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Elizabeth Grosz in Architecture from the Outside (2001)
writes, “The space of the in-between is the locus of social,
cultural, and natural transformations…where becoming, openness
to futurity, outstrips the conservational impetus to retain
cohesion and unity.” In many ways the idea she espouses
illustrates the importance of interior architecture, whose main
formal attribute is inherently about in-betweeness. It aspires to
the design of space that is open to the possibilities of fluid
interaction between multiple subjects and their relationship to the
material world. In its investigation into the critical articulation
of space and its social conditions, the practice of interior
architecture becomes an act of designing space that reinforces an
intimate relationship between the human body and the material
world.
Figiure 1: Study Model by Corina Apodaca for Studio 4 Branding
and Indentity
This notion of intimacy emphasizes a synthesis between interior
experience and physical form. Intimacy is a way of understanding
the world around us that diminishes the abstraction of ideals in
order to establish a closer connection with specific meaning,
feeling, and interactions that these ideals generate. The realm of
interior architecture is filled with an intimate relationship
between humans, materials and material artifacts. The underlying
desire of these different material systems is such that they create
spaces where human interaction is housed in its many variations. It
acknowledges that there is an intimacy that refuses to disassociate
the human body and the varying states of the human condition from
the making and meaning of space.
The studios in Woodbury University’s Interior Architecture
department focus on different topical conditions that identify
possible programmatic conditions. Identity and Branding,
Dwelling and Culture, Community and Typology, and
Narrative and Media represent the broader topics of the
upper division design studios as a way of opening up the
possibility of how the social and individual constructions we all
find ourselves in inform the material and formal conditions of the
spaces we design. There is a desire to critique material culture
– art, furniture, material, light – with the same rigor
that is attributed to the making of form and structure. The studio
projects introduce the sensual experience of the designed space and
the material artifacts constituting designed spaces as one point of
departure for critical inquiry.
Figure 2: Rendering by Holly Chisholm for senior
project
Interior architecture relies on the intimacy of the sensual. The
interaction of individuals and communities in space is overtly and
covertly dependent on many forms of touch, and many forms of
interaction between the body and the material world. It starts with
the body as the generative force behind the development of spatial
form. It addresses those issues of design that have traditionally
been seen as transgressive to architecture: the sensual, the
decorative, the colorful, and the thematic. It addresses material
in a way that downplays whether or not the material is useful for
holding up the shelter, and instead emphasizes material as a
wrapping of and exposure to sensuality, a wrapping of the human
condition in textures and color that exclaim those human conditions
or virtuously sublimate them into the performative qualities of
hidden desire and political action.
This emphatic questioning of the intimacy of the human condition,
of social interaction, and of our relationship with the material
world, as well as how the building of form reinforces these
relationships and interactions, is what informs questioning in
Woodbury University’s Department of Interior Architecture. The
program relies on a strong studio education that enables all
participants -- both faculty and students -- to interrogate how the
material world of interior space and the social relationships
housed in these spaces can transform and critically question the
norms of social constructs and their parallel spatial constructs.
All of these issues are questioned through the polemics of
architectural form and material culture, while rooting the
development of design in realized projects.
Figure 3: Detail Section by Iva Kremsa for senior
project
Seen from this perspective, interior architecture investigates a
long tradition of architectural concern that emphasizes the hidden
and ephemeral qualities of space. Volumes become both transformed
and transformative as new inhabitants occupy and appropriate the
physicality of architectural form, structure, and the artifacts
located in the built environment. Interior architecture becomes
less about closing off space to an interior realm and more about
opening up the possibilities of how interior space responds to the
contextual social conditions of a given site and those inhabiting
the site.
Randall Stauffer, IIDA, IDEC, is the chair of Woodbury
University’s Interior Architecture Program.
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