Interior Urbanism

Definition

Interior urbanism names the production of urban space — streets, piazzas, galleries, districts — inside buildings: the city's public forms internalized as architectural interior. The concept enters the wiki through Marinic's chapter on the Portman originals, which describes the atrium hotels as "generators of interior urbanism and forums for the guilty pleasures of consumerism," complexes that "attempted to renew American cities by means of interior urbanity." Its founding gesture is transposition: "Building exteriors were turned outside-in to create autonomous internal plazas, encapsulated landscapes, and hermetic commercial zones" — and its vocabulary is explicitly urban: "Lobbies were envisioned as piazzas and corridors were conceived as streets; their generous scale gave the complex a sense of spaciousness, well-being, and grand interior urbanism."

The concept's genealogy runs through the nineteenth-century arcade, where "the tectonic qualities and material conditions of commercial arcades blurred city streets into building interiors" — "Analogous to Lefebvre's consumption-oriented theory, arcades and Portman atria extended commercial space into large urban plots to establish new interior streets for storefronts and cafés." Its ambivalence is constitutive: interior urbanism reproduces the city's publicness (the atrium "feel both public and urban") while privatizing it — "As both architect and developer, Portman's hotel-retail-commercial complexes transformed downtowns into increasingly isolated, transactional, and privatized forms of urbanism." It is simultaneously the substitute for a failing public realm ("a substitute form of downtown urbanism that ignored the realities of civil unrest, disinvestment, and abandonment") and the instrument of urban withdrawal ("This networked world of skywalks, tunnels, arcades, and atria was designed to be weatherproof, convenient, and safer than downtown itself").

A second, atmospheric register — Solomon's redefinition. Jonathan D. Solomon's Hong Kong chapter (2018) redefines the concept from within its most extreme case: "Interior urbanism is not an urbanism of the indoors, but an urbanism in which indoors and outdoors no longer codify meaningful political or cultural distinctions in the city. In an interior urbanism, all space has equal potential to become part of a public or private sphere based on its occupation." Where the Portman register codes interior urbanism architectonically (the atrium as internalized plaza), the Hong Kong register codes it atmospherically: "The hierarchies that determine how space is occupied are not based on solids and voids (interiors as spaces hollowed out of objects or buildings as objects placed on a void) but rather by manipulation of atmosphere. The public and private spheres are defined by public and private 'spheres, or atmospheres" (public-sphere, atmospheric-politics). Hong Kong supplies the condition: "an urbanism that lacks any of the figure-ground relationships that traditionally bring order to public space… there is no axis, edge, or center" (figure-ground); "The pedestrian networks stretching for kilometers across Hong Kong create an urbanism of continuous 'interiority' that does not always correlate to the 'indoors'" — with the outdoors itself manufactured ("pungent with smells, heavy with particulate matter, buffered by light and noise, and hemmed in by walls, the 'outdoors' is no less a manufactured environment than the indoors. The city – indoors and out – is a vast and continuous interior"). The register's verdict on the concept's politics cuts both ways: "interior urbanism can make public life easier to snuff out, but at the same time allows it to waft. Such an urbanism is at once more rich and more treacherous; more powerful and more volatile" — the modernist continuous interior promised to be "politically liberating and economically equalizing," but "In Hong Kong, these effects are difficult to find. The territory has the largest wealth inequality in the world and is dominated politically by Beijing." And its terminus is quotidian mutability: "Streets become hair salons or workshops, shopping malls host impromptu art classes or musical performances, walkways become restaurants or mahjong parlors. This is all possible because an interior urbanism allows a mutability of hierarchy on a changing wind." Where Marinic's register audits interior urbanism's erasure (the Portman originals renovated into ordinariness), Solomon's audits its volatility — the interior urbanism as the city's open political threshold. See public-sphere, atmospheric-politics, privatised-public-space.

Key Thinkers

• John Portman — the concept's builder: the city-within-a-city as "a district or neighborhood inside the Peachtree Center city-within-a-city"; "a substantial piece of urbanism" (no page — see log).
• Gregory Marinic — the concept's historian-critic: the arcades-to-atrium genealogy and the audit of interior urbanism's erosion ("the uniqueness of its interior urbanity has been largely erased").
• Jonathan D. Solomon — the concept's redefiner: interior urbanism "not an urbanism of the indoors" but an urbanism where indoors and outdoors "no longer codify meaningful political or cultural distinctions"; hierarchies set "by manipulation of atmosphere"; Hong Kong's continuous pedestrian interiors as the concept's strongest case; the volatility thesis ("more rich and more treacherous; more powerful and more volatile").
• Henri Lefebvre — the theoretical frame the chapter invokes: "Analogous to Lefebvre's consumption-oriented theory, arcades and Portman atria extended commercial space into large urban plots to establish new interior streets."
• Walter Benjamin — the arcade as the concept's nineteenth-century ancestor (see arcades).

Related Concepts

• atrium-hotel — the concept's exemplary built type.
• arcades — the concept's nineteenth-century ancestor: the blurred street/interior threshold.
• privatised-public-space — the political condition of interior urbanism: public space's interiorization under private control ("interior circulation spaces feel like a three-dimensional GM advertisement").
• hermetic-seal — the enclosure that makes interior urbanism autonomous: "hermetic commercial zones," "hermetically enclosed and secure interior spaces."
• terrain-vague — the interior urbanism's residual capacity: the podium's "voluminous, unarticulated, and unusable spaces," "a maze of terrains vagues."
• interiority — the interior condition urbanism imports at city scale: the atrium as interior without "a definable exteriority."
• consumerism — the interior urbanism's engine: "temples of consumerism"; Lefebvre's space as commodity.
• iconic-architecture — interior urbanism's monumental scale ("grand interior urbanism") and its civic claim.
• urbanism — the discipline interior urbanism operates within and against.
• Metropolitan Hybrids — the reformulation (Luna): "This would change the notion of a 'city within a city' to a 'system within a city'" — interior-urbanism's container logic (the microcosm) dispersed into programmable networks across existing fabric.
• Urban Systems — the network alternative to the internalized city: hybridized facilities (visitor-center-hotels, the city-as-museum) as "a perceptible typology of organization and city navigation."
• Public Sphere — Solomon's rewrite of the sphere the concept displaces: "politics are practiced in the public 'sphere" in Hong Kong because the city lacks traditional spaces of state power; the public sphere persisting "in small-scale, ad hoc actions, appropriations, and occupations of private, public, and semi-public infrastructure."
• Atmospheric Politics — the concept's mechanism in Solomon's register: "the clouds of teargas in Admiralty and the perfumed air of the adjacent Pacific Place shopping mall are both tools for reinforcing the hierarchies of Hong Kong's political establishment."
• Figure-Ground — the order the concept (in its Hong Kong form) presupposes the absence of: "there is no axis, edge, or center. Even the ground itself is elusive."
• Everyday Architecture — the concept's quotidian terminus: "Streets become hair salons or workshops, shopping malls host impromptu art classes or musical performances, walkways become restaurants or mahjong parlors."
• Practiced Place — the occupation mechanism: "In a city in which formal urban spaces do not embody narratives, their occupation tends to do so instead" (Solomon).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — the founding source: the interior-exterior provenance section (arcades as forerunners), the city-within-a-city analysis of Peachtree Center, the piazza/street vocabulary of RenCen's podium, the privatization thesis, and the erosion audit ("Reorienting an interior-urban space into an ordinary interior space, the civic stature of the Portman original has been significantly diminished").

• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the corporate enclave's interiorized publicness: Broadgate's plazas and concourses as "spaces at once public and private" — the British parallel to the Portman condition (complementary source; see privatised-public-space).

• Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — the reuse of interiorized retail types (dead malls, post-retail space) as interior architecture's contemporary urban domain (complementary source; see post-retail-space).

• Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity (Luna 2018) — the concept's polycentric counter-program: metropolitan architecture's second definition ("a building that contains a city. The architectural shell acts as a setting, and programming takes a priority role") is the city-within-a-city Luna inherits — Las Vegas hotels where visitors shop, dine, gamble, and gallery-go "all while remaining inside the building" — but the chapter's metropolitan hybrid redirects it: "Polycentrality would also require conceptualization of metropolitan hybrids as urban systems. This would change the notion of a 'city within a city' to a 'system within a city'" — Boston's hybridized visitor-center-hotels, Venice's palaces-as-museum. Where Marinic's interior urbanism is the atrium's privatized interiorization of the city, Luna's is its distribution: the same urban program (accommodation, information, exhibition) networked across existing buildings "that not only benefit tourists but residents as well, rebranding the city by providing a perceptible typology of organization and city navigation." See metropolitan-hybrids, urban-systems, atrium-hotel.

• Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the concept's atmospheric redefinition (Ch. 48): "Interior urbanism is not an urbanism of the indoors, but an urbanism in which indoors and outdoors no longer codify meaningful political or cultural distinctions in the city"; occupation rather than solids-and-voids as the allocator of public/private; Hong Kong's no-ground, continuous-interior condition (Figure 48.2's solid-figure massing); the POPS occupations (HSBC atrium, Umbrella Movement) as the concept's political cases; the volatility verdict ("easier to snuff out… allows it to waft"). The concept's strongest case and its redefinition — the Portman register's privatized interiorization answered by a register in which the interior urbanism is the city's open political medium. See public-sphere, atmospheric-politics, figure-ground, privatised-public-space.

• Altered (e)states (Erdman 2018) — the practice register — the interiorized city as the practice's ground, and the concept's periodization: Hong Kong "more emblematic of a city of the twenty-first century (built out, episodic, layered, and interiorized) than it is of a late-twentieth-century city that is open, smooth, continuous, and free to grow outward"; its population growth completed 1931–1961, making it "among the most mature modern cities in China" — the "topological city" with its "highly continuous, centrifugal qualities… a rare and dying breed." The register's economics: development/financing practices that spread risk "by involving more than one designer, style, and brand" produce "environments that are intentionally and architecturally unresolved" (Bel-Air On The Peak's faux-neo-baroque-to-Foster phases; tenders broken up among Gehry, Kuma, Marino); its GFA political economy ("the monetization of floor plate areas over design… an intensively Fordist production of housing"). Its design answer is alteration — "cities will have to consider how to adapt and alter their existing structures to grow inward, to reconfigure their interior, and to design for the discontinuities and temporal layering of their urbanity" — demonstrated on the interventionist Hong Kong pair (Tod Williams/Billie Tsien's Asia Society Center; Herzog & de Meuron's Police Central Headquarters). Where Solomon (ch. 48) reads the same city politically, Erdman reads it operationally: what a practice does inside the interiorized metropolis. See interiority, adaptive-reuse.

• source-notes/marinic-2018-why-this-why-now

• source-notes/vanucci-2018-inside-out-outside-in

Open Questions

• Is interior urbanism the city's continuation or its subtraction? The chapter holds both: the complexes "attempted to renew American cities by means of interior urbanity" while "transform[ing] downtowns into increasingly isolated, transactional, and privatized forms of urbanism" — can the interiorized city ever be civic, or is civic gravitas always exteriority?
• The chapter's equation "Lobbies were envisioned as piazzas and corridors were conceived as streets" is metaphorical urbanism: does interior urbanism possess actual urban social process ("Building interiors… allow social processes to be manifested, observed, and reconfigured"), or its image?
• Lefebvre's differential space is "mobilized by resistant forces existing within absolute space" — can a privately owned interior urbanism host differential space, or does privatization confine the interior to abstract space (consumption) and pseudo-absolute space (staged sociability)?
• How does interior urbanism scale from the atrium podium to the contemporary entertainment hyperspaces the chapter names as its heirs (Las Vegas, Dubai, Abu Dhabi) — and does the type's dispersion confirm or exhaust the concept?
• The concept names a positive program ("interior urbanity" as urban renewal) and a critique (privatization, hermeticism). Is the wiki's privatised-public-space the same concept seen politically — and should interior urbanism be reclaimed as the interior disciplines' urban theory?
• Solomon's two registers of the concept (Portman's interiorized privatization vs Hong Kong's atmospheric volatility) share a name — do they share a mechanism? The atrium allocates occupation by lease and management; Hong Kong's network allocates by atmosphere. Is "manipulation of atmosphere" a third ownership form, and can it be owned at all?
• The Hong Kong register terminates in quotidian mutability ("streets become hair salons or workshops") — is that mutability the concept's designed potential (something a practice could design for) or its emergent excess (only exploitable tactically after the fact)?
• The modernist continuous interior was "politically liberating and economically equalizing" in utopia and "difficult to find" in Hong Kong — is the failure the program's or the city's? What would a continuous interior that kept the promise look like?