Politicizing the Interior

Definition

The political conception of the interior: the claim that "the interior is comprised of both spatial and political experiences" (Teston 2018) — that interior architecture's human-experiential focus (the interior volume, activation, the everyday) is itself a political terrain, not a retreat from politics. The concept names both a gap and a program. The gap: "interior architectural theory, particularly as it pertains to the political, is a relatively underrepresented – yet growing – area of inquiry"; following Terry Meade, interior designers "often overlook critical discussions about the sociopolitical issues occurring in the built environment" because most interiors are private, "not a part of the commons" — "this inattention to the concerns of urban society is a cavity in everyday design practice." The program: appropriate political perspectives from urban design and anthropology — Augé's non-place, the Situationists' subversive methods, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — so that interior architecture can "stimulate new forms of community, political agency, and social consciousness."

Key Thinkers

• Liz Teston — the concept's author: the interior as "both spatial and political," the frontier appropriation program, and the human-rights grounding ("the responsibility to promote access to design as a basic human right").
• Marc Augé — the non-place as the interior's supermodern, transactional-political condition: "non-places take our collective identity and twist it into a heterotopic, transactional experience."
• Guy Debord — psychogeography as the model of a political method that "explores the everyday city from an experiential and personal standpoint" — political yet subversive of "the rationale of the city grid."
• Michel de Certeau — place (stasis, codified) vs anthropological space (experiential); the everyday-practice theorist whose distinction Augé's dialectic extends (see practiced-place).
• Terry Meade — "Interior Design, a Political Discipline" (2013): the prior charge that the discipline neglects the sociopolitical (not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• interior-architecture — the discipline whose theory the political conception joins (the Reader's ninth conception, after the dynamic one).
• right-to-design — the program's normative core: design access grounded in the UDHR's rights to housing, health, community, and the arts.
• non-places — the supermodern condition the political interior must analyze and humanize; Teston asks for "the phenomenology of the non-place."
• everyday-life — the political interior's field: "design is embedded in the everyday and has intrinsic value"; researching the commonplace "elevate[s]" it — everyday objects, underserved populations, modestly detailed buildings.
• interiority — the political register of innerness: non-places may "allow for experiences of psychological interiority"; identity in the smartphone reshapes the phenomenology of physical places.
• psychogeography — the subversive method transfer: a model "for subversion of conventional urban design" applicable to interior architecture.
• disciplinary-frontiers — the geographic presupposition: political theory crosses disciplines through thick, liminal frontiers, not hard edges.
• heterotopia — the transactional distortion: the non-place as heterotopic experience.
• memory — "the built environment is a part of our collective memory, whether canonical or mundane"; memory and cultural identity inextricably linked.
• commons — the interior's political blind spot: most interiors are private and not part of the commons, which is why designers feel "absolved from allegiance to meeting the collective demands of the public."
• power-and-space — the debate field the political interior joins: spatial ordering as political ordering.
• strategy-and-tactic — the micro-subversion lineage Teston invokes and half-mocks: "micro-subversive actions that drive away boredom."
• Tableau — the political interior's art-practice form: installation art as "a vehicle that facilitated exposing political or social issues" (Kienholz, Osorio) — the interior arranged to testify.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the founding source: the interior as "both spatial and political"; the disciplinary gap (fourteen percent of CIDA programs; Meade's charge); the appropriation program (Augé, de Certeau, Situationists); the UDHR grounding; four future trajectories (material culture vs sustainability, civil-rights parity, corporate design standards and non-place, pop/lowbrow design).

• Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — the tableau's political register: the North American tableau as "a vehicle that facilitated exposing political or social issues" — "the Vietnam War, racism, cultural displacements, and the different forms of violence present in American society" (Kienholz's Portable War Memorial: the "space of war" against "business as usual," "the perverse and perhaps indispensable side of American wars abroad"); Osorio's "social architecture" (paired by Jennifer A. González with Beuys's "social sculpture") staging "the conflicts that emerge within the Latin American diaspora in the United States – an array of bilingual and bicultural communities variously defined by race, ethnicity, prejudice, violence, and displacement"; and Badge of Honor's prison cell and son's room as the interior of incarceration's second sentence — "the eerie pride evident in some kids whose fathers are incarcerated, a 'badge' that ostensibly indicates the courage of those serving time." Where Teston's political interior is a disciplinary program, the tableau makes the interior itself the political instrument — the room arranged to testify. See tableau, narrative-space.

• Spatial Stories (de Certeau 1984/2006) — the primary text behind the page's place/space lineage: de Certeau's own definitions — place (lieu) as "the order… in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence," where "the law of the 'proper' rules," vs space (espace) as "intersections of mobile elements," "in short, a practiced place" (pp 79–80) — the distinction Teston transmits and Augé dialecticizes into place/non-place; and the political freight of the 'proper': stability, univocity, the tomb-like fixity of the ordered place against the operations of historical subjects. See practiced-place.

• Puzzle (Carley 2018) — the politicized-object register: Life challenges the architect/decorator and contents/container hierarchies "by politicizing objects: by acknowledging that interior environments are not neutral but highly inflected spaces that demonstrate the occupiers' relationship to the contemporary social and cultural milieu they inhabit through the objects they possess and consume" — the domestic interior's political reading carried by its object-list rather than by the public/private frame. See interior-as-biography, infra-ordinary.

• Hearts and minds and dishwashers (Larson 2018) — the historical proof of the concept's premise: states politicized the interior long before the discipline theorized it. The chapter documents the interior "used to set official civil defense policy" (the FCDA "militarize[d] the American home… under the guise of anti-war safety," civil-defense), deployed as "counter propaganda… emphasizing living standards" (propaganda, soft-power), and staged as the arena of systems competition in the kitchen debate — "interior architecture… was in fact the tool of choice in fighting for philosophical dominance in the Cold War." The register inverts Teston's disciplinary gap: where Meade's charge is that designers "overlook critical discussions about the sociopolitical issues occurring in the built environment," Larson shows the discipline's object so politically effective before its academic consolidation that "interiorities became the best-used and most often deployed tool for both explaining and waging the Cold War" — "the grunt work of familiarizing and swaying opinion" still continuing in the present's reuse/conservation campaigns. Where Teston argues the interior should be political, Larson documents that it always already was — the discipline's political unconscious made archive. See hearts-and-minds, kitchen-debate, interior-architecture, cold-war.

Open Questions

• Teston's trajectories are research programs, not results: which of the four (material culture vs sustainability; space-related civil-rights parity; corporate design standards and non-place; pop/lowbrow design) can the wiki's existing clusters already stage, and which would need new sources?
• Is the private interior really politically absolved (Meade's diagnosis of the discipline), or does the political conception finally give the wiki's domestic-interior and gendered-spatial analyses (Ardener's partition, the Beecher household government) their interior-theoretical name?
• Does the human-rights grounding coexist with the commodity-signalling account of everyday identity ("commodity consumption… emits a signal representing our chosen identity"), or does the right to design stand against consumption as the everyday's political form?
• Can the Situationist method survive the interior's scale — or does the dérive's presupposition of unplanned urban movement mark the limit of the appropriation program?
• Teston's political interior is argued as a disciplinary program to be adopted; Larson's archive shows states adopting the interior as political instrument without any such theory. Does the discipline's neglect of the political (Meade's "cavity") mean designers were unknowingly executing state strategy — and does Larson's history strengthen or complicate Teston's rights-based program (whose political interior is for the user's claims, not the state's persuasion)? See hearts-and-minds, right-to-design.