Toward the immaterial interior

Author: Frank Jacobus Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 27 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/jacobus_2018-toward_the_immaterial_interior.md

Summary

Frank Jacobus (architect and principal of SILO AR+D, the practice he founded in 2012 with Marc Manack) states interior architecture's twenty-fifth disciplinary register: the cultural-register (media-history) register. The chapter's premise is that constructed space is "a culturally reflective and communicative mechanism" and that an "underlying persistent desire" drives the "fabrication of spaces to embody human thoughts within material constructs" — interior architecture as "a spatial and material construct meant to preserve cultural or personal beliefs." Humanity has used three successive primary registers for this preservation — the built environment (Victor Hugo's "books of stone"), the book (which "gradually remove[d] the building as humankind's primary register"), and digital media ("Today is the age of the third register") — and each new register offers "a higher level of accessibility and transferability" while dematerializing the previous one. The chapter reads two paradigms of cultural transference through interior architecture (the unconscious — the Egyptian temple's plan as materialized belief; the conscious — the Greek temple as the god's body and "book of Athens"), then traces the book's intercession (the academy, referential culture, the neoclassical interior as "More photograph than building," Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève as a building that "takes its new spatial cues directly from books"), the mechanization roots of dematerialization (Mumford's clock, money's abstract symbols, Giedion's medieval-to-nineteenth-century shift of spatial comfort from the room's shell to its objects), and the digital third register's contemporary dematerializations: transarchitectures, interactive surfaces, energy-harvesting floors, Herzog & de Meuron's Eberswalde Library and VitraHaus, and stone thinned to veneer. The chapter closes without alarm: dematerialization is "a continuation of the ceaseless evolution of architectural space conception," and "imagination has been victorious in shifting sensibilities… toward an acceptance of the immaterial as a new purveyor of reality" — but designers "must be as conscious as possible as to what motivates their decisions."

Key Claims

Constructed space is "a culturally reflective and communicative mechanism": "Materiality delivers messages within interior spatial environments, reflecting a cultural sensibility and intelligence, but also compelling future actions and desires." See cultural-registers.
Interior architecture is a preservation technology: "we can discuss interior architecture as a spatial and material construct meant to preserve cultural or personal beliefs. The core ingredient of this effort is material itself, the physical or nonphysical substance that makes space possible." See interiority.
The register thesis: "in seeking permanence for human thought, we have moved from stone, to paper, and now to bits and bytes to write our story" — three primary cultural registers: interior architecture, the book, digital media. Buildings "acted as the first primary human registers within which our stories and aspirations were communicated." See cultural-registers, memory.
Victor Hugo's "books of stone": pre-Gutenberg cultures wrote their most important stories in and on monuments, "exercising extreme effort that they be remembered for generations." See memory.
The book displaced the building because physical built space could not "compete with the comparative ease of production and transference of human thought that the book offered" — each new register provides "a higher level of accessibility and transferability; these two critical components must be present when seeking endurance and permanence for human thought." See cultural-registers.
The ephemerality corollary: "As our modes of register become more ephemeral so do our modes of experience, affecting both how we perceive and how we create our built environment." See dematerialization.
Giedion's diagnosis (via Mechanization Takes Command): the evolution of cultural registers has "confused the human environment" by splitting "our modes of thinking from our modes of feeling." See mechanization.
Two paradigms of cultural transference through interior architecture: (1) unconscious cultural expression — spatial, material, and formal manifestations "dictated by belief and by advances in material and building technology," with no conscious attempt to define culture; Giedion's Egyptian New Kingdom temples, laid out per the belief allowing no "standstill in life or death," rooms with no place of rest except the dark cella where "the image of god was preserved" — the layout itself "a materialization of cultural belief and value that can be read as a 'specialized elaboration of culture.'"
(2) conscious cultural expression — the Greek temple: "The form and proportion of the Greek temple stood for the body of the god that was its dedication… the temple of Zeus was the body of Zeus; the temple of Athena was the body of Athena"; "the Parthenon is the body of Athena, but it is also the book of Athens." See house-body-equation, typology.
"Every building contains traces of both paradigms and there is no possibility of excluding either paradigm in a built work. Both paradigms, always working in conjunction, make interior architecture a cultural mirror into which we can look to gain access to the beliefs and customs of past cultures."
The book produced "learning 'by the book'": "Knowledge gained by the reading of books was knowledge of events divorced from firsthand experience. No longer grounded in experience in relation to one's own body, the book afforded an increasingly vast number of literate citizens to peek into and pull from knowledge gained by past cultures." (Mumford: print "abstracted from gesture and physical presence"; "print made a greater impression than actual events"; people "lost that balance between the sensuous and the intellectual, between image and sound, between the concrete and the abstract.")
The academy was the book's built-effect vehicle: "The rise of the academic tradition in the design disciplines, in large part made possible by the emergence of print media"; the Academy of Architecture in Paris (the future École des Beaux-Arts, seventeenth century) against the medieval craft guilds — the key difference "the firm distinction that is made in the academies between learning and doing," with classical precedents studied through newly available books.
The referential-culture thesis: "the introduction of the book as a mass medium is a point in history at which all cultural production becomes, at least in part, referential. Interior architecture transitions from serving a preliterate culture… to serving a referential culture that learned to do by reading; happy to borrow their ideas from a former age." See history.
It took "four hundred years of hindsight before anyone was able to understand (or at least 'put into words') that the changes that occurred in the built environment over that period of time were in large part a result of the arrival of the book and its succession of buildings as humankind's primary cultural register."
The neoclassical interior as first dematerialization: interior architecture becomes "a symbolic historical stamp, whose form recreates an idealized past for a present world"; these interiors told "a story no longer rooted in the culture they served," their "very physicality was denied by their lack of locality. More photograph than building, these interiors become a dematerialized postscript to gothic culture and the first examples of the effect of technological advance and dematerialization on interior spaces." See dematerialization, representation.
Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève as the building defined by the book: "the building's exterior acting as a virtual card catalog, the entire interior space tells a story that unfolds page by page, as if the visitor is perusing a book" — the sequence from entry garden (marble busts), through the stair landing that thrusts the visitor "into Raphael's School of Athens painting," to the reading room where one can "pull books from the shelves and complete the dialogue with humanity's great thinkers." "Buildings had replaced books as humanity's storytelling medium, and now interior architectural space was being defined and inspired by them." See narrative-space, wall-of-books.
Mechanization's root: the clock as prototype — "the invisible umbrella of time… giving human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine"; that an invisible, human-made abstraction "can so affect, control, and order the lives of so many collectively is testament to the notion that the effects of the immaterial are being strengthened in relation to the material." See mechanization, temporality.
Mumford's abstract time: "one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it"; "Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, and it could even be expanded by the invention of labor saving instruments." The clock "gave rise to new conceptions of abstract space, interchangeable and relatable over any distance, transportable in the minds of humans." See temporality, mechanization.
The abstraction gradient: "As society mechanizes, one by one, concrete entities are replaced by their abstract counterparts" — Mumford's money economy against barter, from variable local coinage to "the abstract symbols of wealth: gold, drafts, bills of exchange, and eventually merely numbers." See abstraction.
Giedion's interior-space shift: medieval spatial comfort was "determined by the unity of the proportions, materials, and form of the room's shell" (small furniture not a dominating factor); by the nineteenth century space became "defined much less by the plan and sectional volume and more by the objects within" — mass-produced small objects prompted "a rush to fill spaces with them." "Habitation areas no longer needed to be strongly defined spatial realms in order to elicit comfort. Space had become neutral, a backdrop for the smaller designed objects that began to dominate our lives." See comfort, mechanization.
The law of palliation: "It seems standard that with the advance of technology and the replacement of hand power by machine power, a palliation of intricate interior spatial form occurs. By the middle of the nineteenth century, human perceptual comforts were no longer dictated by space that is bound in the physical."
The corporeal divorce: "As tools have developed in such a way as to slowly divorce the corporeal aspects of the human body from the process of production, imagination has been victorious in shifting sensibilities away from a particular kind of awareness of material, toward an acceptance of the immaterial as a new purveyor of reality." See dematerialization, simulation-hyperreality.
Symbol devaluation (Giedion): mechanization mass-replicated historically rarified symbols so that "the original symbolic meaning was lost in the panoply, a dematerialization and devaluation of the symbols themselves"; the symbols "soon disappeared, giving way to new ways of thinking about the made object." The same process may now be erasing "ways of thinking about space… bound to ideas that originated within book culture," under "an immediacy, rapidity, and constant newness that books cannot offer" — "until eventually the idea of material has been entirely severed from that which is physical. To use Giedion's words, material may soon be completely 'torn out of the frame within which it once had meaning.'" See obsolescence, dematerialization.
Contemporary dematerializations: "it could be argued that most contemporary critical practices have accepted or are celebrating forms of dematerialization in the design disciplines in one way or another." Transarchitectures (Marcos Novak's term, per the notes) "explore the relationships between virtual and physical space"; interactive surfaces are "a direct and literal example of this phenomenon, wherein the wall as a static, physical artifact begins to deliver a deeper and more complex space than that of the physical interior itself. We've begun to expect more from the physical surfaces that surround us." See transarchitecture, interactive-architecture, augmented-reality.
The energy floor as the dematerialized datum: floors "that capture and store the energy created by human movement over the surface" are "a conversion of the tactile into the overtly intellectual. Floors can no longer simply be a place to live or stand; what they deliver physically is now a given; their new value will arise from what they deliver virtually and intellectually." See transarchitecture.
The graphic envelope: Herzog & de Meuron's Eberswalde Library — "the physical materiality of an exterior building surface disappears through a new graphic reading that hybridizes concrete and glass into a single unified envelope"; "many contemporary examples seem to eliminate the physical material entirely in favor of the new depth of readability in the graphic itself. A multitude of examples like this exist in interior architecture, wherein a graphic field replaces what would otherwise be read as physical (and knowable) material." See law-of-cladding, representation.
The typological symbol: VitraHaus (Herzog & de Meuron) "uses the typological 'knowable house form' and suspends and stacks replicas of itself at odd angles so as to reduce its physical material reading and have the participant rely instead on a historical and intellectual understanding of this phenomenon. 'House' is here being delivered as symbol; its grounding is no longer a physical or material phenomenon, but is instead purely intellectually and culturally rooted." See typology.
Materials themselves dematerialize without intent: "the vast majority of building materials today are lighter and reduced versions of their former selves. So even when we do not aim to dematerialize, technologies are forcing our hands in this regard. Stone, once a hulking, thick structural mass, eventually became a moderately thick surface… Now, stone is an incredibly thin veneer supported by an often invisible building frame; this again is an evolving form of dematerialization."
The non-alarmist close: "None of this writing is meant to paint a grim picture of these new forms of reality. Instead, designers must be as conscious as possible as to what motivates their decisions and attempt to understand how those decisions will affect life and experience. To know where we stand and at what we aim, we must continue to probe the potential effects of digital design and production on spaces and on spatial conceptions. Transarchitectures and hypersurfaces are to be seen as continuations of the ceaseless evolution of architectural space conception and perception from the Egyptian and Greek temples to today."

Connections

Concepts: cultural-registers · dematerialization · mechanization · transarchitecture · interior-architecture · interiority · narrative-space · memory · history · comfort · abstraction · typology · house-body-equation · representation · obsolescence · interactive-architecture · digital-architecture · augmented-reality · wall-of-books · law-of-cladding · temporality · simulation-hyperreality · inside-outside-dialectic Authors: Frank Jacobus · Gregory Marinic (ed.) · Sigfried Giedion (the chapter's principal authority: Mechanization Takes Command, The Eternal Present) · Marc Manack (the SILO AR+D co-founder and sibling Reader chapter) Debates: truth-and-illusion — Position K, the graphic that replaces the material (the dematerialized surface as illusion's media-historical heir) · static-vs-dynamic-architecture — the static wall delivering "a deeper and more complex space" than the physical interior (Position A's media antecedent) Related source notes: Manack — Fabricating interiority — the two SILO AR+D partners' consecutive Reader chapters form a pair: Manack's interior intensifies its material fabrication of distinctions from architecture, Jacobus's traces how the register that made interiors meaningful dematerializes; both derive the discipline from construction technology · Hollis — (Re)constructing Histories — Hollis's alteration-as-history meets Jacobus's buildings-as-registers: both make the interior a medium of the past, but Hollis's medium is intervention, Jacobus's is communication · Taylor — Shape shifting — the dynamic conception's responsive interior is Jacobus's "interactive surface" register; Bouman's claim that architecture will lose "its position and character as a consistent and integrated form of cultural communication" is Jacobus's whole thesis stated as loss · Qureshi — Spatial therapies — Qureshi's "post-analog" condition is Jacobus's third register arriving: both date the discipline's crisis to the dematerialization of cultural media · Stokes-Rees — Symbiotic spaces — the museum as storyteller-building is Jacobus's second paradigm (conscious cultural expression) at institutional scale; Labrouste's library is its nineteenth-century ancestor · Gattegno & Johnson — Ambient environments to sentient spaces — the data-fed surface Jacobus calls dematerializing is their sentient space at urban scale · Braham — A Wall of Books — the domestic book-wall vs. Labrouste's building-as-book: the book's interior presence at two scales · Deyong — A history of style — Deyong's referential style-history (Riegl to Rowe) is the academic, book-born tradition Jacobus dates to the École des Beaux-Arts.

Direct Quotes

Page numbers are not available in the chapter text; quotes are located by paragraph content.

"Constructed space is, and has always been, a culturally reflective and communicative mechanism. Materiality delivers messages within interior spatial environments, reflecting a cultural sensibility and intelligence, but also compelling future actions and desires." (opening)

"an underlying persistent desire seems to be the fabrication of spaces to embody human thoughts within material constructs. In this way, we can discuss interior architecture as a spatial and material construct meant to preserve cultural or personal beliefs. The core ingredient of this effort is material itself, the physical or nonphysical substance that makes space possible." (opening)

"Generally speaking, in seeking permanence for human thought, we have moved from stone, to paper, and now to bits and bytes to write our story." (opening)

"Buildings and interior spaces, in addition to providing shelter and space for organized human activity, acted as the first primary human registers within which our stories and aspirations were communicated." (opening, on Hugo's thesis)

"Victor Hugo referred to buildings as 'books of stone,' as pre-Gutenberg cultures wrote their most important stories in and on these monuments, exercising extreme effort that they be remembered for generations." (opening)

"Physical, 'built' space was no longer able to compete with the comparative ease of production and transference of human thought that the book offered. Stories that were once written in stone were now written in books. Today is the age of the third register: digital technology." (opening)

"With each new register, technological invention and evolution has provided a higher level of accessibility and transferability; these two critical components must be present when seeking endurance and permanence for human thought." (opening)

"As our modes of register become more ephemeral so do our modes of experience, affecting both how we perceive and how we create our built environment." (opening)

"Siegfried Giedion made clear in Mechanization Takes Command that this evolution of cultural registers has 'confused the human environment' by splitting 'our modes of thinking from our modes of feeling.'" (opening)

"This chapter begins with the notion that there are three primary cultural registers of humanity, interior architecture, the book, and digital media." (opening)

"In the first paradigm, interior architecture is a chiefly unconscious cultural expression. This occurs through spatial, material, and formal manifestations dictated by belief and by advances in material and building technology." (on the two paradigms)

"The temple's rooms were intentionally designed to not allow a place of rest except in the dark cella (chamber), inside of which the 'image of god was preserved.' In this way, the organization of interior spaces in the Egyptian temple was itself a materialization of cultural belief and value that can be read as a 'specialized elaboration of culture.'" (first paradigm, Egyptian temple)

"The form and proportion of the Greek temple stood for the body of the god that was its dedication. For example, the temple of Zeus was the body of Zeus; the temple of Athena was the body of Athena. As an embodiment of the gods, and through its form, sculpture, and inscriptions, each temple became a chronicle of a particular aspect of Greek culture. In this way, the Parthenon is the body of Athena, but it is also the book of Athens." (second paradigm, Greek temple)

"Every building contains traces of both paradigms and there is no possibility of excluding either paradigm in a built work. Both paradigms, always working in conjunction, make interior architecture a cultural mirror into which we can look to gain access to the beliefs and customs of past cultures." (on the two paradigms)

"The printed page increased the safety and permanence of the written record by manifolding it, extended the range of communication, and economized on time and effort." (Lewis Mumford, quoted)

"So print speedily became the new medium of intercourse: abstracted from gesture and physical presence, the printed word furthered that process of analysis and isolation which became the leading achievement of eotechnic thought." (Mumford, quoted)

"More than any other device, the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and local. Doing so, it contributed further to the dissociation of medieval society: print made a greater impression than actual events, and by centering attention on the printed word, people lost that balance between the sensuous and the intellectual, between image and sound, between the concrete and the abstract." (Mumford, quoted)

"The rise of the academic tradition in the design disciplines, in large part made possible by the emergence of print media, was the vehicle by which the book altered constructed material environments." (on the academy)

"If we compare the modern system to the craft guild, which was an apprenticeship-based approach, the major difference is the firm distinction that is made in the academies between learning and doing." (on the academy)

"In some ways, it seems that the introduction of the book as a mass medium is a point in history at which all cultural production becomes, at least in part, referential. Interior architecture transitions from serving a preliterate culture, whose form was the result of a more insular, individual, and communal mentality, to serving a referential culture that learned to do by reading; happy to borrow their ideas from a former age." (on referential culture)

"Surprisingly, it would take the benefit of four hundred years of hindsight before anyone was able to understand (or at least 'put into words') that the changes that occurred in the built environment over that period of time were in large part a result of the arrival of the book and its succession of buildings as humankind's primary cultural register." (on referential culture)

"These neoclassical interiors, though still retaining their physical mass and concreteness in the form of carved stone, were but a picture of a former age, which told a story no longer rooted in the culture they served. Their very physicality was denied by their lack of locality. More photograph than building, these interiors become a dematerialized postscript to gothic culture and the first examples of the effect of technological advance and dematerialization on interior spaces." (on neoclassical interiors)

"The Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève by Henri Labrouste is an example of a building that attempts to take its new spatial cues directly from books. In addition to the building's exterior acting as a virtual card catalog, the entire interior space tells a story that unfolds page by page, as if the visitor is perusing a book." (on Labrouste)

"This abbreviated description of the spatial sequencing within Labrouste's library tells the story of an architect trying to grapple with what space becomes with the advent of a literate society. Buildings had replaced books as humanity's storytelling medium, and now interior architectural space was being defined and inspired by them." (on Labrouste)

"With the clock arose the invisible umbrella of time, organized and structured on a mass scale, 'giving human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine.' That time, this mostly invisible and abstract instrument, can so affect, control, and order the lives of so many collectively is testament to the notion that the effects of the immaterial are being strengthened in relation to the material during and leading up to the industrial age." (on mechanization)

"Timekeeping, or the notion that we can divide, organize, and commodify that which does not have a physical existence and is merely a construct developed by sheer human will, is perhaps another of the first signs that the material is beginning to relinquish control during the late Middle Ages and into the Industrial Revolution." (on mechanization)

"Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it." (Mumford, quoted)

"Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, and it could even be expanded by the invention of labor saving instruments." (Mumford, quoted)

"Just as the world after the rise of the book was 'lightened,' in that information once conveyed through the weight of stone was now transportable by hand, the clock gave rise to new conceptions of abstract space, interchangeable and relatable over any distance, transportable in the minds of humans." (on mechanization)

"In the period from 1850 to 1890, the entirety of Western culture was trying to discover their relationship with new forms of mechanization. As society mechanizes, one by one, concrete entities are replaced by their abstract counterparts." (on mechanization)

"Spatial comfort in the Middle Ages, according to Giedion, was in large part determined by the unity of the proportions, materials, and form of the room's shell." (Giedion via Jacobus, on medieval space)

"The nineteenth-century conceptions of space, after having evolved for several hundred years during the age of mechanization, became defined much less by the plan and sectional volume and more by the objects within." (Giedion via Jacobus)

"Habitation areas no longer needed to be strongly defined spatial realms in order to elicit comfort. Space had become neutral, a backdrop for the smaller designed objects that began to dominate our lives." (Giedion via Jacobus)

"It seems standard that with the advance of technology and the replacement of hand power by machine power, a palliation of intricate interior spatial form occurs. By the middle of the nineteenth century, human perceptual comforts were no longer dictated by space that is bound in the physical." (on the palliation of interior form)

"The corporeal had become too heavy and burdensome; it could no longer keep up with the excitement for the lightened load of the new spatiality of mechanized culture. The Industrial Revolution, with the clock and the printing press as its progenitor and exemplar, in substituting manpower for machine power, had driven material sensibilities to the brink of the immaterial." (on mechanization's zenith)

"Digital media is to the book today what the book was to the built environment in the fifteenth century." (on the third register)

"The transitioning away from the book as a research mechanism, and the digitizing of mass quantities of information, is a direct and blatant effect of the transition of modes of expression toward digital means, a further dematerialization of cultural space." (on the third register)

"The result was that the original symbolic meaning was lost in the panoply, a dematerialization and devaluation of the symbols themselves." (Giedion via Jacobus, on mass-replicated symbols)

"The long-term effect of this, if it follows similar past trends, will be further dematerialization, until eventually the idea of material has been entirely severed from that which is physical. To use Giedion's words, material may soon be completely 'torn out of the frame within which it once had meaning.'" (closing argument)

"In fact, it could be argued that most contemporary critical practices have accepted or are celebrating forms of dematerialization in the design disciplines in one way or another." (on contemporary practice)

"Transarchitectures, for instance, explore the relationships between virtual and physical space. Interactive surfaces are a direct and literal example of this phenomenon, wherein the wall as a static, physical artifact begins to deliver a deeper and more complex space than that of the physical interior itself. We've begun to expect more from the physical surfaces that surround us." (on transarchitectures)

"Floor systems, for instance, that capture and store the energy created by human movement over the surface, are yet another example of a dematerializing of interior architecture; a conversion of the tactile into the overtly intellectual. Floors can no longer simply be a place to live or stand; what they deliver physically is now a given; their new value will arise from what they deliver virtually and intellectually." (on energy floors)

"In projects like the Eberswalde Library by Herzog and de Meuron, the physical materiality of an exterior building surface disappears through a new graphic reading that hybridizes concrete and glass into a single unified envelope. Graphic surfaces have existed throughout the built environment's rich history; however, many contemporary examples seem to eliminate the physical material entirely in favor of the new depth of readability in the graphic itself." (on the graphic envelope)

"A multitude of examples like this exist in interior architecture, wherein a graphic field replaces what would otherwise be read as physical (and knowable) material." (on the graphic envelope)

"This project uses the typological 'knowable house form' and suspends and stacks replicas of itself at odd angles so as to reduce its physical material reading and have the participant rely instead on a historical and intellectual understanding of this phenomenon. 'House' is here being delivered as symbol; its grounding is no longer a physical or material phenomenon, but is instead purely intellectually and culturally rooted." (on VitraHaus)

"So even when we do not aim to dematerialize, technologies are forcing our hands in this regard. Stone, once a hulking, thick structural mass, eventually became a moderately thick surface that relied only on itself for support. Now, stone is an incredibly thin veneer supported by an often invisible building frame; this again is an evolving form of dematerialization." (on thinning materials)

"None of this writing is meant to paint a grim picture of these new forms of reality. Instead, designers must be as conscious as possible as to what motivates their decisions and attempt to understand how those decisions will affect life and experience." (closing)

"Transarchitectures and hypersurfaces are to be seen as continuations of the ceaseless evolution of architectural space conception and perception from the Egyptian and Greek temples to today." (closing)

"As tools have developed in such a way as to slowly divorce the corporeal aspects of the human body from the process of production, imagination has been victorious in shifting sensibilities away from a particular kind of awareness of material, toward an acceptance of the immaterial as a new purveyor of reality." (closing thesis)

Open Questions

Jacobus's two paradigms claim that "Every building contains traces of both paradigms and there is no possibility of excluding either" — can the pair be operationalized as a reading method for any interior (what is this room unconsciously saying vs. consciously saying), or does it only work on monumental, pre-modern cases (temples, libraries)?
If "our modes of register become more ephemeral so do our modes of experience," does the digital register's ephemerality produce a correspondingly ephemeral interiority — and what happens to the interior's preserved beliefs ("cultural mirror") when the mirror goes virtual? (Cf. interiority, non-places.)
The chapter dates the first dematerialization to the neoclassical interior ("More photograph than building… a dematerialized postscript to gothic culture") — but is a "picture of a former age" dematerialized if its visitors experienced it through stone mass and carved detail? Is dematerialization a property of the object, its mode of production, or its reading?
Is Labrouste's library the interior defined by the book — or the interior's last attempt to compete with the book (re-asserting spatial storytelling against print's ease)? Does the reading-room sequence monumentalize the book or mourn the building's displaced register role?
The Giedion symbol-devaluation arc predicts "the idea of material has been entirely severed from that which is physical" — but Jacobus's own examples (energy floors, thin stone veneer) remain physical artifacts delivering virtual value. Is dematerialization a severing or a re-layering — matter retained as substrate while value migrates to the virtual?
If "most contemporary critical practices have accepted or are celebrating forms of dematerialization," what would a resistant practice look like — and does Manack's fabricating conception (the interior as admitted artifice intensifying its distinctions from architecture) name such a resistance, or is it dematerialization's accomplice?
The chapter asserts, without developing, that "imagination has been victorious in shifting sensibilities… toward an acceptance of the immaterial as a new purveyor of reality" — is the immaterial a purveyor of reality (a medium delivering it) or a replacement for it (simulation, per Baudrillard)? Jacobus's non-alarmism leaves the wiki's spectacle/simulation critique unanswered.
Does the three-register model (interior architecture, book, digital media) admit a fourth register — and if the register changes with each media revolution, is "interior architecture" the name of a discipline or of a stage that media history has already passed?

Notes

The chapter is Chapter 27 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge, 2018); the wiki's ingested chapters from the volume now run Hollis (1), Deyong (2), La Coe (3), Qureshi (4), Webb (5), Stokes-Rees (6), Taylor (7), Teston (8), Manack (9), Campos (10), Satterfield & Swackhamer (11), McClure & McClure (12), Hedges (13), Meninato (14), Schneiderman (15), Treadwell (16), Carraher (17), Anderson & Lovell-Anderson (18), Garófalo-Khan (19), Gattegno & Johnson (20), Smith (21), Spankie (22), Olsen (23), Weir (24), Brown (25), Weinthal (26), Jacobus (27).
The author is the SILO AR+D co-founder whose partner's chapter (Manack, "Fabricating interiority," Ch. 9) the wiki has already ingested — the Reader's third practitioner-authored theory chapter after Webb and Manack.
Notes cited in the chapter: Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (trans. Alban Krailsheimer, Oxford UP, 1993), pp. 192–206 (the "books of stone" thesis; the chapter's source via Neil Levine, "The Book and the Building: Hugo's Theory of Interior Architecture and Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève," in The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture, MIT Press, 1982, pp. 139–173); Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1948), p. v; Giedion, The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Architecture (Bollingen, 1964); Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (1982); Vincent Scully, Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (1991); Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934), pp. 136, 17; Thomas Fisher, "The Past and Future of Studio Culture," Arc Voices (2004); Paul Shepheard, What Is Architecture (MIT Press, 1999), p. 12; Marcos Novak, "Transarchitectures and Hypersurfaces: Operations of Transmodernity," Architectural Design 68, no. 5 (1998): 84–93.
Figures referenced in the chapter text include "Man in the Assembly Line" (Leblond, Romuald, and Jessica Vaillat, Charlie Chaplin) — the Chaplin Modern Times image captioned in the mechanization section.