirit" diagnosed as the era's characteristic historicist error ("a thing must be beautiful because it is old and appropriate because it is beautiful," p. 387); and the past's legitimate transmission located in proportional law rather than ornament ("the rules of proportion which the artistic experience of centuries has established as the best," p. 389) — a distinction (transmitted laws vs. misused survivals) that anticipates by more than a century Rice's critique of essentialist interior history. The chapter's title names the discipline's object: the interior's "historical tradition" is the thing both invoked (proportion's inheritance) and condemned (the survivals) — see survivals, archaeologizing-spirit, the-double-test.
• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the page's primary historiographic source: the OED etymology (the interior's domestic sense born 1829 as theatrical stock scenery; the OED definition doubling room and its picture "esp. in reference to the artistic effect"); the interior's emergence "with conceptual specificity in the context of bourgeois domesticity"; the interior-view genre dated (Gere), its life-cycle, and its familial-to-public document shift; the essentialist tradition diagnosed in Praz ("perhaps even more than painting or sculpture… furniture reveals the spirit of the age"), Thornton (via Macaulay's humble topographer) and Gere (the album that "hides an essentialist view"); "What has been tacitly recognised as a particular historical emergence has been used to authorise a transhistorical and essentialised view of the domestic interior"; and Foucault's effective history as the alternative — "the emergence of the interior, in its doubleness, can be cast as an event in the schema of effective history," against histories that "have produced a sleep of historical consciousness." See effective-history, bourgeois-interior, doubleness, interior-view, the-collector, de-realisation.
• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — the two conceptions and their problems; Rice's critique of traditional history; the etymological time-boundedness of "interior"; the herstories parallel; Ricoeur's eikon.
• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — the style-manual historiography of interior decoration (Praz, Gere, Thornton) as the tradition against which interior design's theory defines itself (complementary source).
• Quadrature (La Coe 2018) — a live case of the field's anachronism problem: the chapter's title retroactively names Andrea Pozzo's 1680s quadrature "interior architecture," absorbing the Baroque into the discipline's prehistory exactly as Pile's survey absorbed baroque libraries — and, on Hollis's own terms, legitimately, since a usable history must deal with "structures and practices that reach back well beyond the birth of 'interior architecture' as it is currently conceived." See quadrature.
• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the decorative-convention history as a model of interior-relevant historiography: "a partial history of the architectural palette that arises from the privileging of natural over applied finishes," told through a single convention (the wall of books) appearing across high-style and advice-literature documents alike (p. 56); the manual-of-style historiography — The International Style as "a startlingly successful manual of style, similar in approach to the numerous home and interior design manuals that preceded it" (p. 57) — putting the style manual (the genre Taylor & Preston charge with suppression) to critical work; and the explicit method claim that color conventions "require narrative forms for their exploration" (p. 61). See wall-of-books, the-decorative.
• 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the feminist-recovery model of interior historiography: Ferry "champions advice literature as both narrative discourse and historical documentation on design and taste" (editors, p. 110) — the handbook treated as a narrative (imitations traced, reader-figures inverted, a dominant discourse and "the muted discourse" between the lines) and as documentation (of professionalization, gender orders, the 'Art at Home' series' editorial apparatus, the Married Women's Property legislation context). The recovery itself is the model's point: the Garretts as "England's first female interior decorators" recovered from a genre the style-manual historiography reduced to prescriptions — Hollis's "herstories" parallel made operative. The source also documents the historiography's blind spots from within: Ferry's excerpt covers only pp. 26–29 of her 2003 article, the training-and-practice record (pp. 15–25) unexcerpted. See advice-literature, mutedness, house-decorator.
• Time travel (Massey 2018) — the temporal-reconstructive model, demonstrated: interior-architecture's writing diagnosed as trapped in architecture's frozen conventions — the "freshly constructed, shiny new entity" image, the linear "before and after," the prestige-driven drift toward "an architectural approach" — and re-methoded through a plurality of befores and afters: the ICA's Dover Street gallery read across sixteen years of installation photographs, oral testimony, and catalogues, until the room's social and political context (imperial London, rationing, the avant-garde's turnover) becomes legible "beyond styles, technical innovations, and authorial tropes." The model's evidence-practice answers Rice's transparency problem openly: images are "selected to evoke a certain atmosphere" — construction admitted, not disavowed — and the field's challenge is stated at its scope: exhibition studies "does not take the spatial culture of the exhibition space sufficiently into account" (see time-travel, interior-architecture).
• From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — the fashion-press archive as the interior's historical evidence: Houze's method reads design history through the popular magazines the style-surveys ignore — Das Interieur's first-issue manifesto, Wiener Kunst im Hause's well-furnished-home model, Wiener Mode's back-cover room designs — and the exhibition record (the 1900 Paris room) read through critics' reports (Mourey, Hevesi). Her central historiographic claim dissolves the high/low hierarchy the surveys presuppose: the unattributed popular designs in Wiener Mode "cannot simply be understood as the last step in the decline of artistic idea to popular culture," because "the popular fashion magazine as a vehicle for perpetuating both commerce and culture already was well in place by the time the Secessionists began to market their new designs" (p. 160) — the archive's "low" end is constitutive of the "high" end, not its decline. The chapter is also a demonstration of the Ferry/Massey lesson (see advice-literature): the interior's history must be written from the media through which interiors were actually marketed and inhabited — journals, showrooms, fashion plates — rather than from the discipline's own monuments.
• Hearts and minds and dishwashers (Larson 2018) — the disciplinary-label register: the "emerging discipline" trope refuted from the archive. "Interior architecture is often touted as an emerging discipline, but in a sense it has been at the forefront of scholarly debates throughout at least the twentieth century. In the early decades of the Cold War, interiorities became the best-used and most often deployed tool for both explaining and waging the Cold War through consumerism and applied economics. Interior architecture, before being recognized as a discrete scholarship, was responsible for the grunt work of winning the hearts and minds of the people in a battle of global politics that affected much of the life we live today." The chapter's historiographic move parallels Hollis's long-run history and La Coe's anachronism (both expand the discipline's past), but with a different edge: it expands the discipline's prehistory into statecraft — the Cold War's exhibition, civil-defense, and kitchen-debate careers kitchen-debate — and charges the discipline with amnesia in the present ("a so-called emerging discipline that has been down this road before"). The register also documents the field's constitutive archive problem in miniature: the kitchen debate itself "is taught in history courses, written about by scholars," yet "no comprehensive transcription exists" — the interior's biggest historiographic object is one whose sources are incomplete by design. See interior-architecture, hearts-and-minds, cold-war.
• Why this, why now? The case for interior architecture (Marinic 2018) — the nomenclature register, and the historiography's programmatic bookend: "Interior architecture represents not simply a shift in nomenclature, but a unique approach and critique of the historically iconoclastic, purist, and paradigm-oriented tendencies of architecture, while simultaneously challenging the assumptions and underinvestigated boundaries of interior design" — the discipline's name itself carrying a historiographic claim (a critique of architecture's historical tendencies, not a relabeling). The closing chapter also converts the Reader's fifty chapters into a historiographic object: "When considered as a whole, the work contained in this book forecasts the future of interior architecture as a heterogeneous ecology of distinct attitudes and expertise" — the volume as the archive in which the discipline's identity is (being) constructed, Hollis's "exists as much in its own histories as in built artefacts" enacted by the anthology that closes it. See identity-of-the-interior, interior-architecture.
• source-notes/deyong-2018-history-style-modern-interior
• source-notes/schneiderman-2018-inside-the-prefab-house
• source-notes/taylor-2006-a-roam-of-ones-own

Open Questions

• Hollis asks whether the history of interior architecture should itself be "discontinuous, multiple, layered, and collaborative" — is such a form writable, or does every history re-impose the "ersatz purity of vision" it critiques?
• Is the instability of the interior (spatial, temporal, representational) a source of the interior's historical invisibility — the reason it lacks a historiography comparable to architecture's — or the very thing its historiography should celebrate?
• Can Rice's genealogy of the concept and Hollis's long-run history of alteration be combined — a history of the practices that only later acquired the concept "interior architecture"?
• Rice's primary text names the essentialist wing and proposes effective history — but the excerpt elides the original's pages 277–278 and 281–282, where the constructive programme presumably develops. What does the full 2004 article (and the 2007 book) add — and does the "reversal of a relationship of forces" have a specified interior-design content?
• Praz's retrospective-exhibition model and Gere's albums become, on Rice's own terms, evidence of the post-nineteenth-century way of seeing. Does that reclassification (the historiography itself as source material) resolve the evidence problem or merely relocate it — can the interior's history be written from the histories of the interior?
• Does the "herstories" analogy transfer method as well as problem — do oral history, material culture, and reconstruction techniques developed by feminist historians have applications to interiors?