Inside out

Author: Michael Webb Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 5 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/webb-2018-inside-out.md

Summary

Architect Michael Webb (founding member of Archigram; born in Henley-on-Thames) takes up "the notion of interior architecture" by pressing on the instability of the interior/exterior boundary in modern architecture: "in most buildings… the surfaces should be considered as belonging to both the interior and exterior," yet in "modern architecture's weirder moments" the distinction dissolves — Le Corbusier's early Garches sketch (bird or ceiling? sky or interior?), the de Bestegui roof garden (lawn or carpet?), James Tyrrell's [Turrell's] PS1 ceiling (a "grand illusion" shattered by a passing airliner). Webb then offers two of his own works as design-theoretical answers: the unfinished Henley regatta painting, in which the air enclosed by the perspectival cone of vision "has magically solidified" and can be extracted "like an ice core" — the contents of the cone becoming "components of an interior space"; and the Drive-in House, where the car is ingested through an intake tube into a rotating drum — Wankel-engine fashion — until "the car has become the gorgeous object within" and the interior walls become "a distended negative of the car exterior." The chapter's thesis is the culminating formula: "The outside is the inside distended, and thus, results in an interior architecture."

Key Claims

"It is quite evident in most buildings that the surfaces should be considered as belonging to both the interior and exterior. In some of modern architecture's weirder moments, however, this distinction is not quite so evident." — surfaces carry double membership; modernism sometimes dissolves the distinction. See inside-outside-dialectic.
The Garches riddle: Le Corbusier's early design sketch "purports to show a large double-height interior space" — but the squiggle in the ceiling "looks like a bird"; "if we are looking at the sky and not the ceiling, does that make it an exterior space?" The same ambiguity governs "Monsieur de Bestegui's Parisian roof garden": "Is that not a manicured lawn…? If so, it must surely be an exterior view. Or is it a carpet, in which case it must be an interior view?" See le-corbusier, phenomenal-transparency (Rowe & Slutzky's Garches).
James Tyrrell's [Turrell's] famous PS1 ceiling in Queens NY is "a grand illusion shattered not by a bird but by UA 3245 making its final approach into LaGuardia Airport flying well below 35,000 ft." — the sky framed as ceiling. Note 1: "The airliner's ceiling, while invisible, is very much an actuality … so is Tyrell's ceiling." See truth-and-illusion.
SITE's Best Products project: "the enclosed volume of the big box store shifted sideways off its base, so that many of the items for sale displayed in the sales area find themselves out in the open. SITE's work represented the ne plus ultra of architecture for disaster movies." — the store's interior contents spilling into the exterior. See consumerism, commercial-vernacular, post-retail-space.
The Henley painting: the depicted landscape is "the volume of air, land, and water enclosed by a perspectival cone of vision, whose axis is parallel to the rowing lanes of the course, and whose apex is in the Cyclopean eye of the beholder" — the golden afternoon of the Rev. C.L. Dodgson's river glide (the prefatory poem of Alice in Wonderland, per note 3). See perspective.
The ice-core move: "I have allowed myself the notion that the air within the cone has magically solidified. It can thus be removed from the overall landscape and examined independently like an ice core. By this move, though, the contents of the cone become components of an interior space and the wall of the cone a window to the nothingness beyond." — representation's cone extracted as a solid interior object. See representation, perspective.
The easel displaced from the beholder: only what the beholder can see is rendered; what lies behind those objects (from the easel's position) appears "as negative 'shadows' radiating from the beholder's eye, voids slashing through the ice core and breaking through the exterior wall of the cone. If the beholder were to move, the voids would begin rotating like movie gala searchlights to create new gashes in the wall." Note 2: "The cone has been sectioned horizontally, thus making its top surface a parabola." — the beholder's gaze as a moving, wounding agency within the represented interior.
Via Reyner Banham's 1965 Letter from America: Banham praised not the "corporate modern architecture purveyed by the likes of Paul Rudolph, SOM, and I.M. Pei" but "the automobile-induced vernacular of mobile homes and drive-ins that represented a radical change in the basic programming of a building" — a vernacular "quintessentially American in its seeming response to the needs of the restlessly mobile society." See automobile-vernacular, everyday-architecture, banham-reyner.
Banham on the drive-in movie house: "just a flat piece of ground where the operating company provides visual images and piped sound, and the rest of the situation comes on wheels. You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car. You also bring Coke, cookies, Kleenex, Chesterfields, spare clothes, shoes, the Pill, and god wot [sic] else they don't provide at Radio City." — the building reduced to ground plus services; the occupant brings the interior. See terrain-vague, domestic-interior.
The provisional interior: "the smoochy couple dancing to the music of the radio in their parked convertible have created a ballroom in the wilderness (dance floor courtesy of the highway department)" — a vision of "rapture in the wilderness [that] presumably dissolves when the couple return to their car and the dance floor turns back into a length of highway … and silence replaces the sound of music." — the interior as temporary, conjured event.
The Drive-in House (drawing, 1995 redrawing): a horizontal section showing the car driven "through the intake tube into a clockwise rotating drum," with seals preventing "hot or cold external air from entering the house"; the house "nestled into the side of a hill."
The representational convention: the tripartite drawing places the driver's "Cyclopean line of sight" steadfastly vertical in all three phases — "the building must rotate around the driver, rather than the driver around the building." The datum of the composition is the occupant's center of vision, not the architecture.
The rotation's phases: in part 2, "the drum has rotated further, the volume of air contained within the drum warming or cooling to the internal temperature of the house"; in part 3, "the drum has rotated yet further so that its internal walls now align with those of the house. The car has become the gorgeous object within."
The machine analog: "The operational geometry of the drum was an attempt to emulate – albeit at a giant scale – the Wankel engine's ingenious rotational harmonies; hence the term 'intake' or 'exhaust' with the car itself playing the part of the gas and air mixture. The analog only takes you so far!"
The culminating claim (1985 redrawing, "Roof Plan at night"): "The mechanism is more compact… The interior walls of the house, then, are a distended negative of the car exterior. The outside is the inside distended, and thus, results in an interior architecture." See interior-architecture, drive-in-house.
Note 4 looks forward to the autonomous car: the smart self-driving car (rentable version) — "drive it, leave it at the entrance to J.C. Penney and there's another waiting for you when you exit … sure … after a 10 minute wait … at least has the potential for eliminating those pressed metal deserts more completely than ever the drive-in could." — parking lots ("pressed metal deserts") as the terrain the drive-in house line of thought targets. See post-retail-space, augmented-reality.

Connections

Concepts: drive-in-house · automobile-vernacular · interior-architecture · inside-outside-dialectic · perspective · representation · domestic-interior · interiority · commercial-vernacular · consumerism · post-retail-space · everyday-architecture · terrain-vague · phenomenal-transparency Authors: Michael Webb · Gregory Marinic (ed.) · Reyner Banham (quoted at length on the drive-in) · Le Corbusier (the Garches sketch and roof garden) Debates: truth-and-illusion — the ceiling-or-sky riddles and Turrell's PS1 ceiling as modern episodes of illusion joined to architecture · interior-design-vs-architecture — interior architecture defined by design practice itself, as the dissolution of the interior/exterior boundary rather than a turf war Related source notes: McClure & McClure — Inside Looking In: The Prospect of the Aspect — the sibling boundary-chapter: Webb generates the outside from the inside ("the outside is the inside distended") where the McClures hold both sides simultaneously ("both a connector and a separator"); the Pompidou's "perceived interior is turned inside-out" is their version of his inversion · Scott — Architecture or Techno-Utopia — Felicity Scott names Webb (with Archigram) among the 1960s–70s experimental architects whose techno-utopian practice Tafuri and Rowe's debate "foreclosed"; Webb's chapter supplies a first-hand specimen of that corpus · La Coe — Quadrature — the perspectival cone of vision shared: where Pozzo positioned an embodied observer inside the cone, Webb solidifies the cone itself into an extractable interior · Deyong — A history of style and the modern interior — Garches as the shared ground: Rowe & Slutzky's phenomenal-transparency analysis of Villa Stein meets Webb's rereading of the early Garches sketch · Bachelard — The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the phenomenological counterpart: Bachelard's inside/outside dialectic lived as "play of values," Webb's architectural versions (surface, lawn, ceiling) · Hollis — (Re)constructing Histories — the discipline Webb's formula names · Qureshi — Spatial therapies — the big box store and parking-lot ("pressed metal deserts") territory Webb's SITE reference and note 4 anticipate · Venturi et al. — Learning from Las Vegas — the commercial-strip vernacular context for Banham's automobile-induced vernacular · Wassmer — Big Box Retail Decentralization — the big-box geography of the SITE work

Direct Quotes

Page numbers are not available in the chapter text; quotes are located by section heading.

"It is quite evident in most buildings that the surfaces should be considered as belonging to both the interior and exterior. In some of modern architecture's weirder moments, however, this distinction is not quite so evident." (§ opening)

"If we are looking at the sky and not the ceiling, does that make it an exterior space? Was this little sketch a progenitor of James Tyrrell's famous ceiling at PS1 in Queens NY, a grand illusion shattered not by a bird but by UA 3245 making its final approach into LaGuardia Airport flying well below 35,000 ft.?" (§ opening)

"Is that not a manicured lawn in Monsieur de Bestegui's Parisian roof garden? If so, it must surely be an exterior view. Or is it a carpet, in which case it must be an interior view?" (§ opening)

"In one of the projects that SITE did for Best Products, the enclosed volume of the big box store shifted sideways off its base, so that many of the items for sale displayed in the sales area find themselves out in the open. SITE's work represented the ne plus ultra of architecture for disaster movies." (§ opening)

"The landscape depicted in the painting… is that of the regatta course at Henley-on-Thames; namely, the volume of air, land, and water enclosed by a perspectival cone of vision, whose axis is parallel to the rowing lanes of the course, and whose apex is in the Cyclopean eye of the beholder." (§ opening, on the Henley regatta painting)

"I have allowed myself the notion that the air within the cone has magically solidified. It can thus be removed from the overall landscape and examined independently like an ice core. By this move, though, the contents of the cone become components of an interior space and the wall of the cone a window to the nothingness beyond." (§ opening)

"What lies behind those objects (behind in terms of the view from my easel) will appear as negative 'shadows' radiating from the beholder's eye, voids slashing through the ice core and breaking through the exterior wall of the cone. If the beholder were to move, the voids would begin rotating like movie gala searchlights to create new gashes in the wall." (§ opening)

"No, he wanted to bring to our attention the automobile-induced vernacular of mobile homes and drive-ins that represented a radical change in the basic programming of a building." (§ "The drive-in house," on Reyner Banham's 1965 Letter from America)

"just a flat piece of ground where the operating company provides visual images and piped sound, and the rest of the situation comes on wheels. You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car. You also bring Coke, cookies, Kleenex, Chesterfields, spare clothes, shoes, the Pill, and god wot [sic] else they don't provide at Radio City." (Reyner Banham on the drive-in movie house, quoted § "The drive-in house")

"the smoochy couple dancing to the music of the radio in their parked convertible have created a ballroom in the wilderness (dance floor courtesy of the highway department)." (Banham, quoted § "The drive-in house")

"Here, our eyes must be usurped by the driver's Cyclopean line of sight, his center of vision, which is likewise 'up' in all three phases, meaning that the building must rotate around the driver, rather than the driver around the building." (§ "The drive-in house")

"In part 3, the drum has rotated yet further so that its internal walls now align with those of the house. The car has become the gorgeous object within." (§ "The drive-in house")

"The operational geometry of the drum was an attempt to emulate – albeit at a giant scale – the Wankel engine's ingenious rotational harmonies; hence the term 'intake' or 'exhaust' with the car itself playing the part of the gas and air mixture. The analog only takes you so far!" (§ "The drive-in house")

"The interior walls of the house, then, are a distended negative of the car exterior. The outside is the inside distended, and thus, results in an interior architecture." (§ "The drive-in house," on the 1985 "Roof Plan at night" drawing)

"The airliner's ceiling, while invisible, is very much an actuality … so is Tyrell's ceiling." (Note 1)

"The smart, self-driving car (rentable version only): drive it, leave it at the entrance to J.C. Penney and there's another waiting for you when you exit … sure … after a 10 minute wait … at least has the potential for eliminating those pressed metal deserts more completely than ever the drive-in could." (Note 4)

Open Questions

Does Webb's formula — "the outside is the inside distended" — describe a general mechanism of interior architecture (the interior as the negative/extrusion of an object) or only the logic of his own project? Can it be reconciled with the artefact, alteration, composition, quadrature, and therapy conceptions catalogued on interior-architecture?
The chapter claims surfaces "should be considered as belonging to both the interior and exterior" — does this resolve or merely restate Bachelard's finding that the inside/outside opposition "ceases to have as coefficient its geometrical evidence"? Is the double-membership surface the architectural version of the "play of values"?
The drive-in house inverts the occupant/architecture relation: "the building must rotate around the driver, rather than the driver around the building." Is this an anticipation of robotic architecture — and does note 4's self-driving car (eliminating "pressed metal deserts") make the drive-in house a proto-autonomous-vehicle proposal?
Banham's drive-in interior ("You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car") dissolves when the couple return to their car: is the provisionally conjured interior — "a ballroom in the wilderness" — an interior at all, or does it show that interiority requires enclosure only as event, not as matter?
Is Webb's ice-core painting (the cone of vision extracted as a solid interior) a serious proposal about representation constructing interiors (cf. Rice via Hollis) or a surrealist jeu — and does the distinction matter for interior theory?

Notes

The chapter is the written companion to Webb's lifelong drawing projects; the Two Journeys exhibition/monograph (Lars Müller, 2018) is explicitly organized around two themes — a train of thought deriving from Reyner Banham's article A Home is not a House (1965) and a study of linear perspective projection — matching the chapter's two halves.
The source renders "James Tyrrell" for James Turrell and cites the original Drive-in House project (1968) via redrawn drawings dated 1985 and 1995.