WEEK 8: Encounters

Inhabited spaces demand to be understood less as a collection of objects and more as a collection and articulation of human relations – as the traces of the relationships people make with one another.

Discuss via text and analysis diagrams how we can read the various plans discussed in the text as an articulation of the relationships between inhabitants and an articulation of their behaviours.

Although interior spatial designers may not like to admit it, the interior design of a building will always come after the architecture of the building. The architectural structure of a building must be designed, generated and built before an interior designer can create spatial experiences within the interior of the structure. Interior space is intricate and complex and includes an eco-system of relationships. An interior has the ability to augment encounters between individuals who inhabit and occupy the space. However, the interior also has the ability to hinder such encounters through the design of its circulation.

Robert Evans – Figures, Doors and Passages 

“The struggle to find a home and the desire for the shelter, privacy, comfort and independence that a house can provide are familiar the world over.”

The exploration for privacy, comfort and independence through the intervention of architecture is quite a recent idea. When these words were first used in relation to household affairs, their meanings were quite difference from those we now comprehend.

The architectural plan has the ability to describe the nature of human relationships as humans inhabit these spaces and leave traces and records behind. Showing how a space is occupied through diagraming or simple human figures is crucial to understand and gain a sense of how the space is actually used. Without this documentation we cannot understand how the space differs from any other space. The way in which humans inhabit and occupy a space is generally absent in even the most extravagantly illustrated buildings. This is where we begin to see the importance of interior-spatial designers, as they are able to create interior experiences within the structure that an architect has designed and built.

The Madonna in a Room 

Raphael was an influential painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its ‘clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur’. During the Italian High Renaissance period, the interplay of figures in space begun to dominate painting. In periods previous to this, the representation of the body focused on physiological detail: the articulation of limbs, the modeling of sinew, flesh and muscle, and the rendering of individual beauty. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that bodies were reduced into the graceful and sublime. The sixteenth century saw a decent from their pedestal to become engulfed by animated groups of familiar figures sharing their company as in Raphael’s Madonna dell’ Impannata (1514), typical of so many ‘holy family’ portraits.

Raphael’s Madonna dell’ Impannata (1514) 

The Door

The Villa Madama, located just outside Rome, was designed by Raphael around 1518. The Villa Madama was where we began to see thought going into how the space was to be inhabited by humans. The plan of the Villa Madama was designed to study social relationships through two organisational characteristics. These characteristics are crucially important evidence of the social milieu it was meant to support. Firstly, rooms have more than one door, some have two doors and some have three or four. Although this design concept is thought of as a fault in domestic buildings today, it was preferable in the time of Italian High Renaissance as it meant that there was a door wherever there was an adjoining room, making the house a matrix of discrete but thoroughly interconnected chambers.

Villa Madama Interior 

“It is also convenient to place the doors in such a Manner that they may lead to as many Parts of the edifice as possible.” – Alberti

Similarly to all domestic architecture prior to 1650, the Villa Madama had no qualitative distinction between the way through the house and the inhabited spaces within it. Everything we create uses the past to the design the new. In Raphael’s case he used the knowledge and theory of the Ancient Greeks to design the Villa. The main entrance was situated at the southern side of the building. Raphael used pathways, staircases and doorways to create a framing mechanism for human intercourse. It was inevitable that during the course of a day paths would intersect, and that every activity was likely to cause intercession unless very definite routes were taken to avoid it.

The Villa Madama Floor Plan 

Passages 

The first recorded appearance of the corridor was in England at the Beaufort House in Chelsea, which was designed by John Thorpe in 1597. “A long entry through all” was written on the house plans, which proved the power of the idea that was beginning to be recognised. To Thorpe, the concept of the corridor was something of a curiosity as he continued to experiment with the idea.

Beaufort House floor plan shows a clear idea of the corridor connecting all rooms of the house. 

Following 1630, these changes of internal arrangement of the home became very evident in houses built for the upper classes. Houses would contain an entrance hall, grand open stair, passages and backstairs merged to form a network of circulation space, which would reach every major room in the house. Another great application of the corridor is the arrangement of the Coleshill house in Berkshire which was built by Sir Roger Pratt between 1650 and 1667. Every floor in the home comprises a passage that tunnels through the entire length of the building.

Coleshill House Floor Plan showing the central corridor leading to the many rooms of the house. 

The Body in Space 

The social aspect of architecture, which surfaced for the first time as an integral feature of theory and criticism, had more to do with the fabrication of buildings than the occupation of buildings. However, the social aspect as shifted in emphasis to place more importance on the procedures of its assembly and how bodies occupy and use the space.

‘The Functional House for Frictionless Living’ designed by Alexander Klein in 1928 was an unusual project that had to consider how to design a home that would fit multiple families comfortably and without conflict. The project started with research carried out by Klein for a German housing agency. Klein used line diagrams to reveal the superiority of his improved house plan. Pathways remain entirely distinct and do not touch at all initiating complete frictionless living. The justification for Klein’s plan was ‘the metaphor hidden in its title implying that all accidental encounters caused friction and therefore threatened the smooth running of the domestic machine: a delicately balanced and sensitive device it was too, always on the edge of malfunction’. Klein’s clever design meant that one could move through the space without encountering one another.

Klein’s Line Diagrams showing frictionless living through improvement to circulation.

The Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa inherited the renaissance style to reinterpret the past. Scarpa would use medieval sculptures throughout his interiors to show relations within a space. In 1953, Scarpa was commissioned to renovate Palazzo Abatellis in Sicily, which was a prestigious building from the last decade in the 1400s. He was able to make the resulting Galleria Nazionale di Sicilia into one of the most impressive museums in Italy.

Carlo Scarpa’s Staircase – so perfectly designed for the body that it does not require a handrail. 

Scarpa used the plans to create relationships between the art and the architecture through gaze. He used the architecture of the building as a performance for how we inhabit it and thought of the figures and sculptures being able to move. Scarpa carefully constructed views within the space. The sculpture of Eleanor of Arogon is placed at the end of a corridor. An individual approaches her through a sequence of corridors and arches, which creates a frame for the sculpture. This is an example of how Scarpa understood bodies in space.

‘Elanor of Arogon’ through the frame of the room. 

Relation to Semester 1 

In redesigning the space of the NSW Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Projects 2 and 3, it was crucial to think about how the spaces would be inhabited by humans. The project went beyond thinking about the functions that the institute required, to think instead about how these functions would cooperate together and how the multitude of users would use these separate functions. Improving circulation was a major theme in redesigning the spaces. Three circulation patterns had to be designed in a way that they would comfortably work together to make the building as a whole work for three different users – the institute members, the public and the patient.

 

References:

1. Evans, Robin. ‘Figures Doors and Passageways’ in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, Architecture Association, UK 1997, pp. 42-57

2. Evans, Robin. ‘Rookies and Model Dwellings, English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space’ in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, Architecture Association, UK 1997, pp. 93-117

WEEK 7: Models of domesticity through history

The 17th Century DUTCH INTERIOR

The mid seventeenth century saw the subdivision of the Dutch home into day and night uses, and into formal and informal areas. The upper floors of the house began to be treated as formal rooms, only used for special occasions. Other rooms in the house were reserved for sleeping and were for private use only.

The 17th century Dutch home was not necessarily innovative however, as it still retained many medieval features. It was the blending of the old and new that gave the Dutch home its unique characteristic features. The Dutch prized three things above all else, firstly their children, secondly their homes and thirdly their gardens. The growing importance of family in Dutch society influenced the new design of the family home.

17th Century Dutch Interior, Vermeer, ‘Carrer de Delft’, 1657-1658, Amsterdam, Rijkmuseum 

“Home brought together the meanings of house and household, of dwelling and of refuge, of ownership and of affection.”  John Lukas, The Bourgeois Interior

The furniture and decoration of a 17th century Dutch home were used to convey the wealth of its owner. Benches and stools were still present in less prosperous homes, however as in England and France, the chair had become the most common sitting device (the chair was only found in royal homes previous to this period). In comparison to the French Bourgeois that was crowded and chaotic, the Dutch interior was simple and sparse. The Dutch didn’t want the interior to be crowded as they wanted to feel a sense of space that the room and the light produced. They created spaces that were uniquely intimate and private.

‘The Fat Kitchen’, Jan Steen, 1650

The feminisation of the Dutch home in the 17th century was one of the most important events in the evolution of the domestic interior. The main cause of this was the changed limited use of servants. Dutch married women had “the whole care and absolute management of all their Domestique”, which included taking care of the cooking. This saw the increasing importance of the kitchen room in the home. The woman became master of the house.

“Domesticity, privacy, comfort, the concept of the home and of the family: these are, literally, principal achievements of the Bourgeois Age.” – John Lukas, The Bourgeois Interior

17th Century Dutch Interior (Vermeer) 

Pieter de Hooch

 

The 18th Century FRENCH  DOMESTIC INTERIOR 

The eighteenth century saw the rise of a number of highly influential interior designers and architects such as James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, Robert Adam and Horace Walpole. Similarly to the the seventeenth century Dutch home, the eighteenth century parisian interior floor plan was still very much separated between public and private spaces. However, unlike the dutch home, the French architects and designers were very fond of extravagant detailing and colour.

French Pavilions of the Eighteenth Century, Jerome Zerbe & Cyril Connolly

An 18th century upper class bedroom, Paul Lacroix

An example of an extravagantly designed french interior from the eighteenth century is Horace Walpole’s ‘Strawberry Hill’. The house was built in stages from the late 1740s to the 1790s and used by Walpole for both entertaining and as a private retreat. Walpole was an influential historian, collector and social commentator, which heavily influenced the style of his architecture. The eighteenth century saw a revival of Gothic style in french interiors. Walpole’s fascination with history and art led him to design and build Strawberry Hill through a Gothic lens.

Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole 

Robert Adam was one of the most celebrated architects of his day. Adam was famous for his neo-classical architectural style. His main achievement was the development of a unified style that extended beyond architecture and interiors to include both the fixed and moveable objects in a room. Similar to Walpole, Adam incorporated design ideas from historical periods, such as ancient Greece and Rome into the form and decoration of a space.

Detail from a ceiling design for 5 Adelphi Terrace, by Robert Adam, England, 1771

Syon House, Robert Adam, West London, 1760

Delores Hayden’s ‘Grand Domestic Revolution’ 

“Women’s work” comprised of activities such as cooking food, caring for children and cleaning the house. These activities were a women’s job, however were to be performed without pay in domestic environments. This generated a huge division between men and women. The of the first feminist groups in the United States of America were known as ‘Material Feminists’ as they dared to define a “grand domestic revolution” in women’s material conditions.

Delores Hayden ‘Grand Domestic Revolution’ 

Their main goal was to demand economic remuneration for women’s unpaid household labour. They proposed ‘a complete transformation of the spatial design and material culture of American homes, neighbourhoods and cities’. In order to overcome patterns of urban space and domestic space that isolated women and made their domestic work invisible, they developed new forms of neighbourhood organisations such as the day care centre, the public kitchen and the community dining club. By redefining housework and the housing needs of women and their families, they pushed architects and urban planners to reconsider the effects of design on family life.

Delores Hayden, ‘Grand Domestic Revolution’

1960s UTOPIAN MOVEMENT

The 50s and 60s saw an immense shift in domestic labour. Women were less required to do all the domestic labour within the home as it became more of a family responsibility to work together to get all the chores done. This period gave women the freedom to leave the home and explore leisure activities. This freedom was mimicked in the house plan, as open plan living saw a breakdown of boundaries between public and private rooms of the home.

The confident 1960s women. 

The first example of how the space of the kitchen shifted from a small, closed in space to an open plan space was the Frigidaire Kitchen, which was designed in 1957. This kitchen was designed to give women more freedom from domestic activities as it allowed them to balance both domestic life with leisure activities. The design of the kitchen was quite striking in its theatrical ability. The individual pieces of the kitchen were temporary, meaning it could be altered and moved to suit the needs of the user. The temporality and freedom of the kitchen allowed for completed efficiency, a concept that was prominent in society after the second world war. This kitchen gave women confidence to be independent in how they ran their homes and their lives as it gave them more control.

The Frigidaire Kitchen, 1957

Another suitable example of the modern day kitchen was Fred Antelline’s 1961 Kitchen, which was built in a home in Rancho Santa Fe. It is popularly known as the “pleasure island” kitchen. The design of this kitchen created a whole new interaction and system to kitchen activity. Instead of the kitchen being being placed in a space purely for women to cook in, shut off from the rest of the home, Antelline designed it so that the entire family and occasionally visiting guests could be a part of the cooking process. The breakfast bar/island bench created a space for face-to-face preparation that made it “easy on the wife”. Everyone became part of the process and cooking became a form of entertainment and fun.

Fred Antelline’s 1961 Kitchen 

Relation to Semester 1

The 17th Century Dutch home required a separation of formal and informal space. Similarly in projects 2 and 3, in redesigning the space of the NSW Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, it was crucial to create a division in the space. The NSWIPP did not require a division between the formal and informal, but rather a division between the public and private spaces of the building. The division of public and private space was crucial in being able to provide a comfortable space for three different users. The building provided public space through the cafe intruder as well as the exterior garden space that could be used for dadirri and other purposes by the local community. The public space of the building was also designed for institute members by providing them with an open plan living, dining and entertainment area on the ground floor of the building. The private space of the building provided institute members and invited guests with training and presentation facilities. It then also generated a very private space for a possible patient to be provided with therapy services within the building. Without the division of public and private space, the building would not be able to provide facilities and services to all three users of the institute.

 

References:

1.Rybczynski, Witold, ‘Domesticity’ , in Toward a New Interior; An Anthology of Interior Design Theory,Princeton Architectural Press. Ed Lois Weinthal 2011. 

2. Hayden, Delores. ‘The Grand Domestic Revolution: A history of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighbourhoods and Cities’ Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981 pp. 1-30 Introduction.

3. Pohl, Ethel Baraona & Puigjaner, Anna & Najera Cesar Reyes, Blurring the Kitchen Work Triangle in Archis Magazine, Volume 33 Interiors. ed. Oosterman Arjen ( Netherlands: Stichting Archis, 2013) pp.118-122

4. ’18th Century Interior Design’, Victoria and Albert Museum,accessed 25th April 2014, <http://www.vam.ac.uk/page/0-9/18th-century-interior-design/&gt;

 

WEEK 4: How did the envelop of the interior develop historically?

How did the ‘envelope’ of the interior develop historically? How does it relate to the rise of companionate marriage, the nuclear family and what comes to be known as the ‘bourgeois’?

The word ‘interior’ has changed in meaning throughout history. The first English meaning of interior in the late fifteenth century was ‘the basic divisions between inside and outside, and to describe the spiritual and inner nature of the soul’. From the early eighteenth century, interiority was used to ‘designate inner character and a sense of individual subjectivity’. At the end of the eighteenth century, the interior came to ‘designate the domestic affairs of a state, as well as the interior sense of territory that belongs to a country or region’. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the word ‘interior’ became to mean ‘the inside of a building or room, esp. in reference to the artistic effect; also, a picture or representation of the inside of a building or room’.

The first use of ‘interior’ in the domestic sense is dated 1829. This is when the interior emerged as the ‘Bourgeois Domesticity’ in the nineteenth century. The bourgeois emerged as a space separated from sites of work and productive labour, to become ‘a place of refuge from the city and its new, alienating forms of experience’.

Marriages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were typically arranged by a father and a man willing to marry his daughter. The daughter was treated like property and was traded or sold to a man, usually a lot older than her.  By the mid-18th century, companionate marriages became more common, mainly in the upper and lowest classes. Companionate marriage is a marriage in which the partners agree not to have children and may divorce by mutual consent, with neither partner responsible for the financial welfare of the other.  Companionate couples were affectionate and chose to spend much time together because they married for love and friendship. The companionate marriage depended on equality and sharing between man and wife. Industrialisation and capitalism saw and increase in the nuclear family (term used to define a family group consisting of a pair of adults and their children) as it became a financially viable social unit due to the influences by church and theocratic governments. The growth of nuclear family influenced the design of interiors.

A seventeenth century dutch interior, nuclear family (Pieter de Hooch, 1665). 

Discuss the domestic interior’s evolving relationship to the public sphere.

Two versions of the modern interior emerged in the middle years of the nineteenth century. One was linked with the idea of the ‘home’ and the other was associated with the worlds of work and commerce. Similarly to its middle-class female occupants, the domestic interior refused to be confined to the home. This is where we began to see a blurring between the two spheres of public and private space.

The domestic interior shifted into the public sphere in the same way that domestic manufacturing was shifted into factory manufacturing. The advent of factories had put an end to domestic manufacturing, some examples being clothes making and fruit bottling. Although these goods remained domestic necessities, women were forced to buy them outside the home. This shift to mass production through industrialisation also took the domestic interior into the public sphere.

The domestic chores, such as making clothes, were now being mimicked in factories. This was the beginning of the shift of the private to the public.

Industrialisation is the process of social and economic change that transformed the way people and the community lived.The domestic interior exposed itself to the public sphere through its developing relationship with the growing mass media of the time. The growth of mass media was a key feature of industrial modernity, through mass production and mass consumption. An association was formed between the media and the domestic sphere, which facilitated an enhancement in consumption of goods for the home. Magazine images, trade catalogues and other printed material idealised the domestic space, which then stimulated desire and encouraged consumers to construct their own current domestic interiors through the purchase of new interior products.

Charlie Chaplin staring in the 1936 film ‘Modern Times’ which he wrote and directed. His character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialised world. 

Industrialisation and the growth of factories saw an increase in the number of people moving from the countryside into townships as people were looking for better-paid work. Towns were continuously developing and growing as industrialisation took over. The growth of these towns saw the introduction of community services and public spaces. An example of the developing relationship between private interiors within the spaces of public interiors is the shopping mall. With the rise of industrialisation and growing mass production and consumption, there was a rise in the development of public shopping malls. Within this hustle and bustle of mass shopping would be what people knew as a private lounge interior. This showed a clear shift of the domestic interior into the space of a public sphere. The lounge area in this public space would contain comfortable armchairs, a large carpet and potted plants – a scene that had been removed from its more familiar private environment and repositioned in a public space. This space that was known to people as a private interior space, offered comfort and refuge from the growing world of work and commerce.

A modern shopping mall interior (Sparke,P. 2008)

 

References:

1. Rice Charles, Rethinking Histories of the Interior’ in Intimus; Interior Design Theory Reader, Great Britain: Wiley-Academy 2006 pp. 284-291

2. Sparke, Penny. ‘Introduction, The Modern Interior, London : Reaktion Books, 2008 pp. 7-18

3. Pile John, ‘A History of Interior Design’, London: Laurence King Publishing, 2000. pp. 8-9