Interior Architecture Commons^™

Adaptive Ephemeral Interiority: Upcycling Site Specific Interiors, Marco Sosa, Lina Ahmad, Karim Musfy

Interiority

Adaptive reuse in architecture refers to the process of redesigning, converting, and reappropriating existing spaces for functions different from the ones they were originally designed for. This research is a case study showing an alternative to this concept, re-purposing aviation parts and finding new programmatic functions in the design learning studio. The pedagogy approach, adopted by a design studio in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), presents the fluidity of adaptive interiority against rigidity and site specificity. The research results in the creation of adaptive modular spaces and ephemeral interiority through upcycling design, flexibility, materiality, reusability, recyclability, and connectivity while simultaneously …

Water-Based Settlement And The Loss Of Community Water Resilience, Patiphol Yodsurang, Yasufumi Uekita, Ikuro Shimizu

Interiority

After the first dam was built in the Chao Phraya River during the 1950s, several water-controlled structures and megaprojects were built throughout the basin. For the first 30 years, water levels were stable, and the dams largely provided flood prevention. However, in recent years, global warming and climate change have been driving the frequency and intensity of extreme events. Local people have gradually lost their resilience against living with water during the years of a stable flood and flow system. This caused the interiority of the amphibious culture to drown into an oblivion state in the water-based settlement. The investigation …

Responsive Interior: Tactics For Adaptation And Resilience, Paramita Atmodiwirjo, Yandi Andri Yatmo

Interiority

Design disciplines continuously face challenges to demonstrate resilience in responding to rapid changes and complex issues in our contemporary world. The idea of responsive interior highlights the ability to respond appropriately to a particular context through various tactics to ensure its relevance and resilience for the present and future. Interior practices deal with intervention, adaptation, and alteration of existing conditions, as well as finding new uses and programmes that can be added to existing spaces. Behind such attempts, a series of responsive tactics has become necessary to gather knowledge and understanding of the existing qualities, which should be an important …

Hybrid And Performative Spaces: Towards A New Analytical Lens, Ayman Kassem

Interiority

The exhibition space is a territory where architects and designers have experimented with hybrid and performative spatial qualities. However, such spatial mechanisms have expanded into other spatial practices. As we live in a constantly changing world, these practices allow spatial systems that adjust to continual changes in modes of living. Newer approaches to spatial transformation try to respond to the need for transience and flexibility. Hybrid and performative interventions are elaborated to transform existing spaces with strategic non-architectural rearrangements. As a result, our inhabited spaces, such as exhibitions, are becoming hybrid and performative. However, hybrid and performative may be perceived …

My House And Coronavirus: Experiences Of The Pandemic Full Lockdown, Faredah Mohsen Al-Murahhem

Interiority

On March 2, 2020, Saudi Arabia announced the first coronavirus case. A complete lockdown started in Makkah on April 2, 2020. The holy capital of Islam has always been packed with pilgrims, but the situation was different with COVID-19. The full lockdown continued in Makkah even during the holy month of Ramadan. This study discusses the experience of full lockdown in the context of Makkah with its unique status as a holy city, with the longer period of its complete lockdown compared to other Saudi cities. The article presents a case study focusing on the interior design students at Umm …

Deep Interior: Sensorial Encounters Of Orang Suku Laut With The Sea, Rini Suryantini, Diandra Pandu Saginatari, Yandi Andri Yatmo

Interiority

This paper explores the idea of a deep interior during an encounter between a sea tribe and the sea, as an intimate interaction between the body and nature that consists of liquid matter, the earth’s surface, and the sea inhabitants. This paper introduces the idea of intimate engagement with such a liquid environment to reveal its interiorisation. It arguably positions ecological understanding through reading and responding to nature as the key to interiorisation. This study learns about the livelihood of a sea tribe, Orang Suku Laut (OSL), in the Riau Archipelago, Indonesia, mainly through food hunting and gathering activities. Through …

Interiority From The Body, Mind, And Culture, Paramita Atmodiwirjo, Yandi Andri Yatmo

Interiority

Within the interior occupation, the human body and interior are always interacting. Body-interior relation is a key idea in understanding the human body's presence, experience, and performance in interior space. The body and the interior can define, command, and affect each other. The transactional perspective in environmental psychology emphasises the reciprocity between body and environment. Awareness of these reciprocal relationships becomes a key in understanding the interior as a stage for the human body and its dynamic processes. This issue of Interiority presents a collection of studies that situate the human body as an inherent part of the interior environment …

Towards Responsive Interiors: Practicing Neuroscience-Informed Design Approaches In Interior Design Education, Eva Storgaard, Marjan Michels, Inge Somers

Interiority

Growing insights from neuroscience—here, understood as an umbrella term for a number of empirical disciplines that study the relation brain, nervous system, genes, and behaviour—and its inquiries into how human behaviour and well-being is affected by interiors can enrich and inform the design of interiors and its properties innovatively. Interior design education can play a key role in linking the insights stemming from research and turn the question of human, experiential responsiveness into an elementary perspective of the design process.

In this paper, we explain a pedagogical method developed for one of our graduate studios that addresses this issue and …

Colour, Light, And Materiality: Biophilic Interior Design Presence In Research And Practice, Beth Mcgee, Nam-Kyu Park

Interiority

The biophilic design hypothesis uses nature-based environmental design for optimising people’s health and well-being. Stephen Kellert in 2008 developed a list of biophilic attributes that was further refined in the Biophilic Interior Design Matrix (BID-M) to specifically support the interior application of biophilic design for health and well-being. The present study further investigates biophilic interior design using the BID-M language and the key interior design components colour, light, and materiality. The first part of the study reviewed four decades of literature related to biophilia and colour, light, and materiality to investigate a total of 19 publications. The second part of …

‘Sense Of Place’ On Sacred Cultural And Architectural Heritage: St. Peter’S Church Of Melaka, Azizi Bahauddin, Rani Prihatmanti, Sophie Asha Putri

Interiority

The ‘sense of place’ of a religious building can be sacred for the community that frequents the architecture. It is deeply embedded with cultural attributes that made the architecture more meaningful and became a structure that ties the community. This article examines the St. Peter’s Church in Melaka which is seen as the epitome of the Portuguese community as a place for them to congregate. This study is influenced by Lefebvre’s space triad theory on the production of social space based on the ‘perceived,’ ‘conceived,’ and ‘lived’ space to form the interiority through sense of place. This qualitative research delves …

Primbon: Representation Of Kraton Yogyakarta, Ami Arfianti, Murni Rachmawati, Purwanita Setijanti

Interiority

Primbon as Javanese local knowledge has been a guide for Javanese everyday and ritual life, included buildings, for decades. This paper intends to investigate the use of primbon in the Kraton Yogyakarta (Palace of Yogyakarta) as the representation of the sultan (king). The investigation was conducted through interpretive criticism to reveal the degree of conformity under the rules and principles in primbon as an attempt to form a new perspective in understanding the primbon.The analysis focuses on verses 172 and 194–196 of Primbon Betaljemur Adammakna, which deals with the arrangement of buildings. By transliterating the verses into English and …

Interior Practice Of Women In Kampung Kauman Semarang, Arnis Rochma Harani, Titien Woro Murtini, Mustika Kusumaning Wardhani

Interiority

The spatial practice of women in Kampung Kauman is a concrete manifestation of the active agents of spatial production in everyday life, which uses housing to support their economic, social, and cultural activities. This paper aims to expand the idea of women-led domestic territory using the lens of interiority, highlighting women's practices that connect and expand their space in the inner space of the dwelling and beyond. This research was conducted by mapping the everyday practices of women in Kampung Kauman to reveal various spatial settings in space. This paper argues that women's practice can broaden the understanding of interiority …

Interiority Of Agraharam: Traditional Houses In Temple Towns Of India, Manan Singal

Interiority

The article aims to provide a multisensory reading within the multiple scales of spaces in the traditional settlement of agraharam. This multisensory reading generates layers of interiority that exist across temples, streets, and houses. Agraharam is the traditional house of the Brahmin (priest) community found in temple towns of South India. This house responds to religious beliefs, tradition, and local climatic conditions and displays a balance of sensory experiences which enrich the overall living experience. In this article, interiority is referred to as the characteristic of being ‘inward,’ where memories and practices of a specific community are associated with …

El Croquis Night: Excursus Into Nocturnal Obliteration In Architectural Media, Javier Fernández Contreras

Interiority

El Croquis is one of the most prestigious architectural magazines in the world. Founded in 1982 by Richard Levene and Fernando Marquez, it publishes five monographs every year. The volumes dedicated to established Pritzker Prize names like OMA Rem Koolhaas, SANAA Sejima & Nishizawa, Herzog & de Meuron, Alvaro Siza or Rafael Moneo, are considered their respective oeuvre complète. The journal almost never publishes nocturnal photographs of interior spaces. The same goes for other major architecture magazines. In February 2020, HEAD – Genève invited Richard Levene to create a night edition of El Croquis. The workshop focused on the …

Prioritising Storage Practices: A New Approach To Housing Design Thinking, Elena Marco, Katie Williams, Sonja Oliveira

Interiority

Inhabitants of UK housing have more possessions than ever, whilst space for living in standardised houses is at a premium. The acquisition of material possessions, and how it affects both space and inhabitants’ wellbeing, has not previously been considered in architectural practice or housing policy research fields. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how practising architects design for the storage of material possessions in housing. For the first time, it places storage practices at the centre of housing design thinking, by engaging practising architects in a design intervention to explore original design solutions that support inhabitants’ lives and lifestyles, …

Between Inhabited Interiors And Interiors On Display: Exploring Spatial Boundaries At Rosenborg Castle, Ane Pilegaard

Interiority

When visiting museums, we meet various types of physical barriers, such as glass vitrines, railings, and extended ropes, which have been put there to protect the objects on display. Such barriers are often accused of creating an unfavourable distance to museum objects but can also be thought of in more positive terms, as this article will seek to demonstrate. Based on analyses of museum display boundaries at Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, where visitors can experience objects from The Royal Danish Collection within historic interiors, the article looks into the effects of such boundaries on the museum experience. The article explores …

The Public Interior Space Within Louvre Abu Dhabi Dome: A Visual Reflection, Karim Musfy, Marco Sosa, Lina Ahmad

Interiority

What defines an interior space? Is a traditional threshold the only building element considered as a clear component demarcating interiority from the outside environment? Could light or water be just as clear? How can scale challenge the identification of an internal space? Is a living space more identifiable as an interior volume? What about an internal courtyard for a family house outlining the beginning of a nation or the opposite extreme in the time-space continuum, a 24,000 square meters domed roof over a series of intimate spaces establishing a nation’s cultural intention internationally? Can a central space act as a …

New Territories: Reimagined Interiorities, Lucy Marlor

Interiority

At a time where boundaries within society, culture, and technology are continually challenged and redefined, even the commonly understood binary oppositions within areas such as gender, age, and digitality (Negroponte, 1995) are becoming less visible, measurable, and socially accepted. In this new realm where even physical reality is encroached upon by the digital, are the tangible and perceived distinctions between interior and architecture also becoming extinct? The emergence of more flexible and transitional space appears to not only blur the boundaries of inside and outside, interior and architecture, but also the previous distinctions of function. Space is no longer solely …

Virtual Interiorities, Adam Nash, Kate Geck, Andy Miller

Interiority

A practice of the virtual offers to interior design a dynamic conception of interiority that transcends simplistic representative notions of space, recognising the inseparable relationship of space and time, as well as an understanding of interiority as lived experience and its attendant amenability to active interpretation and therefore design. Ultimately, a practice of the virtual facilitates an understanding of interior as a dynamic and ongoing network of relations, and interior design as individuating participation in this network. In this article, we describe in detail an expanded notion of the virtual, and extrapolate how an understanding of this notion might help …

Animated Interior, Paramita Atmodiwirjo, Yandi Andri Yatmo

Interiority

An animated interior represents a departure from the idea of interior space as a permanent and timeless entity. The understanding of animated characters in the interior allows for the emergence of our complex relationship with space through various forms of engagement. The understanding of an animated interior offers further possibilities that become the basis of design practice. This issue of the Interiority journal presents a collection of inquiries and approaches that reveal various animated qualities of the interior in various contexts. The articles address the character of the interior, which is dynamic and dependent upon various temporal conditions of inhabitation. …

Grafting Interiority: Generative Methodologies Between The Natural And The Synthetic, Rana Abudayyeh

Interiority

Design is approaching a crucial period where the exchange between interior and exterior systems needs to be rethought and addressed from the standpoint of resilience and innovative environmental responses. The era of the detached interior bubble that is climate controlled and therein severed from natural systems is no longer justified or feasible. Interior spaces must respond to environmental conditions and proactively engage natural systems. The paper examines grafting methodology as an interior spatial formula that aims to generate complex sectional strategies for new programmatic typologies. It showcases work from a third-year interior architecture studio where students utilised natural landscapes as …

Urban Interiority: Emerging Cultural And Spatial Practices, Paramita Atmodiwirjo, Yandi Andri Yatmo

Interiority

Discourses on the urban interior recently have emerged as a series of provocations and experimentations that highlight the critical understanding of the urban realm from the interiority perspective. In the fast-moving development of modern global cities, the urban interior concept becomes increasingly important. Cities are fast becoming containers for contemporary spatial practice, with urban spaces becoming melting pots of diverse cultures and communities. Viewing urban settings from the interiority perspective allows us to comprehend unique local characters in particular contexts. This issue of Interiority presents a collection of works that illustrate the expanded understanding of the urban interior, especially in …

Critical Spatial Practices: A Trans-Scalar Study Of Chinese Hutongs And American Alleyways, Gregory Marinic, Rebekah Radtke, Gregory Luhan

Interiority

Across time and cultures, the built environment has been fundamentally shaped by forces of occupancy, obsolescence, and change. In an era of increasing political uncertainty and ecological decline, contemporary design practices must respond with critical actions that envision more collaborative and sustainable futures. The concept of critical spatial practice, introduced by architectural historian Jane Rendell, builds on Walter Benjamin and the late 20th century theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to propose multi-disciplinary design practices that more effectively address contemporary spatial complexities. These theoretical frameworks operate through trans-scalar means to resituate the built environment as a nexus of …

Inscriptions: Narrating The Spatial Dynamics Of The Immaterial Interior, Arif Rahman Wahid, Kristanti Dewi Paramita, Yandi Andri Yatmo

Interiority

This paper explores inscription as a projection of the spatial dynamics of a setting, beyond a historical or cultural symbol in a context, and highlights that inscription—a written or carved message on a surface—is an element that immaterially demonstrates a more in-depth narrative of an interior. This paper focuses on exploring inscriptions embedded in various production settings in Jakarta and Central Java, collecting individual and observational accounts on the production of such inscriptions and their meanings. The study suggests that inscriptions demonstrate various roles, from providing information, mediating different spaces and performing as tools to assist activities. Inscriptions may traverse …

Z33 Hasselt: Hortus Conclusus As A Model For An Urban Interior, Bie Plevoets, Shailja Patel

Interiority

This contribution reviews the recent renovation of Z33—House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture in Hasselt, Belgium—in the light of its unique implementation of different levels of interiority. The institute is housed in the former beguinage, a site with a rich and layered history and one of the few green public spaces in the city centre. The intervention by architect Francesca Torzo builds further on and strengthens the existing qualities of the site through a creative process of copying and improving. By doing so, she changed the overall appearance of the beguinage, strengthening its quality as an enclosed …

One Typology For A Big Word: Office Of Diversity, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro

Interiority

Architecture’s original project was the invention of interiority, an enclosed area delimited from its context and made available for a narrowly defined public, function, and meaning. This original project was expanded during the Enlightenment with the concept of type as a method for producing architecture and establishing social institutions for molding subjectivities. This quest for interiority has reached its completion with world capitalism and its associated complexes, which, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued, are an interior without any possible or imaginable outside. In response to this condition, this essay argues that the original project of architecture—the conception …

The Interior World Of Books, Browsing, And Collecting Inside The City, Alison B. Snyder

Interiority

A most desirable and collectable material object is the ubiquitous book. A bound composite of printed pages with words and images, it contains a microcosm of myriad narrative viewpoints, experiences, and imaginations. Metaphorically, a book compactly conceals a kind of interior space that protects the provocative lives of people, their character, ideas, and explorations, thus communicating different scales of interiority. Book collectors, called bibliophiles, revere and covet books as their object of desire. The bibliophile as seeker-collector-seller partakes of simple and complex transactions that essentially protect the lives of the books. This essay concentrates on two main book browsing locations …

The Ikea X Uts Future Living Lab As A Learning Laboratory, Thea Brejzek, Lawrence Paul Wallen

Interiority

This article introduces the IKEA x UTS Future Living Lab, a design research collaboration between IKEA Australia and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), founded in 2018. Authored by the Lab's two directors, the article traces the pedagogical and methodological approach of the IKEA x UTS Future Living Lab. Situated within the Educational Design Research (EDR) discourse, this article demonstrates the development of a productive dialogue between two contrary operating principles: that of infinite creativity afforded to design students, and that of rigorous design development towards mass manufacturing and market distribution by a major global player in the design industry. …

Architectural Filth And The Heroic Passivism Of Farhadi's Salesman, Vahid Vahdat

Interiority

Architecture in Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman (2016) is not a mere passive backdrop to an otherwise unaffected narrative; it is an autonomous agent that takes part in the events that unfold, complicates the narrative, and even occasionally defies the ideological position of the film. By analysing interior spaces, architectural elements, urban infrastructure, and maintenance practices, I suggest that 1) the fluid visual boundaries of Farhadi’s spatial settings are instrumental in blurring the borders of truth and morality—themes that are central to his film; 2) the ontological study of architecture, from the moment of excavation to its ultimate fracture/failure serves as …

Shifting Interiority: Changing Encounters With Our Environment, Paramita Atmodiwirjo, Yandi Andri Yatmo

Interiority

During COVID-19 pandemic, the whole world has witnessed and experienced dramatic changes in all aspects of life. As we adapt our everyday lives to restrictions and limitations to fight the pandemic, it also has become a trigger for us to rethink and re-position knowledge on spatial design disciplines. This Interiority issue compiles contributions that respond to a special call for papers that address these questions: How does the pandemic, including its impacts from lockdowns and physical distancing, affect how we think about interior and architecture? What lessons can we learn from this situation that we can use in future interior …