Skyscraper Interior

Definition

The skyscraper interior names the historical scene where the modern interior separated from architecture — in Marc Manack's account, the building type through which "the design of interiors comes into being" as an established profession. The mechanism is economic-typological: the tower's "novel scale (at the time) and repetitive pro forma, worked together to seduce architects into a simultaneously unbalanced attention to the composition and appearance of exterior vertical surface and collective disinterest in the interior space beyond the ground floor lobby. Most of the interior volume of skyscrapers was given over to the interior designer." The interior profession was thus born from an architectural vacuum at scale.

The concept's paradox: "the skyscraper both challenged and reinforced the discipline's nascent identity." The challenge — modern filigree construction (steel frame and curtain wall) "progressively dissolved the building envelope through the transparent material," so "the possibility of distinction for the interior architecture was equally diminished," the interior losing its perceptual seam from the exterior. The reinforcement — the tower's sectional dynamic counteracted the surface's dissolution: "The repetition of uniform, undifferentiated, horizontal floors connected by elevators at once prevents spatial experiences of vertical continuity between floors and promotes horizontal expansion of space. This effectively turns each floor into an isolated distinct world in relation to the flattened "wallpaper" of the surrounding urban panorama on its perimeter vertical surface." Verticality is lived as stacked horizontals; the building's single exterior design houses a stack of unrelated interior worlds.

The technological instruments of separation are the corporate interior's kit of parts (kit-of-parts): "Suspended ceilings, raised floors, demountable partitions, and flexible, reconfigurable office furniture systems… all operate with an impermanence and literal detachment from the architectural envelope within which they are housed. These elements become the means for the interior to assert its autonomy." The result is a doubled authorship condition: "While the architecture of the building may have but one static design by a single author, the skyscraper initiated the evolution of multiple, episodic interior architectures by multiple authors" — and a moment where "the modern interior is completely indifferent to, and largely unaffected by, the architecture it is housed within, free to fabricate its own identity and position of interiority."

Key Thinkers

• Marc Manack — the concept's theorist: the skyscraper as interior architecture's birth scene and paradox (envelope dissolved, section emancipated); the kit of parts as the interior's technological decoupling; "multiple, episodic interior architectures by multiple authors."
• Carol Willis — Form Follows Finance (1995), the wiki's skyscraper-economics source: the tower's "repetitive pro forma" has its financial-history counterpart in her account of speculative floorplates and skylines; not yet cross-linked at the interior level (see source-notes/willis-1995-form-follows-finance).

Related Concepts

• Interior Design — the profession born here: the interior designer as the recipient of "most of the interior volume of skyscrapers."
• Interior Architecture — the discipline whose "nascent identity" the skyscraper "both challenged and reinforced."
• Fabrication — what the decoupled interior became free to do: "free to fabricate its own identity and position of interiority."
• Flexible Interior — the kit of parts' demountable partitions as the corporate descendant of the movable screen (Beecher's 1869 rolling screen): the boundary as reconfigurable furnishing, now at office scale.
• Authorship — the doubled authorship condition: one static architectural author above, "multiple, episodic interior architectures by multiple authors" below.
• Boundaries — the dissolved envelope: the curtain wall as a boundary that no longer separates, displacing the interior's distinctness from surface to section.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the "wallpaper" panorama: the tower's perimeter surface flattened into image, while each floor remains "an isolated distinct world."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fabricating interiority (Manack 2018) — the source of the concept: the skyscraper as the interior profession's birthplace; the paradox (curtain-wall dissolution vs sectional emancipation); the kit of parts; the multiple-authorship condition; the "wallpaper" panorama.
• Form Follows Finance (Willis 1995) — the financial logic of the repetitive floor ("form follows finance") that underlies the "repetitive pro forma" Manack names as the tower's seduction mechanism (complementary source).
• Inside the prefab house (Schneiderman 2018) — the corporate kit's prehistory: the tower's demountable kit has a domestic-industrial prehistory in the kit house — Sears's optional early-gypsum interior lining that "reduced construction time of the kit-based house," and the Lustron House's porcelain-enameled steel interior whose modular units were "manufactured as complete units and plugged into the house at the building site." The corporate kit of parts (kit-of-parts) is the tower-scale descendant of the manufactured interior element. See prefab-interior.
• Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity (Luna 2018) — the tower's reuse horizon and its un-designed limit case: "The skyscraper, being the quintessential metropolitan architectural typology, presents a great opportunity for exploring these microcosms in the field of adaptive reuse. The scale of these buildings makes them more prone to be adapted than dismantled, yet the appropriation of this typology becomes a challenge to break away from a commercial strategy." La Torre de David answers with the multiple-authorship condition taken to its extreme: the 45-story unfinished skyscraper "adapted in an ad hoc fashion, filled with markets, gyms, services, shops, and dwellings. The dwellings were constructed from leftover and found construction materials; each family personalized their own unit, creating a real sense of diversity in this vertical city" — Manack's "multiple, episodic interior architectures by multiple authors" realized without any designer, at metropolitan scale (see metropolitan-hybrids, housing).

Open Questions

• If the interior profession's autonomy was born of architects' "collective disinterest," is that autonomy structurally parasitic on neglect — and does the contemporary architect's re-occupation of the tall-building interior (workflow, amenity branding) re-subordinate the discipline precisely where it was emancipated?
• The kit of parts operates "with an impermanence and literal detachment from the architectural envelope": is the corporate interior then the first fully disposable interior — and does its impermanence anticipate the fit-out cycles of contemporary office churn (cf. flexible-interior, non-places)?
• Each floor is "an isolated distinct world" against a flattened "wallpaper" panorama: does the skyscraper interior produce a stack of private worlds behind a single public image — and is that the tower's own version of the interior/exterior split Deyong traces to modernism's founding?
• Manack's multiple-authorship claim ("multiple, episodic interior architectures by multiple authors") mirrors Scott's collective authorship of alteration: is the tall building the speculative office counterpart of the centuries-altered building — a composite work whose authors change with every tenancy?