(Re)constructing Histories: A Brief Historiography of Interior Architecture

Author: Edward Hollis Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 1 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/hollis-2018-reconstructing-histories.md

Summary

Hollis critiques the founding literature of interior architecture — John Kurtich's Interior Architecture (1995), John Pile's A History of Interior Design (2000), Graeme Brooker & Sally Stone's Re-readings (2004), Charles Rice's The Emergence of the Interior (2007), Penny Sparke's The Modern Interior (2008), and Fred Scott's On Altering Architecture (2008) — asking how its histories were constructed, from what evidence, and by what narrative structures. His central argument is reflexive: history is not merely the record of things past but, like interior architecture itself, "a (re)construction of preexisting structures" — and the practice of altering existing buildings is itself a historical practice, "the reinterpretation of fragmentary pasts to give them utility in the present." The chapter traces the discipline's emergence from three stimuli (the volume of reuse practice exemplified by the Tate Modern and Reichstag Grands Projets; the profession turf war between interior design and architecture; and a "second wave" of postmodern practice and theory), then shows how each book's conception of the discipline shaped its evidence and narrative — from Pile's transparent photographs to Rice's constructivist account of representation — leaving problems of "conceptual rigor in the former and narrative coherence in the latter."

Key Claims

The books that constituted interior architecture as a discipline arose in response to three stimuli: the increasing volume of reuse practice "on the ground" — where Grands Projets like the Tate Modern (Herzog & de Meuron, 2000) and the Berlin Reichstag (Norman Foster, 1999) "emerged… to occupy the center ground in architecture"; a long-standing political conflict between the professions of interior design and architecture; and a "second wave" of postmodern practice and theory.
The discipline's literature was written "not by architects but by studio teachers in art schools" (Scott, Brooker) and "theoreticians and historians of design" (Sparke, Rice, Pile) — so its founding had a "political and professional dimension": Scott's book "began from a partisan argument" for art-school designers' contribution to alteration being as valid as architects' new buildings, "an argument against a widely assumed hegemony."
Kurtich reported the mutual professional disdain: "Designers disdained the elitist architects for their compulsion for purity and maintenance of concept. Architects generally considered designers to be frivolous with no philosophical base of knowledge to guide their work" (Kurtich, p. vii). See the Interior Design vs. Architecture debate.
Brooker & Stone connect interior architecture's rise to a postmodernism that is not the stylistic postmodernism of the 1980s but a literary one: the acceptance of remodeling "is based on the reaction to what is perceived as the detrimental erosion of the city and its contents by modern architecture" (p. 10); modernist buildings were "the product of a formal system that was essentially self-sufficient" (p. 9), while alteration opens "the aesthetics of the incomplete, the incoherent, and the layered."
Kurtich's foundational three-part definition of interior architecture: (1) the entire building designed as an external shell containing integrated finished interiors; (2) the completion of space within an existing architectural enclosure; (3) "the preservation, renovation, or adaptive reuse of buildings, historic or otherwise" (p. vii).
Pile's History of Interior Design is a primer — "a sort of Pevsner or Bannister Fletcher for interior design" — surveying "60,000 years of personal and public space" (p. 8) through an architectural lens: interior design is "inextricably linked to architecture and can only be studied within an architectural context," admitting ruins and courtyards "even though the sky may be their only ceiling and they are, therefore, not strictly interiors"; furniture and textiles are reduced to "edited highlights."
Sparke starts from Walter Benjamin's nineteenth-century Paris: dwelling opposed to the office, "The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions" (Sparke, p. 22). Her history is of the "boundary war" between two spheres: the domestic interior (femininity, soft textiles, decoration) versus the public interior (hard surfaces, male occupations, architecture). See separate-spheres.
Sparke's key claim: "The boundaries between the 'separate spheres' were fundamentally unstable, and it was that instability, rather than the separation per se, that… defined modernity, and by extension the modern interior" (p. 12). Her episodes: the domestication of hotels and cafés in the nineteenth century; the "victory of the architectural interior" in the Gesamtkunstwerk homes of the early twentieth; "Art School" interior design as a temporary soft-modernist resolution, unsettled by the current rise of interior architecture.
The interior is an unstable category temporally as well as spatially: "Interiors are rendered even harder to discuss by the fact that they are constantly being modified as life goes on within them" (Sparke). Hollis draws the implication for his subject: "An altered building is only ever in a temporary state, destined to be obliterated by history just like the decorative schemes of ephemeral homes."
Pile's history treats its photographs "as if they were transparent evidence of the interiors depicted" — interiors shown as objects "(albeit inside-out ones) largely denuded of that 'great range of objects'" he himself says clutter them. Rice dissents: "Visual representations of interiors are not simply transparent to spatial referents, even if such spatial referents exist; representations construct interiors on a two-dimensional surface as much as practices of decoration and furnishing construct interiors spatially" (Rice, p. 19). See representation and architectural-photography.
Rice's OED etymology periodizes the concept: "interior" from the late fifteenth century (inside divided from outside; the inner nature of self and soul); "interiority" from the early eighteenth century (interior character, individual subjectivity); from the mid-eighteenth, the domestic affairs of a state; "It was only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, that the interior came to mean 'the inside of a building or room.'" The concept of the interior is time-bound. See interiority.
Rice's critique of "traditional" histories: "The traditional history… does not subject its conceptual and organizational structures to historical analysis. Each of these histories, in their desire for comprehensiveness, seeks to establish a domain of study wherein one can recognize the continually present themes of privacy and domesticity in relation to the stable categories of the interior and its inhabiting subject" — treating representations as transparent evidence and inhabitation as "timeless, but also progressive."
The anachronism problem: Pile's survey contains Minoan throne rooms, medieval cathedrals and baroque libraries, "none of which were designed by people who would have described themselves as interior designers"; likewise Kurtich, Brooker and Stone might present the ad hoc occupation of the Theater of Marcellus or Michelangelo's conversion of the Baths of Diocletian into Santa Maria degli Angeli as "interior architecture" — "It is unlikely… that rapacious medieval nobility or Michelangelo himself would have agreed."
Hollis's counter-objection to Rice's and Sparke's time-bound solution: it "is not necessarily an adequate approach for a historian of interior architecture, which addresses itself not just to the ephemeral practices of interior occupation, but also the eternal verities of architecture" — a usable history of alteration "will have to deal with structures and practices that reach back well beyond the birth of 'interior architecture' as it is currently conceived."
The narrative problem: a survey history of styles requires what Scott, via Summerson's Architecture in Britain 1530–1830, calls "ersatz purity of vision" — Hampton Court appears first as the creation of Wolsey and Henry VIII, then two hundred pages later as Wren's — "a perceptual requirement to see buildings as discrete entities and complete unto themselves even when… the whole is a composite affair." The alternatives: a sequence of individual alterations (Hampton Court appears twice) or a case-study model tracing one place across centuries (Brooker & Stone's "inherent qualities of the place and its surroundings" emerging through "repeated retellings") — at the cost of "any sense of a general or comprehensive history."
The authorship problem: "the work of intervention and alteration is… collective, across generations, whereas the work of architecture may often be considered to be individual" (Scott). "If a building has been redesigned many times over centuries, to whom may we ascribe its authorship, and how?" See authorship.
The reflexive thesis: "Interior architecture exists as much in its own histories as in built artefacts" — architecture and the interior are themselves systems of representation; therefore "Should… the history of interior architecture, like its products, be discontinuous, multiple, layered, and collaborative taking place across generations?"
The spectrum of conceptions shaped by these books ranges "from Pile's or Kurtich's conception of the interior as a quasi-architectural artefact, to Brooker and Stone's or Scott's understanding of the practice of alteration — and the consequent incompleteness of the interior as an ever-changing 'open work.'" Both approaches leave problems — "of conceptual rigor in the former and narrative coherence in the latter."
The historiography of interior architecture shares its conditions with the "herstories" that emerged alongside it in the late twentieth century: an interest in "deviant" practices or identities that challenge traditional heroic narratives; all rise with "liberation" movements; all share the problem of evidence and narrative, "for the very suppression and oppression of the suppressed and oppressed lay in the denial of their voices."
Via Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting: history is the construction of images of the past — Plato's problematic of the eikon, which "offers itself as the presence of an absent thing stamped with the seal of the anterior," yet is a thing in its own right. "The final referent of memory remains the past"; "the representation of the past is found to be exposed to the dangers of forgetting, but is also entrusted to its protection." See history and memory.
The concluding proposal: solutions may lie in the practice itself, for "The practice of altering existing buildings, after all, is in itself a historical practice, involving, like history, the reinterpretation of fragmentary pasts to give them utility in the present." Interior architecture is "constructed as much by its own history as recorded by it" — the double question: how, in both spheres, to "acknowledge the pastness of the past, and be worthy of the protective trust that is placed in us as its interpreters?"

Connections

Concepts: interior-architecture · interior-design · historiography-of-the-interior · adaptive-reuse · separate-spheres · interiority · domestic-interior · gender-and-the-interior · history · memory · representation · authorship · postmodernism · architectural-photography · interdisciplinarity · modernity · iconic-architecture · the-decorative Authors: Edward Hollis · Gregory Marinic (ed.) · Walter Benjamin (quoted via Sparke) · John Summerson (Scott's exemplar of style-history) Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture — the professional turf war as a stimulus for the discipline's literature · ornament-vs-purity — architects' "compulsion for purity" as the profession-level face of the purity position · postmodernism-vs-modernism — remodeling as reaction against modernism's erosion of the city Related source notes: Taylor & Preston — Proximities — the sibling source: Intimus established interior design's theoretical domain; Hollis supplies its historiography and its disciplinary sibling (interior architecture) · Elliott — Benjamin for Architects (Benjamin's interior) · Summerson — Bread & Butter and Architecture (Summerson as both historiographic target and everyday-architecture pioneer)

Direct Quotes

Quotes are given as they appear in Hollis's chapter. For passages Hollis quotes from the six books discussed, page numbers are those given in the chapter's endnotes, whose OCR numbering is partially garbled; Hollis's own prose is located by section heading.

"It attempts to show how history is not merely the record of things past, but, like interior architecture itself, a (re)construction of preexisting structures." (§ "Why were these books written?")

"The emergence of interior architecture as a new profession is an idea whose time has come. It is the link between art, architecture, and interior design." (Kurtich, p. vi, quoted in Hollis)

"That theory follows in the wake of the expedient." (Scott, p. xv, quoted in Hollis)

"This book began from a partisan argument for the contribution of art school designers to be recognized as being valid in the alteration of the built environment as the more celebrated work of architects in making new buildings. It was, in the beginning, an argument against a widely assumed hegemony." (Scott, p. xv, quoted in Hollis)

"Designers disdained the elitist architects for their compulsion for purity and maintenance of concept. Architects generally considered designers to be frivolous with no philosophical base of knowledge to guide their work." (Kurtich, p. vii, quoted in Hollis)

"The rise in the number of buildings being remodeled, and the gradual acceptance and respectability of the practice, is based on the reaction to what is perceived as the detrimental erosion of the city and its contents by modern architecture." (Brooker & Stone, p. 10, quoted in Hollis)

"First, it can be the entire building designed as an external shell containing integrated and finished interiors. Second, interior architecture can be the completion of space within an existing architectural enclosure. Finally, it can be the preservation, renovation, or adaptive reuse of buildings, historic or otherwise." (Kurtich, p. vii, quoted in Hollis)

"the purpose of this book is to deliver in one volume of reasonable size, a basic survey of 60,000 years of personal and public space." (Pile, p. 8, quoted in Hollis)

"interior design is inextricably linked to architecture and can only be studied within an architectural context … Enclosed spaces such as ruins, ancient sites, and open courtyards are given due consideration even though the sky may be their only ceiling and they are, therefore, not strictly interiors" (Pile, p. 8, quoted in Hollis)

"for the private individual, the place of dwelling is for the first time opposed to the place of work. The former constitutes itself as the interior. Its complement is the office. The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions." (Benjamin, quoted in Sparke, p. 22)

"The boundaries between the 'separate spheres' were fundamentally unstable, and it was that instability, rather than the separation per se, that, I will suggest, defined modernity, and by extension the modern interior." (Sparke, p. 12, quoted in Hollis)

"Interiors do not exist in isolation in the way that a painting or a sculpture does, but within some kind of shell … they are also crammed with a great range of objects and artifacts … this means that interior design is a field with unclear boundaries." (Pile, p. 8, quoted in Hollis)

"Interiors are rendered even harder to discuss by the fact that they are constantly being modified as life goes on within them." (Sparke, quoted in Hollis, § "What evidence did they use?")

"Visual representations of interiors are not simply transparent to spatial referents, even if such spatial referents exist; representations construct interiors on a two-dimensional surface as much as practices of decoration and furnishing construct interiors spatially." (Rice, p. 19, quoted in Hollis)

"The Oxford English dictionary records the 'interior' had come into use from the late fifteenth century to mean inside as divided from outside, and to describe the spiritual and inner nature of the self and the soul… It was only from the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, that the interior came to mean 'the inside of a building or room.'" (Rice, quoted in Hollis, § "What evidence did they use?")

"The traditional history … does not subject its conceptual and organizational structures to historical analysis. Each of these histories, in their desire for comprehensiveness, seeks to establish a domain of study wherein one can recognize the continually present themes of privacy and domesticity in relation to the stable categories of the interior and its inhabiting subject." (Rice, quoted in Hollis, § "What evidence did they use?")

"The consideration of architectural styles requires this ersatz purity of vision, a perceptual requirement to see buildings as discrete entities and complete unto themselves even when, as is the case with Hampton Court, the whole is a composite affair." (Scott, quoted in Hollis, § "How did they tell their stories?")

"the work of intervention and alteration is … collective, across generations, whereas the work of architecture may often be considered to be individual." (Scott, quoted in Hollis, § "How did they tell their stories?")

"Interior architecture exists as much in its own histories as in built artefacts." (Hollis, § "How did they tell their stories?")

"Within interior histories, interior architecture was seen as another iteration of the unstable relationship between the private and public spheres." (Hollis, § "How did they tell their stories?")

"Both approaches leave us with problems – of conceptual rigor in the former and narrative coherence in the latter." (Hollis, § "How did they tell their stories?")

"All of them, however, share the problem of evidence and narrative, for the very suppression and oppression of the suppressed and oppressed lay in the denial of their voices." (Hollis, on the "herstories," § "How did they tell their stories?")

"The eikon offers itself as the presence of an absent thing stamped with the seal of the anterior." (Ricoeur, quoted in Hollis, § "How did they tell their stories?")

"The practice of altering existing buildings, after all, is in itself a historical practice, involving, like history, the reinterpretation of fragmentary pasts to give them utility in the present." (Hollis, closing section)

"If interior architecture is a process through which we represent the past, and its history is an analogous practice of representation, then how can we, in both spheres, acknowledge the pastness of the past, and be worthy of the protective trust that is placed in us as its interpreters?" (Hollis, closing section)

Open Questions

Can a history of alteration and occupation be both comprehensive and non-linear — or are Hollis's two problems (conceptual rigor in the survey model, narrative coherence in the case-study model) strictly irreducible?
Is the anachronism charge fatal to long-run histories of alteration (Michelangelo as "interior architect"), or does it demand a historicized, practice-relative notion of what counts as the discipline's acts?
Does adaptive reuse's arrival at architecture's "center ground" via Grands Projets (Tate Modern, Reichstag) mark the discipline's arrival — or its absorption into the icon economy the wiki traces elsewhere (iconic-architecture, adaptive-reuse)?
Hollis closes by mirroring history and alteration: both "(re)construct" preexisting structures while owing the past "protective trust." What would an alteration practice — or a history — look like that satisfied Ricoeur's eikon problem rather than merely gesturing at it?
Do the "herstories" parallel hold: is the problem of evidence for suppressed practices (the interior, the domestic, the feminine) the same problem, or only structurally analogous?