Fabricating interiority

Author: Marc Manack Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 9 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/manack_2018-fabricating_interiority.md

Summary

Architect Marc Manack (founding principal of SILO AR+D; Associate Professor at UNC Charlotte's Ravin School of Architecture) states interior architecture's tenth disciplinary self-conception: the fabricating conception. The chapter opens from the dictionary's double definition — fabrication is "the action or process of manufacturing or inventing something" and also "an invention; a lie" — and makes both meanings programmatic: interior architecture is unique among the design disciplines in being contingent upon another field for its existence ("in every instance, architecture is a precondition for interior architecture, yet the same claim cannot be made in reverse"), yet it converts that contingency into advantage, since "interiors are far less deferential to architecture than architecture is dependent on the environment." Its identity was built by construction technology: premodern solid construction created strong inside/outside distinctions "through the use of poché and ornamentation to create character" (but within a single act of design); the modern skyscraper — the profession's birthplace, where "most of the interior volume of skyscrapers was given over to the interior designer" — first decoupled interior from architecture (suspended ceilings, raised floors, demountable partitions, furniture systems), "emancipat[ing] the field to invent the disciplinary logic of interiority"; and digital fabrication now lets the discipline "recapture the distinctions between inside and outside inherent in premodern architecture, but with modern technologies, and from a point of view that privileges interiority." Two built exemplars carry the argument: Marlon Blackwell Architects' Crystal Bridges Museum Store (a digitally fabricated wood lamella envelope whose visible thickness embodies poché) and SILO AR+D's North Presbyterian Church (a relational-pattern canopy/cathedral ceiling "vacuum form[ed]" to its architectural limits). The closing imperative: an interior must not merely look different — it must reveal "the means and methods" of its distinctions.

Key Claims

• Interior architecture's disciplinary position is one of accepted contingency converted into advantage: "Unique among the design disciplines, interior architecture is contingent upon another field for its existence… architecture is a precondition for interior architecture, yet the same claim cannot be made in reverse." See interior-architecture, fabrication.
• The two fields run inverted parallel histories: "architecture has progressively sought to diminish distinctions from the environment, while interiors have sought to intensify distinctions from architecture." See inside-outside-dialectic.
• Architecture begins outside and moves in ("Architecture begins with the exterior, on the outside"), its identity "primarily through its exterior presence, with the interior serving to authenticate the architecture's attitude toward… its exterior environment"; interior architecture exists inside, producing "a designed world within a designed world."
• The chapter's thesis: "Ultimately, the interiority of interior architecture is a complete fabrication, an artifice embedded within an edifice." — fabrication as both manufacture and invention (the epigraph's second definition, "an invention; a lie," is knowingly in play). See interiority, fabrication.
• Premodern load-bearing construction produced strong interior/exterior identities — "expressive, unique, and often counterintuitive distinctions in the formal presences, spatial qualities, and surface effects between inside and outside… through the use of poché and ornamentation to create character" — but within "a single act of architectural design, within a single discipline." See poche.
• Interior architecture "finds its agency as a discipline" when solid construction gives way to "layered filigree assemblies and systems": the profession "comes into being through the modern tall building," whose repetitive pro forma seduced architects into "collective disinterest in the interior space beyond the ground floor lobby." See skyscraper-interior, interior-design.
• The skyscraper paradox: curtain-wall transparency "progressively dissolved the building envelope," diminishing the interior's possibility of distinction — but the tower's sectional dynamic counteracted the loss: "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," turning "each floor into an isolated distinct world" against the "flattened "wallpaper" of the surrounding urban panorama." See skyscraper-interior, inside-outside-dialectic.
• A multiple-authorship claim: "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." See authorship.
• The corporate interior's kit of parts — "Suspended ceilings, raised floors, demountable partitions, and flexible, reconfigurable office furniture systems" — "operate with an impermanence and literal detachment from the architectural envelope": "The decoupling of the interior from architecture, in technological terms… emancipates the field to invent the disciplinary logic of interiority." See flexible-interior, skyscraper-interior.
• The emancipated interior "rivals architecture": "a complete and alternate world apart from the architecture, with unique authorial expression and embodied spatial effects." See interiority, architectural-autonomy.
• The discipline's project stated historically: "the discipline of interior architecture seeks to recapture the distinctions between inside and outside inherent in premodern architecture, but with modern technologies, and from a point of view that privileges interiority… from the inside out." See inside-outside-dialectic.
• Four fundamental techniques — "the development of an interior spatial envelope, the subdivision or demising of interior space, the articulation or treatment of surfaces, and the placement of objects within a space" — are to be merged "into singular emphatic elements": spatial design as "a unified atmosphere in a direct manner, with a limited vocabulary but a high degree of dynamic quality," where "floor, wall, ceiling, furniture, lighting, and beyond can be conceived not as distinct elements or layers, but rather as a singular expression." See fabrication, atmosphere.
• Digital fabrication defined operationally: it "translate[s] information from a digital model or drawing to a computer-controlled fabrication machine, transforming immaterial design content into a material product"; serial mass production of "customizable, non-identical elements" makes bespoke construction viable; the "combination of increased modes of spatial articulation within a delimited palette" reinforces the discipline's identity-assertion. See digital-fabrication.
• Exemplar 1 — Crystal Bridges Museum Store (Marlon Blackwell Architects, within Moshe Safdie's museum): a lamella analogy ("the rib-like structure that forms the underside of a mushroom cap") creates "the powerful perceptual effect of a continuous surface that wraps ceiling and walls"; sectioning a singular solid shape yields the cutting paths; "the multiple sections recede in the service of articulating the legibility of the singular element." See digital-fabrication.
• Poché materialized: as one aligns with the short edge of a rib, "The thickness of the construct is visible, an experience that was once only available through the abstraction of section drawing. The space of poché is now embodied in the material perception of the digitally fabricated rib." The envelope "never touch[es] the surrounding construction, with continuous reveals at the perimeter creating the effect that this element hovers within the space" — "a delamination from it, yet borrow[ing] the logic of the architecture to establish independence." See poche, boundaries.
• Exemplar 2 — SILO AR+D's North Presbyterian Church (Cleveland), in an existing industrial building: exploiting "the inherent contradictions in the project" (a single sanctuary with religious qualities — symmetry, axiality, volume, indirect natural light — subdividable into multiple rooms with asymmetrical entries), conceived as "a hybrid canopy/cathedral, a singular ceiling surface that continuously inflects to create a series of pyramidal vaults," concealing movable-partition hardware. See adaptive-reuse, flexible-interior.
• The relational-pattern claim: "The fact that these patterns can emerge out of information established in relational criteria from a project's architectural context is perhaps the digital technologies' most important contribution to the development of interior architecture's discipline."
• The design method: "The resultant form is derived as the interior applies pressure to the exterior, in effect, vacuum forming to its architectural limits" — producing "a highly controlled, yet nondeterministic, spatial configuration and surface effect emerging out of resituating the autonomous interior in relation to an existing architecture."
• The closing double imperative: "It is not enough, however, for an interior to simply look different from the architecture it is housed within. Instead, interior architecture must articulate its position in relation to architecture by revealing the means and methods in which those distinctions are manifested"; digital fabrication "has begun to actualize interior architecture's disciplinary imperative to, quite literally, fabricate distinctions from architecture through interiority," activating "the spatial designer's capacity for speculative imagination."
• On architecture's own autonomy struggle (via John McMorrough): architecture's history is "the creation of reasonable explanations for its existence… made in the midst of a series of preservative justifications, in leaps of faith and defensive postures" — interior architecture must differentiate itself from a field with an "equally problematic and conflicted record of establishing disciplinary autonomy" (cf. Robert Somol's Autonomy and Ideology, note 2). See architectural-autonomy.

Connections

Concepts: interior-architecture · interiority · fabrication · digital-fabrication · skyscraper-interior · inside-outside-dialectic · poche · boundaries · adaptive-reuse · flexible-interior · authorship · architectural-autonomy · atmosphere · interior-design · computational-design · digital-architecture Authors: Marc Manack · Gregory Marinic (ed.) · Michael Webb (the sibling practitioner-theorist chapter: Webb reverses the dialectic's production direction, Manack intensifies the distinction) · Edward Hollis (the disciplinary historiography this chapter extends) Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture — Position L: the fabricating discipline, which accepts architecture's precedence and converts it into technological advantage Related source notes: Webb — Inside out — the two practitioner chapters of the Reader form a pair: Webb's boundary-dissolution ("the outside is the inside distended") vs Manack's boundary-intensification ("interiors have sought to intensify distinctions from architecture"); both derive the interior from technology and both claim the boundary as the discipline's medium · Hollis — (Re)constructing Histories — the founding historiography Manack implicitly answers with a technological rather than historical claim to autonomy · Qureshi — Spatial therapies — Qureshi's "technological innovation through fabrication and material" tactic is Manack's whole subject; but where Qureshi subordinates fabrication to therapy across time, Manack makes fabrication itself the discipline's identity-claim · Taylor — Shape shifting — the dynamic conception's responsive interior and Manack's fabricated interior are two technological conceptions: Taylor's is real-time and behavioral, Manack's is constructional and perceptual · Teston — Politicizing the interior — the ninth and tenth conceptions in sequence: Teston's political frontier ("the defined edge is imaginary") vs Manack's constructional boundary ("continuous reveals") — two different thicknesses of the same disciplinary frontier · Deyong — A history of style and the modern interior — Deyong's interior/exterior schism as modernism's founding condition meets Manack's claim that intensifying the schism is the interior discipline's program · Bachelard — The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the phenomenological counterpoint: where Bachelard dissolves the division's geometrical evidence into lived value, Manack re-materializes the division as perceptible thickness · Claypool — The Discrete Turn — digital fabrication's serial elements (sliced ribs, tiled panels) as a discrete-assembly ontology of the interior

Direct Quotes

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

"1. the action or process of manufacturing or inventing something. 2. an invention; a lie." (epigraph, dictionary definition of fabrication)

"architecture's history and legacy – maybe its very meaning – is to be found in the creation of reasonable explanations for its existence, its raisons d'etre made in the midst of a series of preservative justifications, in leaps of faith and defensive postures." (John McMorrough, quoted in the opening)

"Perhaps rather than explanations, architecture's best claim to reinforcing its own discipline lies in the fundamental act of design in the creation of space, making distinctions from "amorphous" and non-architectural environments." (opening)

"Unique among the design disciplines, interior architecture is contingent upon another field for its existence. The interior is derived from architecture, and in every instance, architecture is a precondition for interior architecture, yet the same claim cannot be made in reverse." (opening)

"Interiors are far less deferential to architecture than architecture is dependent on the environment." (opening)

"Considering parallel histories between the two fields, architecture has progressively sought to diminish distinctions from the environment, while interiors have sought to intensify distinctions from architecture." (opening)

"Rather than a submissive or subservient stance suggested by its relationship to architecture – by articulating its disciplinary autonomy in association with technological advancements in design and construction – interior architecture has developed the techniques to produce some of the most powerful transformative effects available to designers engaged with space." (opening)

"Architecture begins with the exterior, on the outside." (on the two fields' directions)

"a work of architecture often establishes its identity primarily through its exterior presence, with the interior serving to authenticate the architecture's attitude toward, and relationship to, its exterior environment." (on architecture's direction)

"its creative preoccupation lies in the production of an alternative environment within architecture, a designed world within a designed world." (on interior architecture)

"Given that interior architecture is a construct within a construct, its relationship with architecture is at once less interdependent and more relaxed, expanding the field's potential for pure invention." (on the construct within a construct)

"Ultimately, the interiority of interior architecture is a complete fabrication, an artifice embedded within an edifice." (thesis statement, closing the opening argument)

"The massiveness and opacity of the construction enabled expressive, unique, and often counterintuitive distinctions in the formal presences, spatial qualities, and surface effects between inside and outside, establishing unique identities between architecture and interior through the use of poché and ornamentation to create character." (on premodern solid construction)

"In modern building, as solid construction gives way to layered filigree assemblies and systems as new building typologies emerge, interior architecture finds its agency as a discipline." (on the modern condition)

"As an established profession, the design of interiors comes into being through the modern tall building." (on the skyscraper)

"This building type, whose 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." (on the skyscraper)

"Most of the interior volume of skyscrapers was given over to the interior designer." (on the skyscraper)

"The paradox for interior architecture is that the skyscraper both challenged and reinforced the discipline's nascent identity." (on the skyscraper paradox)

"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." (on the sectional dynamic)

"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." (on the sectional dynamic)

"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." (on the skyscraper)

"Regardless, it is 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." (on the emancipated interior)

"Suspended ceilings, raised floors, demountable partitions, and flexible, reconfigurable office furniture systems (the kit of parts of the modern corporate interior) all operate with an impermanence and literal detachment from the architectural envelope within which they are housed." (on the kit of parts)

"The decoupling of the interior from architecture, in technological terms, not only provides the means for generating an independent interior architecture, but also emancipates the field to invent the disciplinary logic of interiority." (on the kit of parts)

"Here, a complete and alternate world apart from the architecture, with unique authorial expression and embodied spatial effects, embodies a presence and identity that rivals architecture." (on the emancipated interior)

"Effectively, the discipline of interior architecture seeks to recapture the distinctions between inside and outside inherent in premodern architecture, but with modern technologies, and from a point of view that privileges interiority, developing discrete spatial experiences with unique identities from the inside out." (on the discipline's project)

"For interior architecture to achieve a distinct identity requires legibility and a trajectory toward singularity, one which takes its fundamental design techniques – namely the development of an interior spatial envelope, the subdivision or demising of interior space, the articulation or treatment of surfaces, and the placement of objects within a space – and begins to merge them into singular emphatic elements that define the spatial design as distinct from the architecture." (on the four techniques)

"The effect has been for the interior architect to consider spatial design as a unified atmosphere in a direct manner, with a limited vocabulary but a high degree of dynamic quality." (on the unified atmosphere)

"Under this conception, floor, wall, ceiling, furniture, lighting, and beyond can be conceived not as distinct elements or layers, but rather as a singular expression." (on the unified atmosphere)

"Digital fabrication processes translate information from a digital model or drawing to a computer-controlled fabrication machine, transforming immaterial design content into a material product." (definition, on digital fabrication)

"The efficiency with which customizable, non-identical elements are designed and serially mass produced has made the deployment of bespoke elements viable in the construction industry by mitigating the premium cost for custom components and assemblies." (on mass customization)

"It is this combination of increased modes of spatial articulation within a delimited palette that has reinforced contemporary interior architecture's ability to assert its unique identity." (on the delimited palette)

"the museum store creates autonomy for the interior architecture by dramatically refiguring the interior profile with an undulating spatial envelope composed of digitally fabricated wood sections." (on the Crystal Bridges Museum Store)

"Using the analogy of a lamella (the rib-like structure that forms the underside of a mushroom cap), the architects create the powerful perceptual effect of a continuous surface that wraps ceiling and walls through the sequence and spacing of the wood fins." (on the Crystal Bridges Museum Store)

"By sectioning the shape, two-dimensional materials are laminated in series to construct a three-dimensional volume of space, but in effect, the multiple sections recede in the service of articulating the legibility of the singular element and the experience of the singular space." (on sectioning)

"The thickness of the construct is visible, an experience that was once only available through the abstraction of section drawing. The space of poché is now embodied in the material perception of the digitally fabricated rib." (on materialized poché)

"The wood ceiling and wall envelope never touch the surrounding construction, with continuous reveals at the perimeter creating the effect that this element hovers within the space." (on the reveals)

"the smooth geometry of the interior appears as a delamination from it, yet borrows the logic of the architecture to establish independence and distinctions from it." (on the interior's independence)

"The fact that these patterns can emerge out of information established in relational criteria from a project's architectural context is perhaps the digital technologies' most important contribution to the development of interior architecture's discipline." (on digital patterning)

"the spatial design of North Presbyterian Church was conceived as a hybrid canopy/cathedral, a singular ceiling surface that continuously inflects to create a series of pyramidal vaults that delineate multiple scales of space, concealing the appearance of hardware and headers required for movable partitions." (on North Presbyterian Church)

"The resultant form is derived as the interior applies pressure to the exterior, in effect, vacuum forming to its architectural limits." (on North Presbyterian Church)

"This design process reveals a unique potential of digital fabrication for interior architecture: to develop a highly controlled, yet nondeterministic, spatial configuration and surface effect emerging out of resituating the autonomous interior in relation to an existing architecture." (on North Presbyterian Church)

"It is not enough, however, for an interior to simply look different from the architecture it is housed within. Instead, interior architecture must articulate its position in relation to architecture by revealing the means and methods in which those distinctions are manifested." (closing argument)

"Ultimately, digital fabrication has begun to actualize interior architecture's disciplinary imperative to, quite literally, fabricate distinctions from architecture through interiority. In doing so, it has activated the spatial designer's capacity for speculative imagination." (closing)

Open Questions

• Is the fabricating conception genuinely a tenth conception of the discipline, or the technological completion of the artefact conception (the interior as bounded object, now manufactured rather than drawn)? Can "a complete fabrication" be reconciled with the alteration conception's care for the inherited shell — or does the North Presbyterian case show fabrication depending on the host building's pressure?
• The epigraph's second definition ("an invention; a lie") is knowingly in play: if "the interiority of interior architecture is a complete fabrication," does the discipline admit that interiority is false — or does fabrication here name a constructive artifice (cf. truth-and-illusion) the way Pozzo's quadrature was a framed illusion (La Coe)?
• Manack's inversion thesis — architecture diminishes distinction from the environment while interiors intensify distinction from architecture — contradicts Webb's boundary-dissolution thesis ("the outside is the inside distended"). Are these two practitioner programs (intensification vs dissolution) the interior discipline's two poles, or is Webb's negative-space house actually an intensification of a different boundary (car/shell)?
• If poché is "now embodied in the material perception of the digitally fabricated rib," is materialized poché still poché — the term named the hollow space in the wall (Spuybroek, the Beaux-Arts fill), whereas the rib's gap is a revealed separation between envelope and host?
• The skyscraper birthed the interior profession through architects' disinterest ("Most of the interior volume of skyscrapers was given over to the interior designer"): is the profession's autonomy then structurally parasitic on architectural neglect — and what happens to it as architects re-occupy the tall-building interior?
• "A highly controlled, yet nondeterministic, spatial configuration" — is nondeterminism a genuine design category (the pattern's emergence from relational criteria) or a dressed determinism (standard triangular tiles computationally subdivided from a rectilinear sheet)?
• Manack claims digital fabrication's limited material palette is a condition of disciplinary strength ("increased modes of spatial articulation within a delimited palette") — the inverse of the usual claim that a narrow palette constrains. Is the delimited palette the interior's equivalent of Bachelard's restricted intimate space, where "concentration… draws the dialectics of inside and outside… its strength"?
• If the discipline must "articulate its position… by revealing the means and methods in which those distinctions are manifested," is the interior's disciplinary evidence then constructional (the revealed detail) rather than historical (Hollis) or political (Teston) — and can one discipline carry all three evidences at once?

Notes

• The chapter is Chapter 9 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge, 2018) — following Hollis (1), Deyong (2), La Coe (3), Qureshi (4), Webb (5), Stokes-Rees (6), Taylor (7), and Teston (8); it is the Reader's second practitioner-authored theory chapter after Webb's "Inside out."
• SILO AR+D, the practice cited for North Presbyterian Church, is the author's own firm (founded 2012 with Frank Jacobus; Charlotte NC, Cleveland OH, Fayetteville AR) — the chapter cites its own built work, as Webb's chapter cites the Drive-in House.
• Notes: Somol, Autonomy and Ideology (1997) on architecture's autonomy search; McMorrough, "Ru(m)inations: The Haunts of Contemporary Architecture," Perspecta 40 (2008): 164; William J. Mitchell, The Logic of Architecture (1990) on distinctions and design worlds; Andrea Deplazes, Constructing Architecture (2005) on solid vs filigree construction; Lisa Iwamoto, Digital Fabrications (2009) and Branko Kolarevic, Manufacturing Material Effects (2008) on digital fabrication ("Sectioning is a term borrowed from Iwamoto," pp. 8–17); Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011) on authorship, mass customization, and identicality.