Idea Journal 2010

Interior Ecologies
Kyuho Ahn Suzie Attiwill Andrea Branzi Rachel Carley Annette Condello Jill Franz Helene Frichot Mihyun Kang Gini Lee Eleonora Lupo Lubomir Savov Popov Janine Randerson Chiara Rubessi Leon van Schaik Susan Sherringham Igor Siddiqui Susan C Stewart Mark Taylor Kirsty Volz Lois Weinthal
I D E A J O U RN AL 201 0
INTERIOR
ECOLOGIES
ISSN 1445/5412
JOURNAL
Formed in 1996, the purpose of IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association) is the advancement of education by encouraging and supporting excellence in interior design/interior architecture education and research within Australasia; and being the regional authority on, and advocate for interior design/interior architecture education and research. The objectives of IDEA are: - to be an advocate for undergraduate and postgraduate programs at a university level that provide a minimum 4 years education in interior design/interior architecture; - to support the rich diversity of individual programs within the higher education sector; - to create collaboration between programs in the higher education sector; - to foster an attitude of lifelong learning; - to encourage staff and student exchange between programs; - to provide recognition for excellence in the advancement of interior design/interior architecture education; - to foster, publish and disseminate peer reviewed interior design/interior architecture research. www.idea-edu.com MemBeRSHiP Institutional Members: Membership is open to programs at higher education institutions in Australasia that can demonstrate an on-going commitment to the objectives of IDEA. Current members: Curtin University, Perth Massey University, Wellington Monash University, Melbourne Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane RMIT University, Melbourne Swinburne University, Melbourne UNITEC New Zealand, Auckland University of New South Wales, Sydney University of South Australia, Adelaide University of Technology, Sydney Victoria University, Wellington Affiliate Members: Affiliate membership is open to programs at higher education institutions in Australasia that do not currently qualify for institutional membership but support the objectives of IDEA. Affiliate members are non-voting members of IDEA. Current affiliate members: University of Tasmania, Hobart Associate Members: Associate membership is open to any persons who support the objectives of IDEA. Associate members are non-voting members of IDEA. Honorary Associate Members: Andrea Mina, George Verghese, Gill Matthewson, Harry Stephens, Jill Franz, Lynn Chalmers, Marina Lommerse,Tim Laurence. IDEA JOURNAL 2010 IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association) 2010 ACN 135 337 236 ABN 56 135 337 236 Published at: Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia Registered at the National Library of Australia. ISSN 1445/5412
IDEA JOURNAL 2010 INTERIOR ECOLOGIES : EXPOSING THE EVOLUTIONARY INTERIOR

PROVOCATION Contributors to the IDEA JOURNAL 2010 respond to the provocation Interior Ecologies: exposing the evolutionary interior to propose emergent interior debates on contemporary spatial, material and performative practices. Can a critical ecological approach to practice and discourse in interiors enable expanded locales for research and experiment across disciplinary and theoretical boundaries? Normative concepts concerned with the designed habitat, or discursive debates around the interfaces of interior and exterior conditions, may fall short in provoking interior thinking to engage through ecologies of practice that contribute to advancing environments, technologies and cultures. The IDEA JOURNAL 2010 exposes the engagement of interior practice in ecological, political, cultural and economic systems.The IDEA JOURNAL publishes scholarly accounts of writing and projects that move across disciplinary perspectives and temporal systems into an open-ended enquiry into ecologies for and of the interior. EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Professor Gini Lee (Executive Editor) Dr Rachel Carley Professor Jill Franz Dr Tom Loveday COPY EDITING David Mellonie, MarketWorks PRODUCTION Design: Propaganda Mill www.thepropagandamill.com rafael@thepropagandamill.com Printing: AstroPorint www.astroprint.com.au 1800 663 551 theteam@astroprint.com.au Cover Image: Dan over London, Hayward Gallery Gini Lee 2010 with Rafael Gomez, graphic design.
Correspondence regarding this publication should be addressed to: Professor Gini Lee Executive Editor, IDEA JOURNAL School of Design Queensland University of Technology GPO Box 2434 Brisbane Q 4001 Australia Facsimile: +61 7 3138 1528 Email: gini.lee@qut.edu.au
Contents
6 12 14 24 40 42 54 62 64 72 88 90 102 114 116 128 138 141 144 Interior Ecologies: exposing the evolutionary interior Gini Lee Provocation Ten Modest Suggestions for a New Athens Charter Andrea Branzi Spatial culture, learning and design: shifting ecologies of practice Susan C Stewart and Susan Sherringham Silent Witness: Rachel Whitereads Nameless Library Rachel Carley Provocation Ideogram_Spatial Intelligence Leon van Schaik Tessellated Floorscape (2010-): interior acts of production. siting and participation Igor Siddiqui Domestic Ecologies: A study of gender and domesticity within Harold Pinters Rooms Kirsty Volz Provocation Mapping Interior Adjacencies Lois Weinthal Interior Luxury at the Cafe Australia Annette Condello Sustainable practice in retail design: New functions between matter and space Chiara Rubessi Provocation in Suzie Attiwill The Social Production of Interiority: an Activity Theory approach Lubomir Savov Popov What can we learn from the Bubble Man and his Atmospheric Ecologies? Hlne Frichot Provocation Remote Senses, Intimate Ecologies: Anemocinegraph (2007-2011) Janine Randerson Enhancement of Critical and Analytical thinking in the context of Interior Design History Kyuho Ahn and Mihyun Kang Homes for Life: A critical ecological study of an Independent Living Project Jill Franz Book Review: Interior Design: a critical introduction by Clive Edwards Mark Taylor Publication Review: Inventario : Tutto progetto Everything is a project by Beppi Finessi/Corraini Eleonora Lupo Biographies
DISCLAIMER To the extent legally permissible, the editors, authors and publishers exclude or disclaim all and any liability (including liability arising in contract and tort) to any person, whether or not through this publication, for any loss howsoever arising and whether or not caused by the negligence of any of the editors, authors and publishers resulting from anything done or omitted to be done in reliance, either whole or partial, upon the contents of this publication.
IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies
Interior Ecologies: exposing the evolutionary interior

Gini Lee : Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Simply put, ecology is a relational concept that concerns the exploration of interactions between the individual, their communities and the environments that sustain them, and this is not confined to the human domain. Although the normative understanding of ecology in everyday use can infer the world of organisms and systems found in the natural world, its etymological roots lie in relatively recent interpretations of the Greek oikos and the study of the house and habitation. If it follows that ecological thinking applied to interiors is predicated upon relational thinking, then research into interior ecological practice should offer up alternative concepts for design that move beyond green environmentalism and associated sustainable design approaches to embrace a range of disciplinary and theoretical domains. The IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies provocation arises from an interest in exposing how a critical ecological approach to interiors can enable expanded locales for research and experiment in private and public realms. Commonly held concepts regarding the vulnerability of the ongoing sustainability and stability of designed habitats in the face of global political, societal and economic change frequently promote technological regimes and societal education as factors aiding recovery over developing more conservative and lateral responses influenced by novel design strategies. Projects such as Paul Virilios and Diller, Scofidio + Renfros Native Land Stop Eject, at Fondation Cartier, Paris in 2008, graphically bring into focus the predicted global mobility of communities and cultures due to climatic and other environmental dynamics, and such issues are increasingly being explored by emerging urban design and architectural research and practice. The provocation Interior Ecologies: exposing the evolutionary interior seeks to elicit parallel interior-focused research and discourse influenced by speculations into environmental and social change to uncover emerging explorations into contemporary interior spatial, material and performative practices. A conversation Mary Zournazi recorded with Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers reflects upon the concept of an ecology of practices to aid in the transformation of old to new creative practices through articulation rather than replacement.1 To read the account of the conversation as it moves back and forth between interviewer and interviewee is to witness an ecology of communication emerge as a collaboration of ideas posed, and in turn expanded upon. Such fluid, relational speaking may also be imagined as contributing to the making of interior spaces through a fluid, relational conversation of ideas developed between collaborators in studio and in the academy. Interior spaces that are simultaneously physically and materially derived from conceptual ecologies draw
from thinking about the world and the various political and social drivers that influence everyday life. Stengers suggests that to create the possibility of transformation it is necessary to imagine new events and problems to confront and risk change. Risk is both creative and political; engaging in risky thought and action promotes invention and an ecology of practice made visible as a collaboration between the domain of the expanded interior and the researchers and practitioners that approach opportunity with fresh eyes. If evolutionary thinking is necessarily adaptive to changing environments and opportunities then logically evolutionary interior practice is adaptive practice. If future existence is predicated on rapidly altering and dematerialising material and political environments, then interiors that embrace and demonstrate risk and relational thinking predicated on an ecological turn, offer a critical perspective on the transformation of spatial and material worlds. The IDEA JOURNAL Interior Ecologies presents ecological thinking in the broad interests offered by the authors of papers, design studio reviews and visual essays in response to the above call. While not seeking to draw confining associations around the research, certain coinciding interests appear across the selected papers where ecological concepts are indeed broadly and sometimes tangentially expressed. Ecologies of theory and practice, domestic ecologies and territories, transforming typological forms, material ecologies and the framing of an ecological pedagogy in the academy appear in various ways throughout the ten papers, which are expanded upon later in this writing. Additionally, threads of relationships across the above themes are present across the authors accounts of their current research where concepts of home, performed and furnished space, discursive site and interdisciplinary practice coexist in a demonstration of ecological thinking and practice in the interior realm. An additional invitation to scholars and thinkers to provide concise expressions of a critical and propositional take on what the concept Interior Ecologies could offer has resulted in five Provocations placed throughout the Journal to provoke critical thought or a pause within the refereed works. Generously offered provocative thinking on interior ecologies, expressed through text and image, uncovers methods for transforming relational perspectives of city (Branzi), spatial associations and learned responses to environments actioned through engaging our emotional intelligence (van Schaik), practices conditioned through attention to and modelling weather through cosmological thinking (Randerson), paying close attention to the intimate and the periphery in everyday life (Weinthal) and the production of an interior economy through spatial and temporal writing as interior practice (Attiwill) . Andrea Branzis Ten Modest Suggestions for a New Athens Charter expands upon Le Corbusiers original intent for structuring and modernizing the city (1933) into a proposal of fluid forms. His new conceptual reforming cities are territories embracing a multiplicity of relationships played out in the citys interstitial spaces, in the home economies, in the human relations; within our minds2 Offering a fragment of his writing and modeling of spatial intelligence, Leon Van Schaiks ideogram
Shoebox Theatre is a mise en scene of spatialised personal remembered histories. In this theatre the narrative of interior elements announces associations and concepts imprinting relational inferences of everyday life upon our emotional intelligence. The Anemocinegraph is a fictional remote sensing device for simultaneous reading of weather phenomena and fleeting events that collapse the global with the intensely personal moments of daily existence. Janine Randersons art project reminds us of our presence in an ever-changing atmospheric world. Personal worlds are also finely drawn in Lois Weinthals provocation, Mapping Interior Adjacencies where she exposes the necessity to pay attention to the ephemeral details and narratives of daily life. Weinthals spatial world is a relational domain diagrammed lightly across the public and the private and across matter and object; with a guiding presence that tracks temporal movement, from inside to outside, across and within, to map the interior space of cues and objects of everyday life. Caught within a sea of white space, Suzie Attiwills in reflects upon interior-making and interior design practice in her purposeful positioning of the reader in engaging with difficult text in the material space of the Journal. Hers is also a relational discussion on the nature of provocation, on working in the middle space that interior design affords and the conceptual interior ecology composed of assemblages producing spaces, objects, and subjects3 mediated through immersion in now time. Dan over London, the composite cover image seeks to extend the provocative intent through illustrating multiple physical, spatial and collaborative perspectives through the graphic transformation of a record of a moment in a space once traversed by colleagues, serendipitously. An artist-made interior space installed as a type of parasitic incursion mediating an interior gallery and an exterior deck hovering above the Thames, a bridge and Londons Southbank, has in hindsight revealed a working interior ecology as experienced site and as remembered and expanded site. The sequence of images made while exploring this space with an design collaborator seeks to reveal the multiplicity of this space as it simultaneously provides; necessary shelter, an educational space for children and a place to sit and rest. A repurposed unused space, its glazing produces a maze-like effect through multiple reflection which shocks the visitor into a displaced sense of the city and the possibility of movement through it. The spectator is both enticed and manipulated within an interior ecology of spatial experience and disassociated traversal.
Dan Grahams Waterloo Sunset at the Hayward Gallery (2002-03) has been described as a counterpoint two-way glass pavilion stretching across sculpture, design and architecture. Depending upon the light conditions outside, the walls shift between reflectivity and transparency and the curves create juxtapositions of distorted figure and ground, furniture and freeway.4 Grahams space is neither inside or out it is both conditions at once due to the mediating aspect of glass curved around a geometry that produces multiple expressions of the city and its interior, furnished or not, an infrastructure or not, fine day or stormy, day or night. Relational aesthetics unfold at each turn. The personal is morphed into the pavilions fabric and fleeting movements are broadcast to others only tangentially present. Captured in the zone of co-existence the retreat to the pure outside allows clarity of knowing where you are, before delving again into the multiple presences of the interior. When Rafael Gomez rearranged the images I had given him of Dan Grahams installation to my mind he was creating a new ecology for this interior. In so doing working collectively to express the idea of ecologies within ecologies to reveal an alternative scenario for a space that is both of the city and a multifocal expression of the articulated interior of borrowed and cyclical experience. Re-articulation and sometimes transformation of interior practices, programs and processes are present in the papers and this has formed the editorial basis for their inclusion. Ecologies of theory and practice are introduced in Susan Stewart and Susan Sherringhams research into the role of the designer in spatial design practice in the context of next-generation learning practices. They contend that the design of processes and communication systems must now operate alongside the more familiar role of the design of spaces and objects, with the result that responsive and inclusive approaches to the interior are increasingly necessary. Such shifting practices are also revealed in Jill Franzs collaborative and participatory projects for Independent Living where the imperative is to work in a designerly manner to develop relationships between people, places and the systems that define assisted living situations. Ignoring territorial urges to claim areas and concepts as ones own, the paper describes how the project has actively encouraged design disciplines to trespass in each others interiors. Seeking to respond creatively to unfamiliar spatial needs has required the designers to embrace other transdisciplinary practice regimes and relinquish territorial
Opposite and Above Drawn from the inside into altered space the interstitial zone is traversed yet shifting transparency/reflectivity caused inside outside occupation at once and all the time the interior is reconstructed at every step Contributory images for Dan over London, Hayward Gallery Gini Lee 2010
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of Volzs constructed rooms are challenged when regarded alongside Franzs discussion on the relationships of interiority and home and self and identity present in independent living rooms. Substantially altered lives are performed and played out within both environments constructed as idealised domestic space. Rachel Carleys intimate survey of the British sculptor Rachel Whitereads Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a holocaust memorial in Judenplatz Square,Vienna, expresses a transformation of typological forms as intangible ecologies of history rewritten in the fabric of the architectural object turned inside out. This installation, which is simultaneously monument and urban relic and abstract library and collection, reveals the sum of its parts through its embeddedness in the narrative of site. Whereas the Australia Caf and Bar (1915-16) is seen as a now departed interior architecture that was pivotal in the introduction of new forms within an evolving social context in early modern Melbourne. Annette Condello describes how Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony experimented across cultural forms and she traces the ultimate erasure of their exotically articulated interior that proved too advanced for the conservative social conditions of the time. In another space in time Chiara Rubessi has researched the case study of a retail project in Bologna that is transformative both in its program as exhibition space and in its material realisation. Proposed as a model of an ecological approach to the sustainable use of extant spaces the interior program adopts distinct materials strategies as basis for conceptual practice. In addition, two reviews of interior publications have been included as an expansion of the Journal into providing invited critical reflection on interior design and interior architecture writing and presentation. Interior Design a Critical Reflection by Clive Edwards is a recent offering in the world of interior design theory and practice writing. Mark Taylor finds that the growing body of surveys that benefit the area of design student and practitioner information so far requires further articulation by the discipline to support a more critical perspective. Eleonora Lupo writes on the recent online publishing project Inventario
and the Tutto e progetto/Everything is a project edition on the idea of everything is design. Visual inventory is used to uncover the stories present behind artefacts. Including this review of the online journal/book/magazine reminds us that there are multiple platforms available in the ecology of information collection and dispersal in which interior practice and discourse is situated. Interior Ecologies exposing the evolutionary interior is expressed as a provocation to interior design/interior architecture theoreticians and practitioners to engage with current design debate in the light of dynamic environmental and social situations. It seeks to both reflect upon the wide domain of interiors and the concomitant possibilities for existing and future practice to enlist in seeking ecological transformations in everyday life and to affect more universal agendas to support interior theory. The researchers and authors in the main have worked an ecological perspective into their research that is embedded in the community of the domestic and the everyday. Active participation in interior environments and discourses are in the main the primary attention being presented here. Speculative and theoretical proposals have been received through the invited provocations which insert themselves among the argued papers somewhat in the way that the Situationist Memoires (1957) book rubbed its sandpaper cover against its neighbours on the bookshelf to leave a residue or abrade the covers of adjacent books. It appears that the motive for the evolutionary interior is emerging in subtle practice and engagement with process and programs for activity that enlists multiple practices and authors and takes place slowly, over time. NOTES
1. Mary Zournazi, A cosmo politics: risk hope change, a conversation with Isabelle Stengers, in Hope: new philosophies for change, Pluto Press Australia, Annandale, 2002: 244 2. Andrea Branzi, Ten Modest Suggestions for a New Athens Charter. IDEA JOURNAL 2010: 12,13 3. Suzie Attiwill, in, IDEA JOURNAL 2010: 88 4. _Sculpture 2004 23(3): 27
norms. Lubomir Savov Popov introduces his alternative view of interiority through examining an Activity Theory approach to the social production of space. He draws our attention to the distinction between the interior as a container that provides for comfort and use value and the emerging experiential interior that is predicated on sustaining process and productivity within shifting socio-political regimes.
Kyuho Ahn and Mihyun Kang enlist ecological concepts in case studies to advance interior design pedagogy through their concern that a lack of relational connections between design history and design studio has resulted in functionally design illiterate interior students. Through experimenting with historical knowledge applied to scaled design and making improved engagement with and understanding of precedent has been demonstrated. Domestic ecologies and territories are literally performed through the familiar room settings inferred by the relational composition Material ecologies are expressed in mobile installations of the of objects and actors in Harold Pinters narratives. Kirsty Volzs remade, digitally produced Tessellated Floorscape, an ongoing expanded visual essay is an account of the room as site of project in which Igor Siddiqui acts as both creator and the abstracted theatre set where she suggests that domestic collaborator with a range of people and sites. The production ecologies are subverted through the interaction of the temporal of the rug with its various permutations as it is moved from site passing of time and the choreography of actor and object in to site and performed by various players reveals an ecological these rooms of abjection and mimesis. The realised interiority
intent that is both invested in the material the carpet squares are recycled and in the participatory occupation of interiors by both the performer/s and the rug. Siddiqui also regards this work as contributing to the evolution of the contemporary interior as each installation of rug and maker invest new territorial instincts in both the place and the tessellated artefact. Drawing upon the naturally occurring soap bubble and its various structural forms, Hlne Frichot responds to the everyday activity of the Bubble Man in her adopted local square in Berlin to muse upon questions of scale and materiality of form that respond to weather conditions. Ecologies of systems and spaces respond to atmospheric pressures from within and without, material and immaterial, social and environmental.
Opposite A new ecology within ecologies for Dan over London, Hayward Gallery Gini Lee and Rafael Gomez 2010
12 Ten ModeSt SuggeStionS FoR A New AtHenS CHaRteR 1 - The city as a high-tech favela. 2 - The city as a personal computer every 20sm. 3 - The city as a place for a cosmic hospitality. 4 - The city as an air-conditioned full-space. 5 - The city as a genetic laboratory. 6 - The city as a living plancton. 7 - Research models of weak urbanization. 8 - Realize faded and crossable borders. 9 - Realize reversible and light infrastructures. 10 - Realize great transformations through micro-projects. These projects are not meant to be realized. They are not utopias for the city of the future, but reflections on the city today. The world has changed, but the culture of project hasnt yet. The city is nowadays no longer a whole of architectural boxes but a territory of men, facilities, information, immaterial relations. The models of weak urbanization try to combine architecture and agriculture, technology and meteorology, goods and sacred cows. INFINITIES We nowadays live in a world that has no exterior side, neither politic nor geographic; a global world made of the sum of many local economic and environmental crises. An infinite world, but not a definitive one: unlimited but with limits of development; mono-logic but ungovernable; without borders, but without a global image. A world made of many worlds; dull, polluted, where everything melts and expands itself; to survive, it has to reform itself day by day with new laws, new statutes, new projects, in order to manage its out of control induced activity. Every intervention has to be reversible, incomplete, elastic, because what is definitive is dangerous. An infinite world which space is filled with the bodies of seven billion people, by flows of information and by numberless goods, that make circles, aggregates and vibrations that totally fill the urban scene. The only possible reform of the city has to be found within the interstitial spaces, in the home economies, in the human relations; within our minds. Andrea Branzi IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies
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Interno Continuo
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Spatial culture, learning and design: shifting ecologies of practice

Susan C Stewart and Susan Sherringham : University of Technology Sydney, Australia
ABSTRACT
Design interventions into environments reshape the ecologies of practice that the environment has participated in, housed or enabled. This paper draws upon research into the complex ecologies of next-generation learning practices and the respondent interior design practices that facilitate and sustain the evolution of those ecologies. The role of the interior designer is expanded to include not only the design of objects, communications and their contexts but also the design of processes through which these may be conceived and understood. Through cross-disciplinary methods and theories the design of an inclusive and responsive process highlights the ecological nature of interior design interventions.
houses a practice, such as learning, is an element within the ecology of that practice. A change in spatial design can shift an ecology of practice, for better or worse. Equally, a space unresponsive, or unsuitable, to shifts and emerging trajectories within the ecology they participate in, can deaden or debilitate that ecology; at least locally, and perhaps beyond. Many educators and theorists of next-generation learning feel that this is indeed the fate of many local learning ecologies, housed in inherited spaces and framed by inherited institutions that arose in response to a very different style of learning. Educators struggle to keep students interested and involved in their learning; struggle to compete with the apparently greater allure of students economic and social lives, and the enticements of digital distraction. Theorists argue that the ecology of learning has moved on, into other spaces.2 Institutions of formal learning need to shift their own practices, structures and assumptions in order to reinvigorate the learning that takes place in their name, and their domain. This paper argues that the predicament of contemporary educators does indeed have a spatial dimension. The radical shifts in spatial and temporal experience over the course of the 20th century impacted upon learning practices in far-reaching ways. The first part of this paper outlines the history of these spatio-temporal shifts. This history is also of critical importance to the spatial design disciplines. If, as this paper claims, interior design emerged as a distinct spatial practice in response to the needs of new kinds of narrative and performative identities within the emergent activity settings of late 19th and early 20th century modernity, then the destabilization of these activity settings by mobile and ubiquitous technologies will have a transformative impact on this practice. Equally architecture and other spatial disciplines must respond to the new peripatetic practices of a digitally enabled culture. The second part of the paper looks at learning practices in particular, the way they have been housed and the need for change. Finally, the paper introduces the approach taken by spatial designers within an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) funded research project charged with the task of developing an inclusive, curriculum driven, human-centred process for developing briefs for next generation-learning spaces. It is argued that this expansion of the role of spatial designers into the design of processes (and tools to facilitate those processes) speaks of an emergent shift in the ecology of design practice. The paper concludes with an argument as to the benefits to be gained, both for design practice and for those whose territories are intervened by such design practice.
. . man is an animal, suspended in webs of significance he has spun . . .1
EcologieS of PRactice
The metaphorical transposition of the concept of an ecology from the natural to the human sciences in the mid-20th century, opened a fruitful trajectory for engaging with the open, complex and adaptive systems that are constructed, interpreted and inhabited by the peripatetic modern. Ecologies are characterized by ongoing, open-ended, animate negotiations within and between complex entities. Understanding human practices as ecologies brings to view the dynamism of their internal transformations, shifting border conditions and renegotiation of external relations. This paper is concerned with two ecologies; an ecology of learning institutions and an ecology of spatial design practice. These two ecologies intersect in the context of a concern to design appropriate spaces for next-generation learning. The paper introduces cross-disciplinary research, headed by a spatial design team, into the requirements of an inclusive brief-development process for next-generation learning spaces. The need to design for such a process has become ever more evident as universities enter into a period of dramatic shifts and expansion.The expertise of diverse stakeholders needs to be given a voice, and the complex negotiation of competing desires and claims needs to be as well informed as possible, if the spaces constructed are to meet the needs of future learners. The space that
THe dynamicS of SPatial exPeRience

Experience of both space and time profoundly altered during the course of the 19th and 20th centuries; with far-reaching consequences for everyday practices.3 The 20th century city radicalized the trend towards a compartmentalisation of daily life into different spheres of activity family life, education, economic production, consumption and leisure that were spatially distinct. Increasingly
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efficient transport networks enabled flows of people, goods and services through and between these settings.4 The everyday experience of space and time within the modern city became one of neutral and efficient movement punctuated by meaningful, located activity or pleasure-seeking tarrying; a rhythm of focus and flow, attention and distraction. While embodied spatial experience was increasingly organised as a punctuated engagement in differently located activities, the potential for virtual engagement in distant or imaginary spaces burgeoned, as popular communications media became ubiquitous. First print, then screen-based media, constructed narrative identities that, for the moment, consumed the reader or viewer, proliferating the possibilities for experience.The shifting of attention from the physical to the virtual and back, gave experiential depth to embodied inhabitation of spaces. Virtual experience of the world accessible through media, was originally anchored (in large part) to particular spaces; books were read in libraries, performances watched at the theatre, films at the cinema and television at home; and these associations enriched the distinctiveness of experience of place, confirming the articulation of temporal experience into sequences of located activities, and richly developed spatial environments particular to these activities. It was in the context of this articulation of spatial experience into activity-specific environments that interior design, as a discipline, was born. There was a need for places that not only oriented themselves to an activity to be performed, but also articulated the identity of the body that laid claim to that activity. National, historical and cultural identities, as well as corporate, branded and domestic identities, variously articulated through design, gave narrative continuity to the projects pursued within different activity settings. These richly developed spatial contexts were both complicated and enriched by their relations with virtual worlds (imaginary, projected, distant, other). First print media, then, increasingly, screenbased media, broke free from their spatial locatedness, and became portable; offering instant and ubiquitous access into the worlds they projected, regardless of physical place. One could read a newspaper or a paper-back book at home, on public transport, in a caf or while on holiday. The portable television eroded the association between television viewing and a room devoted to sitting, living or lounging. Televisual engagement became a transportable pleasure equally available in the kitchen or bedroom. The narrative pleasures offered by film proliferated from the cinema to the television and thence to the computer and mobile Wi-Fi device, where they now appear alongside information streams, games and social software interfaces. The laptop and the mobile phone rendered workplace and social life continuous. Thus, alongside the punctuated rhythms of embodied spatial experience within the 20th century city, a second kind of spatial experience assumed increasing dominance. The virtual worlds and information flows accessed through communications media are experienced as continuously available; as a stream that can be dipped into at will. Boundaries collapse, and active negotiation of the flow assumes an ongoing imperative.
The distinctive character of spatial experience within modernity, and as crystallized in the multimedia spaces of the late 20th and early 21st century, was co-produced with the emergence of the modern subject. Recognition of the emergence of a new mode of engagement with the world radically shaped the designed spaces, objects and communications of the 20th century. Designers such as Harry Beck and the Eameses understood that, for the modern, meaning is constructed through the making of connections.5 Through an ongoing negotiation of multiple contexts, activity settings and information streams, through the making of connections between disparate fragments, the individual has become an active co-producer of meaning in everyday life. Home, school, work, commerce each generate a continuous stream of information, images, impressions and narratives. The experience of overload is a constant of contemporary life. The individual can either disengage, adopting a stance of distraction, or participate and negotiate, coconstructing meaning from the proliferating streams on offer. It is participation in the production of meaning, by individual or group, which animates contemporary cultures.6
LeaRning SPaceS
The modern individual is a learner; positioned as such by the enlightenment imperative for self-improvement, for boundary breaching and critique. The proliferation of distinct activity settings within modern life included settings for learning. At first housed in school rooms in the houses of the rich, in public schools and in universities, learning acquired a set of distinctive associations, practices and embedded dispositions. The students body was schooled to attentive reception, positioned in acknowledgement of the authority of the teacher. Blackboard, writing table, chair, paper and pen, books, maps and measures; all exercised a discipline, shaping the space and the experience of learning. During the 19th century these dedicated spaces of learning were supplemented by projects of public enlightenment represented by the library, the museum and the exhibition. These more informal learning spaces assumed a different kind of body self-directed and, in the case of the museum and exhibition, active, perambulatory and social. These different learning practices and their accompanying body disciplines developed different possibilities for the negotiation of self, world and trajectory. Together they enabled the construction of identities that retained coherence while being open and mobile. These 19th and early 20th century negotiations made sense in the context of relatively stable and intelligible bounded entities of early modernity, as of nation states, gender-roles, and distinct activity-settings. However the progressive erosion of boundaries, blurring of distinctions and destabilisation of identities through the course of the 20th century, has re-written the needs of the learner. Despite the transformation of everyday life by technologies of mobility, and the proliferation of engagement in virtual spaces, the physical and institutional structures accommodating learning have changed very little. Schools and universities, libraries, museums and exhibitions, essentially retain
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their 19th century form. However the revolution in mobile and information technologies radically altered learning possibilities, rendering the traditional physical sites of learning peripheral to many emerging learning practices. The ecology of learning, as practiced by a new generation of digital natives has shifted to encompass new technologies, and has developed new literacies, new bodydisciplines and performances, and correspondent emotional comportments and touchstones.7 The inherited environments of mainstream learning institutions do not cohere with the desires and disciplines of digitally enabled learning practices. The relations they assume between learners and learned are built on pedagogies of instruction, not of participation, negotiation and experimentation.8 They assume the spatial and temporal co-locatedness of learners, rather than the dispersed and collapsed spatiality and temporality of the digitally enabled. They assume that learning is an activity for which there is a place and a time, distinct from the places and times of work and leisure. These inherited learning spaces are still, in large part, the accepted sites of formal learning. However a new generation of learners increasingly treats these spaces, and the activities they house, as a necessary sufferance on the path to formal qualification, rather than as places of discovery and self-accomplishment. The need to re-conceptualize the relations between institutional spaces and learning practices has driven a flurry of research over the past decade.9 Central to this research have been questions concerning the shifting relations between virtual and physical spaces. The tempting efficiencies envisaged as a consequence of the transfer of learning from physical to virtual spaces, has driven investment in online learning. However, while it is clear that these virtual environments have an important role to play within next-generation learning, a substantial body of research into the nature of learning cautions against wholesale abandonment of embodied learning within face-toface contexts and physical spaces. Influential in this research are the arguments of Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, Paul Duguid and John Seely Brown, Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger, Ron Oliver, Jan Herrington and Anthony Herrington. These thinkers and others highlight the role of tacit knowing, informal understanding and appropriate comportment in the embodiment of expertise, and the situated nature of authentic learning.10 As Brown and Duguid observe, you cant learn to talk like a native by studying grammar books. Anyone who has travelled in a foreign culture knows that what goes down on the street isnt whats put down in the books. Learning involves inhabiting the streets of a communitys culture.11 Sustainment of ecologies of practice (the practices that learners are to learn) requires that learners be given opportunities to become street-wise in the culture of their disciplinary community, as a necessary step on the path to expertise. This means direct exposure to, and interaction with, the embodied expertise of authentic bearers of that culture, as well as guided practice in the kinds of performance particular to that culture. As Brown comments:
Ecological robustness is built mysteries are put in the air through shared practice, face to face contacts, reciprocity, and swift trust, all generated within networks of practice and communities of practice. New communications technologies can certainly reinforce these. It is more doubtful that they can readily replace them.12 Expert practice already does, and increasingly will, incorporate the negotiation of digital flows within the everyday performance of practitioners. A focus on the performative aspects of practice does not exclude engagement with the digital. Further, digital flows and virtual spaces provide learners with crucial interfaces, connecting them with bodies that lie beyond the practice; with the learning institution, with educators, with friends and workplaces. Clearly, next-generation learning spaces must accommodate diverse flows of digital information, and provide settings for the creative negotiation of these flows. Equally, however, they must enable cultivation of new and practice-relevant modes of self- and body-discipline; they must accommodate and encourage the performance of expert practice, and provide for the cultivation and dissemination of modes of comportment appropriate to particular fields. Next-generation learning spaces, therefore, need to offer learners a rich mix of opportunities for both virtual and physical engagement with the practice to be learned, with practitioners, educators and other learners, and with the institutional facilitators of, and stakeholders in, their learning process. Further, these spaces must be seductive enough, rewarding enough, that students will shift the centre of their attention, and the site of their negotiation of competing demands, into the space of learning; at least for sufficient time for the seeds of an acculturation into disciplinary expertise to be sown. Unlike the discrete learning spaces created for early moderns, next-generation learning spaces need to cater to the hyper-mobility, the connectivity, and the pleasures of transgression that inform the practices of contemporary learners. Such spaces may be physically dispersed or transient; they may be temporarily and opportunistically appropriated from other uses and practices; they may be loosely defined and inclusive of other activities; they may be actively and continuously reconstituted by their users. However such spatial dispositions challenge many of the assumptions and processes that currently shape the production, inhabitation and control of institutional learning spaces. Significant barriers to change are located prior to, and beyond, the traditional role of the designer. Radical change to learning space design requires a repositioning of many of the assumptions and expectations that educators and learners currently bring to learning. More controversially, but perhaps with equal imperative, such change requires a rethinking of assumptions about the ownership of learning spaces, and of the systems of control and management that currently dominate learning institutions. What is demanded is a paradigmatic shift in the ecology of learning
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institutions. Few stakeholders disagree. The challenge is how impetus outside of these tentative settings until the 1990s, when to successfully negotiate such complex change. It is here that ethnographic researchers and design anthropologists turned emergent areas of design practice have a significant role to play. their attention to patterns of engagement between users and new technologies. The importation of ethnographic research methods into design user research was paralleled by the exportation of design thinking (characterized by creative, iterative generation, testing and reframing of possibilities) into management, organisation design and business innovation.13 Such boundary-crossing, borrowing and reinterpretation of practices drawn from other disciplines is While mainstream interior (and other) design practice has actively characteristic of the late-modern pursuit of connections. Just as participated in the construction and communication of personal, spatial articulations blurred in the latter part of the 20th century, corporate, branded and community identities throughout the so too have many disciplinary distinctions. modern period, and has provided settings for the performance and consumption of these identities, emergent design practices are now A combination of ethnographic methods (re-interpreted for engaging with another aspect of identity construction; the negotiation design contexts) and design thinking approaches (reinterpreted of alternative, future identities, and of the changes necessary to enable for innovation contexts) consolidated within participatory design. those identities. The consolidation of the consultation process into Participatory design is more concerned with eliciting stakeholder understandings and concerns, and facilitating engagement with a brief marks a crucial point in such negotiations. innovative change, than it is with the direct production of a The purpose of the brief is to communicate a desired future. It designed thing or environment. In our ALTC funded project, is the moment at which the possibilities for promising change participatory design becomes the means for enabling the diverse envisaged by the stakeholder group are translated into a specific set (and often conflicting) understandings and concerns of different of desires and constraints for design. Mainstream design practice stakeholder groups to be co-present within an open-ended, has traditionally entered the process at this point. However, the generative conversation about possible characteristics and recognised potential that design holds for redirecting ecologies in qualities of proposed new learning spaces. An iterative cycle which the design plays a role, has focused stakeholder groups on of such conversations feeds into the brief development process. the importance of well considered communication of their desires Thus the preparation of the design brief becomes a process that for the future of their practice. The complexity of the consultative is guided (though not controlled) by design. process, and the difficulty most stakeholders have in projecting and critically engaging with possibilities, has opened up a new role for DeSigning toolS and PRoceSSeS designers. In this pre-briefing process, the designers role is as an enabler of communication and envisioning among a stakeholder As spatial designers we brought to the project an understanding group. This shift in role demands a very different set of strategies of the ways that spaces can shape experience and enable behaviours and practices. Interior (and other spatial) designers and a different focus for design energies. understand the interplay of different elements that combine Spatial designers (among others) have dabbled with inclusive design, to shape spatial experience; the play of light, sound, colour, social design and community consultation in their public projects texture, form, surface, depth, openness, closure, and so on. They since the 1970s, however participatory design did not gain understand the importance of adjacencies, and of flows within The ecology of design is bound into the ecologies of cultures that it is embedded in, and that it services. The shifts in spatial experience and in the embodied experience of learning, in the course of the 20th century, have been echoed by shifts in design practice.
DeSign and ecological cHange
and through the space. They understand temporal dimensions, of design briefs should benefit both stakeholders in the designed the relative permanence and transience of different materials spaces and the practice of spatial design itself. Well designed processes for brief development should result in spaces that and configurations. stakeholders are keen to engage with; that they understand and These understandings, which belong to spatial design practice, are identify with. The designed spaces that germinate from such a important players within the brief development process. While the brief may realise new possibilities for learning, as well delighting brief must not attempt to accomplish or dictate the design itself, it users by their fitness to the practices they house. does need to communicate to the designer the kind of character and mood that will fit the practices to be housed; the ways the Previously, the potential for creating truly innovative design space is expected to behave, what it needs to support and what it often has been constrained by design briefs that reflect partial consultative processes and limited involvement of must exclude. crucial stakeholders. The design of better brief development Within design scenarios for next generation learning spaces, processes opens the door to more exciting design scenarios. different design possibilities have different implications for the Our project is not unique in exploring this new territory for management and modes of occupation of the spaces. If a built spatial designers. The interest that is beginning to burgeon in space demands a shift in facilities management practices, for this expanded terrain suggests a promising shift in the ecology example, this needs to be understood and agreed to by those of spatial design practice. who will be responsible for the management of that space. If the space assumes a shift in teaching and learning practices, this ConcluSion shift must be one that academics and students can see value in, and wish to pursue. In each case, the built space will represent At the close of the first decade of the 21st century, we can an intervention into (or a consolidation of) existing practices of survey the ongoing dynamic of the ecologies to which we are management and of learning. As each of these practices adjusts heirs. From early modernity an emphasis upon mobility and a to new possibilities, and develops new strategies and routines, critical interrogation of boundaries has informed our practices. the ecology of the learning institution itself is re-configured. This is a spatial disposition. To be modern is to be in motion; a transgressor. But equally, to be modern is to be a learner. The designing that was done within our ALTC project was centred As moderns, in the course of the 20th century, we learned on interactions between different stakeholders. Playful prompts to be wary of the simple principles the Enlightenment had were designed to facilitate collaborative exploration of ideas and pinned its hopes to. The enthusiasm of early 20th century promising directions for new learning spaces. We drew upon spatial designers for the transparent, the rational, neutral theory of game design and play, in addition to borrowing and and efficient, was displaced by a consciousness of greater adapting tools already in use within participatory and innovation complexities; of the pervasiveness of power and deception, design settings.14 These latter included persona development and but also of human resilience, of generosity, wit, playfulness and forecasting tools, as well as prompt or cue cards, reconceptualised delight. Together with the other design disciplines, spatial design to suit the specific needs of spatial design within next generation offered opportunities for corporate and independent bodies, learning contexts. The design of these tools has been for communities of practice and culture, to reinvent themselves; detailed elsewhere.15 to reposition themselves within more promising trajectories, or to play the game for what it might offer. The ecology of spatial Expanding spatial design practice to include the design of design practice has responded to and thrived upon the restless participatory processes and enabling tools for the development striving of the peripatetic modern.
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New technologies have transformed social and work practices over the past decades. They have accelerated the collapse of spatial and temporal experience. The moments that we inhabit a single space are increasingly few; our time is increasingly independent of shared schedules and agreed routines. The transgressive seeds sown early in modernity have borne extraordinary fruit. The ecology of spatial design practice is undoubtedly on the move. Our venture into territory relatively new to spatial design, in designing tools and strategies for participatory brief-development processes, is but one of the many boundary crossings that characterize contemporary ecologies of design.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Support for this project has been provided by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Ltd; an initiative of the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The views expressed in this project do not necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council.
NOTES
1. Clifford Geertz, The interpretation of cultures, (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3. 2. Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger, (eds.), Educating the Net Generation, (Educause, 2005), accessed February 2007, www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen/; Paul Draper, The New Learning, (PhD diss., Queensland University of Technology, 1999); and Peter Jamieson, Kenn Fisher, Tony Gilding, Peter G. Taylor, A.C.F. (Chris) Trevitt, Place and Space in the Design of New Learning Environments, HERDSA (Higher Education Research and Development), VOl.19, No.2 (July 2000): 221-237. 3. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Oxford, England and Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1991) and Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley, California and London: University of California Press [1979] 1984). 4. David Harvey, The Urban Experience, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) and Janin Hadlaw, The London Underground Map: Imagining Modern Time and Space, Design Issues, Vol. 9, No1, Winter (Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press, 2003): 25-35. 5. Beatriz Colomina, Enclosed by Images: The Eameses Multimedia Architecture, Grey Room, Vol. 2, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001): 5-29 and Hadlaw, The London Underground Map. 6. Colomina, Enclosed by Images. 7. Andreas Reckwitz, Towards a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol.5, No.2, (2002): 243-263 (251). 8. John Seely Brown, Growing up Digital: The Web and a New Learning Ecology, Change, March/April, (2000): 10-20. 9. Arthur Richardson, An ecology of learning and the role of e-learning in the learning environment: a discussion paper, in Connecting the Future: Global Summit of Online Knowledge Networks, education.au limited, Dulwich, (2002); Jan Herrington and Ron Oliver, An instructional design framework for authentic learning environments, Educational Technology Research and Development, Vol.48, No. 3, (2000): 23-48; George Siemens, Connectivism: A learning Theory for the Digital Age, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, (2005), accessed December 2008, http://www. itdl.org/index.htm; and Jan Visser, Overcoming the underdevelopment of learning: A transdisciplinary view, American Educational Research Association, Position Paper (1999). 10. Hurbert Dreyfus, On the Internet, (London and New York: Routledge, [2001], 2009); John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information, (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000); John Seely Brown and Paul
Duguid, Mysteries of the Region: Knowledge Dynamics in Silicon Valley, The Silicon Valley Edge: A Habitat for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Chong-Moon Lee, William F. Miller, Marguerite Gong Hancock and Henry S. Rowen (eds.), (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), 16-39; Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation, (Cambridge, UK; NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: learning meaning and identity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Herrington et al, An instructional design framework for authentic learning environments; Anthony Herrington and Jan Herrington (eds.), Authentic learning environments in higher education, (Hershey, PA, London, UK: Information Science Publishing, 2006). 11. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, Universities in the Digital Age, Change, The Magazine of Higher Learning, published for the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), Vol. 28, No. 4 (July/August), (1996): 10-19 (10). 12. Brown et al, Mysteries of the Region, 13. 13. Tim Brown, Design Thinking, Harvard Business Review, June, (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2008);Tim Brown, Change by Design: How design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2009); Roger L. Martin,The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2009). The two previous authors are business borrowing design thinking, the following are anthropology /ethnography being imported into design - Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, [1987], 2007); and Joachim Halse, Design Anthropology: Borderland Experiments with participation and Situated Intervention, (PhD diss. IT University of Copenhagen, 2008), available online at http://www.dasts.dk/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/joachim-halse-2008.pdf 14. See, for example, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Bill Gaver, Designing For Homo Ludens, Still, I3 Magazine, No. 12, June (2002); and James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Play, (New York, NY: Free Press, 1986). 15. Susan Sherringham and Sue Serle, Developing curriculum-led human-centred spatial design briefs for next generation learning environments in higher education, International Journal of Design Principles and Practices, Vol. 4, No. 3, (Commonground Publishing, 2010): 125-136; Susan Sherringham and Sue Serle, Using Visual Action Methods in the Design Process, Design Principles and Practices: An International J, Vol. 4, No. 3, (Commonground Publishing, 2010): 179-192; Susan Sherringham and Sue Serle, Visual action methods in design research and learning, ConnectED: 2nd International Conference on Design Education, Sydney, Australia, June 2010, in ConnectED: International Conference on Design Education Sydney (2010); Susan Sherringham and Susan Stewart, Fragile Constructions, Reshaping Learning, Jos Boys and Anne Boddington (eds), (Rotterdam, Netherlands and Boston, MA: Sense Publishing, 2011)
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Silent Witness: Rachel Whitereads Nameless Library

Rachel Carley : Unitec, New Zealand
ABSTRACT
Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whitereads Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a holocaust memorial in Judenplatz Square, Vienna. For her project, the sculptor designed an inverted library in concrete, the proportions being derived from those found in a room surrounding the square. While the majority of critics refer to this memorial as an inside out library, this paper argues that Whitereads design is not so easily understood. It will identify the ways in which her design complicates relationships between sculpture and architecture, container and contained, private and public, interior and faade, as well as domestic and civic scales. The work is placed within a counter monumental tradition of memorialisation, as articulated by James E. Young, which demonstrates a radical re-making of memorial sculpture after the Holocaust. It is argued that this site-specific memorial, partially cloned from the urban context in which it is placed, commemorates a loss that is beyond words. Nameless Library utilises architectural operations and details to evoke a disquieting atmosphere in urban space, borrowing from the local to inculcate neighbouring structures as silent witnesses to past atrocities. The memorial is compared to the casemate fortifications on the Atlantic wall; the defensible spaces of bunkers, described by Paul Virilio in his book Bunker Archaeology as survival machines. It is argued that Whitereads careful detailing of Nameless Library is designed to keep memory alive. Under Whitereads direction, the typological form of the bunker is transformed into a structure of both physical and psychic defense. The memorial has been specifically designed to resist attack by vandals and also functions as a defence against entropy, taking into itself and holding onto lost loved ones, preserving their memory.
in perpetuity. It achieves this by cannily responding to its historical site and surrounding context, turning the architecture of the square in upon itself to foreground Viennas disavowal of antiSemitic persecution since the Middle Ages: looking to the local and its role as silent witness in order to draw attention to past atrocities committed on the site. In 1994, the late Simon Wiesenthal approached the Mayor of Vienna to discuss the possibility of erecting a Holocaust memorial to commemorate the 65,000 Austrian Jews who died in Vienna or in concentration camps under the National Socialist regime. The proposal emerged from dissatisfaction with an existing sculpture, Monument to the Victims of Fascism by Alfred Hrdlicka, installed in the Albertinaplatz in 1988.1 The organising committee for the competition decided that a figurative design was not appropriate and this was the motivating force behind the selection of participants, which was limited to an invited group of five Austrians and five foreigners. The Austrian entrants were Valie Export, Karl Prantl and architect Peter Waldbauer, Zbynek Sekal, and Heimo Zobernig in collaboration with Michael Hofstatter and Wolfgang Pauzenberger. The foreign entrants were the collaborative artists Michael Clegg and Martin Guttman, Ilya Kabakov, Rachel Whiteread, Zvi Hecker, and Peter Eisenman. Judenplatz or Jews Square was decided upon as the location for the memorial. It was the site of the first Jewish ghetto and is located in Viennas First District (Figure 1). The small, intimate square is accessed by five narrow streets, and is populated by buildings predominantly from the Baroque period. Judenplatzs picturesque aspect is belied however, by closer inspection into the history of the site.
Rachel Whitereads sculptural oeuvre evidences an continuing interest in the evolution and transformation of physical interiors. Her public sculpture Nameless Library is one project that can be understood as an evolutionary interior. Using her sculptural vocabulary Whiteread strategically unfolds and involutes condensed layers of historical, cultural and architectural activity specific to the projects particular site and surrounding context. In 2000, Whitereads Holocaust memorial Nameless Library was dedicated in Judenplatz Square in Vienna. Whitereads memorial design elaborately convolutes relationships between sculpture and architecture, container and contained, private and public, interior and faade, as well as domestic and civic scales. The projects strength inheres in its detailing. The memorials strategic assemblage of positive and negative cast elements has been carefully detailed to depict a work of mourning
Above Figure. 1 Anti-Semitic Plaque on Haus zum Grossen, Judenplatz 2, Vienna (detail). Photo taken by author
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The Judenplatz site has had a tumultuous history and many of the competition entrants made direct or oblique reference to this history and the recent excavations in the square.2 In 1995, the City of Vienna Department of Archaeology discovered beneath the proposed memorial location the remains of the citys oldest Synagogue, dating from the Middle Ages The unearthing of flagstones from the synagogue revealed scorch marks that testified to the torching of the temple in 1421. In this pogrom, several hundred Jews burned themselves alive in the synagogue rather than submit to being forcibly baptised.The sculptural reliefs and the inscriptions that adorn the surrounding buildings on the square bear witness to prior Christian occupations of the Judenplatz and to historic anti-Semitic activity.3
On the eastern side of the square is a bronze sculpture of the Enlightenment poet, playwright, and advocate for tolerance, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The sculpture was designed by Siegfried Charoux and unveiled in 1935 (Figure 2). In 1939, the Nazis removed the sculpture and melted it down for ammunition. In 1968, Charoux rebuilt the piece and installed it in Morinplatz. The work was relocated to its original Judenplatz location in 1981. For the Holocaust memorial competition, some entrants construed the figure of Lessing with ambivalence, for the Enlightenment thinker championed reason and it was a rationality gone mad that reached its terrifying conclusion in the catastrophic event of the Holocaust.4 The competition regulations laid particular emphasis on the monument as a work of art that carefully attended to its surroundings and the architectural essence of the Judenplatz. The memorial was also to be considered in relation to Misrachi House at Judenplatz 8, a building that has existed on the site since the fifteenth century and had become a locus of Jewish Education. Two compulsory texts, rendered in German, Hebrew, and English were also required on the memorial: the first commemorating the loss of 65,000 Austrian Jewish lives during the Holocaust, and the second listing all of the concentration camps in which these Austrian Jews were killed.
In counter-monumental practices, it is the monuments very negation, its disappearance that has been foregrounded by many artists charged with designing German Holocaust memorials. Strategies of inversion, self-effacement, and disappearance, are evident in projects such as Horst Hoheisels negative form monument Aschrott-Brunnen Monument, Kassel, 1987, Jochen and Esther Shalev-Gerzs Harburg Monument Against War and Fascism and for Peace, Harburg, 1986-1993, and Micha Ullmans Bibliotek: Memorial to the Nazi Book Burnings, Bebelplatz, Berlin, 1996. As with these contemporary memorials, Whitereads proposal is also characterised by a form of negation. It fails, however, to stage a disappearing act. Rather than being subsumed within the subterranean realm, Nameless Library imposes itself unequivocally within the public domain. Whilst living in Berlin for 18 months between 1992-3, Whiteread travelled throughout Germany and Eastern Europe and became fascinated with the history of Berlin under the Third Reich. She visited concentration camps in Germany and read extensively on the subject, in particular survivors testimonies of the Holocaust. Given this experience, the artist felt equipped to address the subject of Holocaust memorialisation.8
The drawings for Whitereads competition entry were made in collaboration with the architectural firm, Atelier One. All the technical drawings submitted were at a scale of 1:100 and included a ground plan of Judenplatz Square and the memorial site, sections and elevations, foundation details and wall details of book fixings, and ground and roof plans. The model for the project was made at a scale of 1:20 from wood, glass, model paste, and paint in collaboration with model maker Simon Phipps (Figure 3). Some critics were wary of appraising the finished project based on these competition documents. Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote about the room devoted to this project in the exhibition Shedding Life, cautioning It is represented by a model.on which it should certainly not be judged.10 Rebecca Comay also acknowledged that The crucial differences in detailbetween the model and the monument, may nonetheless reveal an essential ambiguity.11 Mark Cousins, Brian Hatton, and William Feaver also had reservations about Whitereads proposal at this early stage. Cousins was suspicious that the project had been hijacked by the symbolism of Jews as the people of the Book, and the Nazi
CounteR-monumentS
Brian Hatton observed that the competition was set between negative terms as not monument, not anti-monument, not museum, not an installation, not an urban intervention.5 This negation of the very idea of the monument is emblematised by the emergence of the counter-monument, a new sub-genre of Holocaust monuments investigated in detail by the art historian James E. Young. Counter-monuments are memorial spaces that are, conceived to challenge the very premise of the monument.6 These projects eradicate the heroic and triumphal from their schedule, addressing instead the void left in the wake of mass genocide. They seek to question the traditional monuments capacity to do our memory work for us.7
THe MemoRial
In Jewish tradition the first memorials came in book form, and Whitereads memorial makes reference to Jewish people being the people of the book.9 Her proposal resembles a domestic library seemingly turned inside out so that thousands of cast replicas of books, cast as positive concrete forms, face out toward the viewer, their spines inward set. The roof bears a cast in the negative of a ceiling rose, a detail characteristic of those found within the bourgeois apartments lining the square. The front elevation displays a negative cast of double doors that face the statue of Lessing. The memorial is located on the North East side of the square, and its orientation was determined by the position of the excavated bimah and its axis by the edge of the building at Misraschi House.
Opposite Figure. 2 Anti-Semitic Plaque on Haus zum Grossen, Judenplatz 2, Vienna. Photo taken by author Above Figure. 3 Rachel Whiteread, 1:20 Scale Model of Nameless Library, 1996. Judenplatz Museum, Vienna. (Model Maker: Simon Phipps). Image courtesy of Rachel Whiteread.
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book burnings, which, he suggests: begins to dilute the technical clarity of her work. We shall see.12 Architectural critic Brian Hatton had reservations about how successful the work would be at a scale of 1:1. He comments: On examination, convincing as it was as an icon, it was inconsistent as a cast. It, too, was an assemblage, of panels and bolted racks; indeed, hollow. Paradoxically, its hollowness, its semblance, seemed to some to compromise its capacity to hold the dead. It should withhold, like the Wailing Wall, like a cave wall, no yonder site, offering, precisely in its terminus, infinitude. Or, like the walls of that remembered war memorial (of Maya Lin), holding more in name than it ever could in measure. But Rachel Whitereads archive reverses that too. The dead are here, it reminds, but their names are elsewhere.13 Hattons reservations were founded upon the memorial being a hollow assemblage of cast parts. However, this form of assembly was employed in Whitereads earlier room-scaled castings and had not hindered these works from conjuring up copious thoughts of loss and memory. It is proposed that the completed memorial, with its strategic assemblage of positive and negative cast elements has been carefully detailed to depict a work of mourning in perpetuity. Rebecca Comay also questioned Whitereads decision to enlist, for the first time, positive book castings in this work, rather than her signature negative castings.14 One can argue against Comays objection on a number of counts. Firstly, Comay suggests that Whiteread all but abandons her predilection for negative casting in this memorial, negating her own hallmark. But this might be precisely her intention. Hatton notes that each memorial testifies twice first in its ostensive subject of commemoration, and second in the index it presents of its builders commitment to remind. Whatever signs they deploy in their monuments, builders of memorials also, unavoidably represent themselves.15 This turn toward an apparent positivity may in fact be an attempt by the artist to ameliorate the impact of the artists signature on the act of memorialisation so that it didnt overwhelm the memorial programme. Secondly, the very strength of Whitereads project lies in the artists combination of casts of both positive and negative prefabricated elements. The work is caught between presence and absence, making any attempts at positivising this object unfathomable. The artists decision to use positive rather than negative book castings was also to make her subject more legible. Whiteread comments that the positive book forms were much easier to read as a series of books, and I didnt want to make something completely obscure.16 At the memorials unveiling, Simon Wiesenthal said of this act of holocaust remembrance that It is important that the art is not beautiful, that it hurts us in some way.17 The memorials power lies precisely in its ability to disturb distinctions between architectural typologies, between interiors and exteriors, rendering the familiar strange.
OBjectionS to tHe MemoRial

Following the announcement of Whiteread as the unanimous winner of the competition, objections to the memorial were fielded from across the archaeological, aesthetic, political, cultural, economic, and religious spectrums of the Viennese community. Hatton suggests that Whitereads entry convinced the judges by virtue of precisely denying easy identification with received versions of its subject or the legibility of its modality - the monument.18 Hatton also presciently notes that perhaps it was this illegibility that was accountable for its belated inauguration, for, as if too cryptic to accept, it has precipitated an unresolved controversy.19 Some opposed the memorial on the grounds that Whiteread was not Jewish. Shop owners and landlords opposed to the memorial project set up an anti-Whiteread petition, collecting 2,000 signatures. They complained of a projected loss of business (allegedly 40%), a loss of car parking spaces and voiced their reservations that the square would be disfigured by the concrete colossus. 20 Some residents also believed there would be potential security concerns, as the memorial might become a target of Neo-Nazi assault. The memorial was also criticised on the basis that it would occlude the excavations beneath it, which many already deemed a suitable memorial to the persecution of Viennese Jews.21 Criticism also came from within theological quarters, where some deemed it an affront to the Book and the Name posed by this shrine to illegibility and anonymity.22 In contrast, others saw the memorial as too readily stereotyping Jews as intellectuals, as the people-of-the-book, thereby ignoring working class victims.23 The memorials dedication was also hindered by the rise of Jrg Haiders right-wing Freedom Party in Austria. After Whiteread was granted the commission, there was growing pressure from prominent members of the Jewish community to change the appearance of the memorial. Suggestions were even made to move it to Heldenplatz and preserve the excavations as a more suitable memorial.24 This suggestion was unequivocally rejected by the artist, saying This particular site gave me my vocabulary.25 On 26 October 2000, the memorial and museum were finally unveiled. Whitereads scheme was complemented by architects Christian Jabornegg and Andras Plffys re-design of the square and a new Museum of Medieval Jewry at Misrachi House. At ground level, the museum contains a room dedicated to the drawings, models, and prototypes designed by Whiteread for the memorial. It includes a 1:1 scale plaster mock-up of the ceiling rose, a wooden book prototype, a door handle, and architectural drawings. In this setting the memorials details are exhibited as tectonic fragments whose representational purpose has been served. They now lie in state; their still lives hermetically sealed in glass cases. Nameless Library marked a point of departure from Whitereads earlier room-scale sculptures in that none of the memorials architectural details were directly cast from an existing interior. The proportions of a domestic interior hidden behind the baroque facades of the Judenplatz were used to dimension the memorial.26 Inspiration was also gleaned from the ubiquitous architectural features
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found within the interiors surrounding the square. An interior footprint was drawn out into the public realm, and into a square that the artist also saw as domestic in scale. The Judenplatz was allied to an interior, and the streets leading to it were seen as multiple doorways.27 Like her earlier architectural casts displayed in galleries, Whiteread once again places a room within a room. On this occasion however, the room is situated within the public domain and must endure the storms of both controversy and climate (Figure 4). Whitereads memorial references a typology whose contents are structured to reveal multiple layers of interiority. Comay has observed that in its degrees of containment, the library would stand at the extreme limit of such a logic of incorporation. A room full of shelves full of books full of pages full of words would logically function as a container of a container of a container of a container of a container.interiorisation would here reach its absolute limit.28 The memorial is lined with 350 book modules, produced as positive concrete casts.The dimensions of this module correspond with the librarian and metrician Melvil Deweys Golden mean of bookshelf length.29 The cast fore-edges of books rusticate Nameless Library, mimicking the base course of its opulent surroundings. Many buildings with elaborate courses of banded, vermiculated, and pyramidal rustication share close proximity to the memorial. By aping the articulated surface treatments of neighbouring buildings the memorial firmly solders itself to the square, while its grey concrete pallor and squat profile serve as a bton brut counterpoint to the stucco finish of the existing facades.
There are multiple ways the memorial can be read with respect to the interior. Most often, critics position the viewer in relation to the project in the following manner: as looking at a domestic library whose walls and bookshelves have been peeled away, so that we are looking at the back of the bookshelves, replete with the petrified fore-edges of books. In this scenario, the viewers position is complicit with the absent internal wall. The fictitious BookS bookshelves are eradicated and the live load of the books is Under Whitereads direction, the ability to open up the diegetic transferred to a new interior wall element. space of the book, a space of narrative passage that moves between scales through time has been foreclosed. Whiteread There are two other ways the viewer might attempt to read chose to cast books of the same height, endowing them with the memorial. It could be construed as a series of internal library an association to the encyclopaedic and bureaucratic, lending walls that have been unfolded and turned outward, much like the the work allegiances to the Nazis obsession with bureaucratic interior as it is described in the developed surface drawing, where procedures and record-keeping. The books on the memorial a room is represented independently from its surroundings. If one make reference to a knowledge base that has been eradicated, were to turn the walls of a library replete with books out toward alluding to the stories unable to be told, just as the lives of the exterior, then it would be reasonable to expect the spines the authors were stopped short. The victims testimonies of the books would now face outward. Here, however, the foreassume these lost forms: regimented assemblies of Deweys edges face outwards.The spine, the exoskeleton of the book, has divine proportion. been pushed into the dark recesses at the back of the bookshelf. This formal gesture serves to prohibit any attempts to catalogue the immensity of the losses sustained by the Jewish community because of the absence of titles embedded into the spines. By detailing the book modules in this way, the memorial alludes to a medieval common practice, identified by Henry Petroski, of storing books with their spines set inward.30 This detail enables Whiteread to not only commemorate the lives lost in the Holocaust, but also make an oblique reference to the Medieval pogrom, without direct reference to the excavations beneath the Judenplatz. In this interpretation, the viewer would perceive the memorial as an interior turned outward, and cast out into urban space, surrounding a central void.There is no need to attempt to situate ourselves within the interior as it is already laid out for us to inspect.Finally, if one were to try and access the titles of these fossilised tomes, to attempt to name and catalogue this loss of life, an alternate interpretation is needed, one requiring the viewer to insinuate themselves into the fabric of the memorial itself, into the liminal space between the pre-cast concrete wall
Opposite Figure. 4 Rachel Whiteread, Nameless Library, concrete, 1996-2000, 390x 752 x 1058cm, Judenplatz Square, Vienna. Photo taken by author. Above Figure. 5. Rachel Whiteread, Shadow Play on Nameless Library, concrete, 1996-2000, 390 x 752 x 1058cm, Judenplatz Square, Vienna. Photo taken by author.
Shadow play operates on the librarys crenulated surfaces. Its elevations fleetingly carry the silhouettes of water towers and other urban furniture populating the roof scapes on surrounding buildings. The cantilevered book modules themselves project shadows onto the surface of the memorial, casting corrugated canopies across the structure, erupting the verisimilitude of its surface according to the trajectory of the sun (Figure 5).
Reading NameleSS LiBRaRy
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of the memorial and the positive book castings. In an attempt to recuperate the spine and its ability to identify the lost object, the viewer must occupy a space in which they are sandwiched between the bolts and the book spines of the library. Given that there are a number of ways to decipher the spatial machinations at work in the project, commentators such as James E. Young who suggest this memorial is inside-out over-simplify matters.31
across the memorials elevations. This detail can be allied to the use of the cross motif in modern tomb art. Pedro Azara notes that the cross is often expressed, in the form of horizontal and vertical chinks (as in Ignazio Gardellas Pirovani vault of Francesco Venezias tomb), which are employed to signal the presence of the deceased person, express his beliefs or his faith, and symbolise the power of light to elbow matter aside.32
DooRS
ABSent InfRaStRuctuRe
As with all of Whitereads room-scaled casts, the memorial carefully evades showing any visible signs of structural support. There are gaps left on the library walls that evince the spaces where the phantom bookshelves once were (Figure 6). The memorial foregrounds the invisibility of the bookshelves: the constructional apparatus on which knowledge is supported and contained within the interior. The live load of the book modules is transferred to the interior of the memorial and, by analogy, to the interior of the viewer who must attempt to recuperate this structural framework in their imagination to make sense of the interiors apparent inversion. The channels left in the wake of the absent infrastructure articulate a regular cruciform patterning
DRainage Point
The use of positive book castings is complemented by negative casting details on the ceiling (now roof) of the memorial (Figure 7). The ceiling has been inclined towards mid-point, so that rainwater is diverted through a drainpipe in the centre of a ceiling rosette and distributed into the existing sewerage system. The ceiling rose has been interpreted as having malevolent undertones, being transformed by the artist into an uncanny harbinger of death.There is an unsettling shift in the function of the detail, whereby a conduit for electricity is now transformed into a drain. Critics have also made affiliations between the inverted ceiling rose and the formal allusions to the architecture of the gas chambers, sites of ethnic cleansing, which masqueraded as shower rooms.33
Jews were killed.The surface of the plinth set below the panelled doors, contains an inscription in German, English, and Hebrew, In Negative casts of double winged doors articulate the front memory of the more than 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered by elevation of the memorial (Figure 8). Azara has identified the the National Socialists in the period from 1938-1945 (Figure 9). door as a detail used in the design of tomb art where, Whiteread utilises the plinth as a critical device to complement The passage from life to death is often symbolised her memorial practice. The plinth institutes a buffer zone by a faade. The sides of some Etruscan and Roman between the memorial and the excavations beneath, elevating sarcophagi containing the remains of architects or the library above this torrid site of contention. This plinth also builders are ornamented with reliefs representing halfoperates to expand the topographic field of the memorial, open monumental doorways, which symbolise both the referencing geographic displacements that connect this sitegates of Hades and the doors of the houses or towns the specific work with the locales of terror to which the Viennese dead person built in his day.34 Jews were freighted. In contrast to these historical precedents, the door on Whitereads memorial is shut fast.The memorials front door is in fact internal, Whitereads ersatz plinth simulates a reunification of sculpture foreclosing access immemorial. One must, by an act of projection, and its substructure the plinth, but this connection is undercut in the section. The sectional drawings produced for the attempt to enter the void of the interior. competition in collaboration with Atelier One reveal that the plinth does not register on the interior of the project. The THe PlintH interior void of the library is without the support of sculptures The plinth surrounding the memorial accommodates the names, substructure, just as the books are without the support of the in alphabetical order, of concentration camps where Austrian bookshelves (Figure 10).
Opposite Left Figure. 6 Rachel Whiteread, Detail of book modules on Nameless Library, concrete, 19962000, 390 x 752 x 1058cm, Judenplatz Square, Vienna. Photo taken by author. Opposite Right Figure. 7 Rachel Whiteread, Ceiling/Roof, Nameless Library, concrete, 1996-2000, 390 x 752 x 1058cm, Judenplatz Square, Vienna. Image courtesy of Rachel Whiteread.
Above Left Figure. 8 Rachel Whiteread Door detail, Nameless Library, concrete, 1996-2000, 390 x 752 x 1058cm, Judenplatz Square, Vienna. Photo taken by author Above Right Figure. 9 Rachel Whiteread, Plinth Detail, Nameless Library, concrete, 1996-2000, 390 x 752 x 1058cm, Judenplatz Square, Vienna. Photo courtesy of Votava/PID and the Jewish Museum, Vienna.
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THe CoRneR PRoBlem

At the termination of each faade of the memorial, the blank covers of the final hardback volumes meet at right angles, constructing an indent (Figure 11).This gesture recalls the design of the corner detail in Mies Van der Rohes Illinois Institute of Technology Building, Chicago, (1945-1947). Reyner Banham observes that Mies English critics saw this detail as: A philosophical problem in abstract aesthetics: did the failure of the two planes to meet at the corner mean that Miess facades were to be read as endless, indeterminate?35 Such corner details, enlisted and applied to a memorial programme, can operate to imply that the vast archive of loss extends far beyond the parameters of the memorial itself.
Architectural theorist Anthony Vidler recognises the corner as one of the defining problems of modern architecture.36 He identifies the psychological effects of the corner in protecting both the occupant and the building: In a domestic context, corners signify security. They are places of rest, where two walls moving horizontally come to peace with each other; the intersection of the two walls demonstrates and creates closure, forms a volume in which the space is held safely; corners are cosy nooks for reading and thinking. In extremis, they are the last defense of the domicile: backed into a corner, the householder, like a boxer, can come out fighting while protecting the rear from surprise.37 In contrast, Whiteread enacts an uncanny conversion on the corner, the ultimate in homey spaces. Her walls of books splay out from one another at the corners of the memorial. There is no intersection at these points; the walls are not, and cannot be, at peace. The corner is divested of its responsibility to ensure the structural integrity of the interior. This formal device, coupled with the absent bookshelves articulates the immensity of the memorials programme, inferring a catastrophic loss that remains insupportable. Whitereads work refuses to contain and also be contained within typological categories. Both Vidler and Hatton suggest that the memorial is characterised by its consummate negation,38 slipping inbetween archetypal forms and the disciplinary categories of sculpture and architecture. Its in-between-ness is exascerbated by the artists use of positive and negative cast elements to mimic details from the surrounding urban context. Searle notes that As much as it is a sculpture Whitereads memorial is a closed, windowless, single storey building.39
THe BunkeR and MemoRial aS SuRvival MacHineS

One of the typological forms that inspired the memorial were the bunkers that make up the Atlantic wall. Whiteread went to Normandy to look at these fortifications and was fascinated by how they were constructed.40 While the memorial does not duplicate the aesthetic of the bunker, with its thickset walls, rounded corners, and strategic openings, it does express a certain ambiguity that also inheres in the definition of this typological form. As Hatton has observed, the word bunker in English can mean store as well as shelter: it can keep in as well as out.41 Under Whitereads direction, the typological form of the bunker is transformed into a structure of both physical and psychic defence. The memorial has been specifically designed to resist attack by vandals and also functions as a defence against entropy, taking into itself and holding onto lost loved ones, preserving their memory, keeping it alive. In his book Bunker Archaeology, Paul Virilio studied these fortifications in detail. He argues that the bunker operates as a survival machine, one designed to hold up under shelling and bombing, asphyxiating gasses and flame-throwers.42 Nameless Library defies easy identification with historical practices of memorialisation. It operates
Opposite Top Figure. 10 Atelier One and Rachel Whiteread, Sections and Elevations of Nameless Library, 1996. Image courtesy of Rachel Whiteread. Opposite Bottom Figure. 11 Rachel Whiteread, Corner Detail, Nameless Library, concrete, 1996-2000, 390 x 752 x 1058cm, Judenplatz Square, Vienna. Photo taken by author.
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against convention. In a manner similar to the utilitarian requirements demanded of the bunker, Whitereads memorial project seeks to defend the physical act of remembrance, keeping the memory of a catastrophic event alive. The placement of the memorial within an urban context was also pre-figured by the placement of bunkers. During the Second World War, these defensive structures were not only confined to the horizontal littoral, alongside the Atlantic, but also cropped up: In the middle of courtyards and gardens....their blind, low mass and rounded profile were out of tune with the urban environment as though a subterranean civilization had sprung up from the ground. This architectures modernness was countered by its abandoned, decrepit appearance. These objects had been left behind, and were colourless; their grey cement relief was silent witness to a warlike climate.43 As well as being drawn out of its immediate environment, Whitereads memorial is foreign to it. The project interrupts site lines across the picturesque square. Its concrete pallor is also in stark contrast to the stucco facades surrounding it. The project brings to the surface of the city its subterranean shame. It casts out the snug bourgeois interior, rendering interior comforts extrovert and inaccessible. Whiteread has taken a living room and executed mortiferous renovations on it out of doors. The artists amalgamation of interior details and exterior faadism locate it between the private and public realms and endow it with an uncanny aspect. The construction lies between room and tomb, signalling a shift between the functional and symbolic. Nameless Library is intent upon disturbing, as Kirstie Skinner notes, the smooth veneer of civilised appearances in Vienna.44 It functions as a perennial reminder that interiors are repositories for grave secrets and buried memories, hidden behind even the most picturesque of facades.
becomeThe work of grief now turns toward the undoing of the identification, the minutely detailed work of unpicking the subject from the object. In a way the object must die twice, first at the moment of its own death and secondly through the subjects unhitching from its own identifications. It is only then that the object can pass into memory, and that stones can be set.45 Whitereads memorial refuses to do our memory work for us and utilises formal strategies that function as an analogue for a process of identification that operates in mourning. For example, this undoing of identification appears to take shape where the bookshelves, the very scaffold or armature that supports and takes on this loss, have been removed. This separates the subject from the mould of the object they have become. Also, in divesting the books of their names (the titles of the individuals that perished) Whitereads memorial lodges the viewer in mourning. As Cousins notes, it is in recalling the name of another that one moves from mourning to memorial.46 When a book is completed it often signals a time of mourning for the reader. Before its termination, the reader is often want to protract the last few hours with the beloved object of their gaze, rationing out the final leaves of the composition before putting it to rest.The finished book then takes its place on the bookshelf, along with other digested tomes. The books on fully stacked shelves are always lifeless objects, catalogued and stored. With the infrastructure absented from the memorial, the loss remains insupportable, transferred into the interior of the subject.Whitereads proposal pays homage to all the nameless victims of mass destruction through the absence of their testimony.The armoured covers of the books are shut fast, disinheriting the psychic imagination their forms so readily invite. Nameless Library is both made from, and foreign to, its environment. Its strength inheres in its strategic design: a design that defends the act of memorialisation itself and utilises architectural operations and details to evoke a deeply disquieting atmosphere.
ConcluSion
The construction of Nameless Library can be read as signalling structural absences: in the evacuated bookshelves, the corner detailing and in the loss of the sculptures substructure within the interior of the memorial.These design decisions reflect the idea that this catastrophic loss of life is insupportable. In Whitereads memorial, the notion of the interior is strategically re-worked.The library is excoriated and petrified. Its locus of artificial illumination is extinguished and entry to the interior has been terminally foreclosed. Its combination of positive and negative casting elements ensures that the work resides in a perpetual state of disconsolate mourning. Mark Cousins compared the processes the subject undergoes during mourning to those at work in Whitereads signature casting practice. He suggests that her work is, A strict analogue for the obscure process of identification which operates in mourning. When I am turned out in grief, I do not look like you, or rather I look like the you I turned into, being your imprint. You are exactly what is lost since only you would fit the mould which I have
Note: An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the 2009 Atmospheres Symposium at
the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.This version of the paper has been revised in light of feedback from the Symposium and also in relation to the IDEA Journals provocation.
NOTES
1. Robert Storr comments: The only acknowledgment of the fate of Austrian Jewry in Hrdlickas grandiose scheme of writhing marble nudes is a small carving of a crouching bearded man scrubbing the streets, as Jews were compelled to do by the Nazis. Adding further insult to this demeaning symbol was the fact that people routinely used his neck as a bench until sculptural barbed wire was wrapped around him by the artist to prevent such casual disrespect. Robert Storr, Remains of the Day, Art in America, April 1999, 108. 2. Brian Hatton, Judenplatz Vienna 1996, AA Files 33, Summer 1997, 90. 3. On the faade of Genossenschaftshaus der Gaswirte (Judenplatz 3-4), on a building built in nineteenth century by Ludwig Schne there are plaques commemorating Mozarts residency in 1789 (during which time he composed the
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opera Cos Fan Tutte), as well as a relief on Judenplatz 4 depicting the Madonna. The next building in the square, located at the corner of Parisergasse is the Haus zum Englischen Gruss at Judenplatz 5, was named after the relief that adorns it. The faade of the building Pazelthof (Judenplatz 6) located between Parisergasse and the Drahtgasse carries a plaque dedicated by the Archdiocese of Vienna in 1998 that acknowledges the part played by the Christian church in the persecution of the Jews and the anti-semitism of the Middle Ages. On the west side of the square is the Kleines Dreifaltigkeitshaus (Judenplatz 7). This structure was built near the end of the eighteenth century and contains a statuette of the Holy Trinity in a recess above the protruding corner. R. Pohanka, Judenplatz after 1421, in M. Hupl & B. Grg (Eds.), Perspectiven: Judenplatz Mahnmal-Museum, June/ July 2000 Vienna, 101. 4. Comay notes: The tension goes deeper than the obvious irony of having Lessing, the seer of the Enlightenment, suddenly cast into the role of witness and overseer to an object which would seem simultaneously to insist on the promise of enlightenment and to spell the latters ultimate opacity and relapse into myth and barbarism. Rebecca Comay, Memory Block, Art & Design, 12, 7/8, 1997, 65. Peter Eisenmans competition entry explored the malevolent extremes of Enlightenment thinking. See U. Pasterk & G. Matt (Eds.) Judenplatz Wien 1996 (Vienna: Folio Verlag, 1996), 46-9. 5. Hatton, Judenplatz Vienna 1996, 90. 6. James E. Young, At Memorys Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 96. 7. Ziva Freiman, The Sorrow and the Pity, Progressive Architecture, February 1993, 76. 8. Whiteread notes: This is the only reason I felt in any way qualified to address such an emotive subject. I have been asked to make proposals for other public commissions, but unless Ive had a direct relationship with the place and understand something of its history, I simply cannot begin to engage. I can only make work that is somehow connected with my own experiences. Rachel Whiteread quoted in Andrea Rose, Rachel Whiteread Venice Biennale 1997 (London: The British Council, 1997), 31. 9. Rose, Rachel Whiteread Venice Biennale 1997, 31. 10. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Conjuring Art out of Thin Air, The Independent, 1 October 1996, sec. 2: 14. 11. Comay, Memory Block, 65. 12. Mark Cousins, M. (1996). Inside Outcast. Tate, 10, 41. 13. Hatton, Judenplatz Vienna 1996, 92. 14. Comay writes of Whitereads model: Rather than functioning negatively as the materialization of an absence, the model here presents us with a positive volume without a trace of negativity or absence. In this respect the memorial might seem to go against the grain of Whitereads entire practice. No doubt it will for this very reason be suspected. For does it not seem to reverse the entire pathos and promise of the cast as the refusal to reify or posit what can only be rendered as absence or negativity? Does it not threaten to reinstate-indeed at the very level of the monument-a kind of positivity which would in this context be more than suspect? Whatever Whitereads projected monument is inverting here, it would appear to perform a rather different kind of negation. It is particularly striking that the peculiar hallmark of the negative cast - everything that we have come to associate with Whiteread - is in this work almost entirely abandoned. The ceiling rose and door mouldings are the only true negative forms or strict inversions in the entire structure, and would effectively function here only as artists signature. Comay, Memory Block, 71. 15. Hatton, Judenplatz Vienna 1996, 88. 16. Lisa Dennison (ed.) Rachel Whiteread: Transient Spaces (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2001), 59. 17. Simon Wiesenthal in Grim Memorial Shows Wounds Still Festering, New Zealand Herald, 27 October 2000, sec. B: 3. 18. Hatton, Judenplatz Vienna 1996, 88. 19. Hatton, Judenplatz Vienna 1996, 88. 20. Some politicians in Austria did not want a Holocaust memorial. Others opposed her because she is not Jewish. Others said the metaphor of the piece - a concrete cast of a library of books, representing Hitlers attempted destruction of a people and its culture, ignored working class victims and concentrated only on intellectuals. David Lister, Bitter Struggles
Bury Holocaust Memorial, The Independent, 12 June 1997, 12. 21. Archaeological value apart, there are the moral and philosophical issues of whether the Nazi Holocaust was unique and should be commemorated singly as such, or whether it was the climax to centuries of pogrom and persecution and should therefore best be marked by emphasising historical continuity. Ian Traynor, Vienna Unearths Its Jewish Guilt, The Observer, 6 October 1996, 20. 22. Comay, Memory Block, 65. 23. Lister, Bitter Struggles Bury Holocaust Memorial, 12. 24. A symposium in January 1997, entitled, Bone of Contention: Monuments-Memorials-Shoah Remembrance was organised by the Jewish Museum Vienna and Institute for Human Sciences in collaboration with the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European Jewish Studies, Potsdam, to discuss issues arising from the controversy surrounding the Judenplatz Memorial. 25. S. Lessard, Towering Presence,Vogue, September, 1998, 426. 26. Lisa Dennison (ed.) Rachel Whiteread: Transient Spaces (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2001), 59-60. 27. Andrea Schlieker, A Book Must Be the Axe for the Frozen Sea within Us in G. Milchram (Ed.) Judenplatz Place of Remembrance (Vienna: Jewish Museum Vienna & Pichler Verlag GmbH & CoKG, 2000), 25. 28. Comay, Memory Block, 71. 29. Henri Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 82. 30. Henri Petroski, The Book on the Book Shelf, 94. 31. James E. Young, At Memorys Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 10. 32. Pedro Azara, The House and the Dead: On Modern Tombs in Mnica Gili (ed.) The Last House (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1999), 38. 33. Simon Morrissey, Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life, Untitled: A Review of Contemporary Art, Winter 12, 1996/7, 7. 34. Azara, The House and the Dead: On Modern Tombs, 26. 35. Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (London: Architectural Press, 1966), 18. 36. Anthony Vidler, Architecture Cornered: Notes on the Anxiety of Architecture. In Joseph Newland (Ed.), The Architectural Unconscious: James Casebere + Glen Seator (Massachusetts: Addison Gallery of American Art, Philips Academy, 2000), 42. 37. Vidler, Architecture Cornered,, 43. 38. Hatton, Judenplatz Vienna 1996, 92. 39. Searle, Review, The Guardian, 26 October 2000: page number unknown. 40. Rose, Rachel Whiteread Venice Biennale 1997, 31. 41. Hatton, Judenplatz Vienna 1996, 31. 42. Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 39. 43. Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 12. 44. Kirstie Skinner, K. The Nameless Library: Rachel Whitereads Holocaust Memorial, Sculpture Matters, 13, 2001, 8. 45. Mark Cousins, Inside Outcast, Tate, 10, 1996, 41.
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My ideogram is based on a shoebox theatre. We are the audience, and the profiles on the lower left and along the right hand side represent some of that audience. People are there to remind us that everyone has a personal history in space, built up around our spatial intelligence. Some profiles contain key points about spatial intelligence. The curtains to the left list other human intelligences and note that our intelligence is emotionally framed, and inflected by our relationships.The right hand curtains note the evolution of our spatial intelligence over millennia, and cite WG Sebald as a writer who describes life through space. The proscenium arch notes Design City Melbourne: the mental space of the city is housed in its great works of architecture Drops note the search for continuums in human experience of space: domestic to professional, and the phenomenon of relegation to the humdrum that erodes our spatial awareness in everyday life. On the stage a banner quotes Gaston Bachelards Poetics of Space: the house holds childhood motionless in its arms. Below this on the stage two personae watch a spatial tennis game while in front of them a spiral of spatial engagement twirls, the first order awareness of the surveyor followed by the lawyer, then the engineer, and now the second order awareness of the architectEach side of the stair are mnemonics for spatial analyses of spaces domestic and workaday.
Ideogram and caption also published in Spatial Intelligence, Wiley 2008
Leon van Schaik
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Tessellated Floorscape (2010-): interior acts of production, siting and participation

Igor Siddiqui : University of Texas at Austin, USA
ABSTRACT
The project Tessellated Floorscape (2010) consists of a modular rug that is digitally constructed from remnant carpeting, the collaborative process through which the rug as a material product has circulated through different social venues from fabrication to inhabitation, and the writing which serves as a reflective tool that links the specificity of the project to a broader set of issues in contemporary design. This essay focuses on three aspects of the project production, siting, and participation in an effort to map out a network of relationships among people, places and resources, and by doing so expose a set of ecologies that informs and shapes the creative practice of interior design as a materially and socially sustainable practice. The aim has been to take advantage of the physical portability of the installation, engage a range of public spaces as its temporary sites, and see what kind of value the acts of spatial re-territorialisation may hold in the study and evolution of the contemporary interior.
PRoduction
The installation was produced from design to fabrication through a collaboration between the designers from ISSSStudio1 currently located in Austin, Texas, and Aronsons Floor Covering, an innovative flooring retailer in New York City, as well as by closely working with the digital fabricator, Surbeck Waterjet Company, from Ardmore, Pennsylvania. While the 2,700 kilometres between Austin and New York and another 160 from New York to Ardmore hardly suggests hands-on interaction between the collaborators, what allowed for a clear line of communication was the immediate transmission of information through digital media on the one hand, and the previous working relationships between the participants on the other. In Texas, ISSSStudio had been working on a series of digital patterns whose tessellations were studied in relation to material and potential use. The idea for Tessellated Floorscape unfolded in a meeting in which the patterns produced by ISSSStudio were reviewed for another project, and the owner of Aronsons, Carol Swedlow, brought up the problem that the showroom had with the surplus of unused, unsellable carpet tiles. Rather than prematurely ending the materials lifecycle as a useable product, the intention was to extend its life and add to its value through manufactured pattern (Figure 2).
Above Figure 1: Tessellated Floorscape assembled.
IntRoduction
Tessellated Floorscape (2010-) is a travelling installation, digitally fabricated from remnant carpeting (Figure 1). Approximately 150 square metres in area, and assembled from nearly one hundred uniquely fitting tiles, the floorscape is a non-standard modular rug that sprawls across the architectural surface of the floor creating a differentiated but continuous ground cover. Its size situates the work between the scale of furniture and that of a room, and as such suggests the creative and critical context from which it emerged the expanding gradient between product and architectural design that is interior design. By investigating the projects material, experiential, and aesthetic properties, the aim is to articulate a series of relationships between modes of production, siting and participation. Those, in turn, may suggest new ways of considering the evolution of interior design as a cultural force that is materially and socially sustainable.
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Carpet tiles are typically repetitive and interchangeable, and their orthogonal geometries produce infinitely expanding fields of homogenous grid, thus reflecting the values and efficiencies of industrial mass production. Each tile can in this way be replaced individually with another identical one without any interruption to the geometry of the overall system, a logic that Tessellated Floorscape challenges through its non-standard pattern. The intent was to deploy an organising pattern that facilitated continuity without gaps or overlaps a true tessellation while allowing for variation within the field. Because the design and manufacturing processes were entirely digital from the outset, the standard repetition inherited from the analogue production of existing carpet tiles was rendered obsolete. Instead of relying on the repetition of identical parts fabricated by the same template or die to maintain efficiency, in digital production a vector of a certain length is drawn and cut with the same speed and energy regardless of its shape. The pattern, a collection of outlines that defines each carpet tile aggregated into a field of tightly fitted seams, indexes the technological change from standard to non-standard production. Its formal properties necessitate, as will be discussed, a re-tailoring of social engagements that surround its design, manufacturing and installation.
The patterning process began with the design of an irregularly shaped, but repeatable tile in which the perimeter curvature was maximised for ornamental effect, while an alternating 120-degree rotation in the tessellation added to the visual intricacy of the overall field. To introduce another layer of variation in order to give each tile its own unique form on the one hand, while also exploring the organic landscape quality of the assembly on the other the regular tessellation was projected onto a three-dimensional topographic surface and digitally captured in this new state. The resulting aggregation is morpho-genetically consistent from within with an allowance for differentiation based on the encounter between the repeated pattern and the projection plane (Figure 3). As an assembly of parts, the pattern resists generalisation, and the specific compatibility among the tiles instead requires close inspection, attention to detail, and trial-and-error fitting.
Opposite Figure 2: Standard carpet tiles reshaped through digital manufacturing Above Figure 3: Generative process drawings
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a specific moment of its making. Architects Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, whose design research addresses the impact of mass-customisation on the construction of building products, refer to this phenomenon as the ability to differentiate each artifact from those fabricated before and after.3 The embedded temporal aspect to such methods of making, in particular the potential for the indexing of human actions as they unfold in space and time, carries through the project from its design and The intent to link the organisational matrix of the pattern with fabrication to its installation and use: one tile fabricated after the chance-based distribution of its fill within is informed by a another segues into deployment at one site after another. long lineage of precedents that include Gyorgy Kepess extensive mid-twentieth century design research on patterns, as well as Site standard labour practices such as masons traditional and current methods for producing brick blends.2 Digital design techniques Intentions for the siting of Tessellated Floorscape are twofold. expand the potential for such practices by freeing the geometries First, the aim has been to exploit its mobility and ability to travel and distributions of patterns from the analogue logic of efficient in order to find out how it interacts with and operates within repetition, instead allowing for the simultaneous unfolding of different environments, in this way saving it from immediate repetition and difference. Each interlocking tile, in other words, consumption as a domestic product. Second, consistent attention is produced with an equal level of efficiency and precision, but has been paid to observations about how such mobility may is in itself geometrically different from the rest, thus referencing allow the product and its associates to traverse boundaries
As a whole, the larger pattern was cropped to produce a cluster of tiles resembling an island-like formation whose scale responds to the spatial and material limitations of the project. In response to the inventory of available material (of which about half of the stock was of a single carpet type, while the other half was an assorted collection of colours, textures, and prints), the designers developed a distribution strategy that related the geometric pattern for cutting with the range of remnant types. The strategy had to be systematic and rule-based, rather than compositional and purely visual, because of the quantity of material that had to be managed and the designers lack of direct access to the material stock itself. The resulting pattern, an arrangement of two distinct interlocking swirls, distinguishes between the uniform and the variable carpet stocks, while leaving the actual distribution of the assorted material up to the fabricators choice and improvisation (Figure 4). The pattern had clear aesthetic consequences, but importantly it structured the fabrication process and delineated boundaries of responsibility within the collaboration. It embedded a layer of certainty into the process, but also allowed for both chance and personal choice by the fabricator to be reflected in the final product. The differentiated part of the surface, in other words, registers the free improvisation with which the fabricator paired a digital template for each tile to each piece of carpet. The overall composition of material patterns, textures, and colours remained unknown to all the participants until the entire rug was first assembled in New York City in February of 2010.
across contexts commerce, academia, industry, culture, and art. As an interior design exploration, the aspiration has been to examine how such a small-scale intervention may inform, and indeed give form to, various relationships between interior practice and multiple spatial contexts, but also address what an expanded notion of site-specificity may mean for such a practice. In that sense, the project seeks the chance to conceive the site as something more than a place,4 an important conceptual leap defining site-specificity in contemporary public art, as identified by art and architecture theorist Miwon Kwon. Addressing a type of recent public art practice and its relationship to site, Kwon writes: (Unlike the previous models) site is not defined as a precondition. Rather, it is generated by the work (often as content), and then verified by its convergence with an existing discursive formation.5 Although Kwon focuses on works of public art and not explicitly on design, her writing provides clues for how a design practice may address parallel concerns. Tessellated Floorscape is a synthetic ground, an interior terrain whose ornate figure domesticates the architectural substrate beneath it. At first encounter, its formal properties suggest the kind of relationship to site specificity that is grounded by gravity and embedded in the impure and ordinary space of the everyday,6 constructing in this way a tangible reality though a unique combination of physical elements not unlike the 1960s and 1970s installations that Kwon considers to be representative of site-specific arts earliest formations. While such an impression is possible and not entirely inappropriate this is after all how the installation appears to be once it lands onto a temporary site it nonetheless misses the broader scope of the project, which is defined not by a single moment of deployment but rather by a network of spatial and temporal relationships. As such, the project reflects more contemporary notions of site-specificity (as provisionally defined by Kwon), the kind of practice for whom the model of the site is not a map, but an itinerary, a fragmentary sequence of events and actions through spaces, that is, a nomadic narrative whose path is articulated by the passage of the artist.7 Tessellated Floorscapes shipping, installation, exhibition and storage schedules continuously define its patterns of movement and rest, a condition that is not uncommon considering the ubiquity of travelling exhibits, art and design fairs, and interinstitutional exchanges of artifacts. More importantly, however, is the observation that the itinerary also shapes the projects identity as it moves from one context to the next. This is most evident as one traces its trajectory and chronologically witnesses its multiple engagements. The first iteration of Tessellated Floorscape came together in the Aronsons Floor Covering showroom in Manhattan. The 92-piece set of tiles arrived by United Parcel Service from the digital fabricator in Ardmore and was assembled on the floor of the showroom during regular business hours. The process of assembly a collaborative performance between the showroom staff and the designer took place amidst ordinary commercial activity, and slowly revealed the final formation of the rug. Working between a drawing as an instructional diagram and the fullscale components on the floor, the overall effect was as unexpected to the designers as it was to the shoppers who witnessed the process. Fully assembled for the first time, Tessellated Floorscape occupied the centre of the showroom and was featured as a custom product developed by
Opposite Figure 4: Material striation
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Aronsons. In the context of the commercial site, the rug was seen as a high-end design commodity to be ordered, purchased and inhabited, inheriting along the way its status as an environmentally sustainable product. The rug continues to generate interest in the form of enquiries about its pricing, lead-times, customisation options and maintenance, and such responses at once confirm its aesthetic appeal and help clarify ways in which it encounters consumer expectations. In particular, Tessellated Floorscape complicates the relationship between a reproducible off-the-shelf product and a one-off by simultaneously being one-of-a-kind and a prototype for a larger edition. On the one hand, the pattern has the ability to propagate itself infinitely, shaping as much material as the CNC (computer numerical controlled) waterjet finds on its cutting bed. On the other, the particular chance-based overlap between the digital pattern and the available material produces a visual outcome that would be impractical, if not impossible, to reproduce. As such, the site of the showroom acts as a context within which the mass-customised principles that ground the rugs manufacturing process come into direct contact with the consumers preconceived understanding of the availability and uniqueness of a retail product based largely on the conventions of pre-digital mass production. In that sense, the very idea of the prototype (defined as the first in a repetitive series) is transformed, echoing William Massies argument that the concept of infinite variation replaces the model of the prototype. The prototype is simply replaced by the type the death of proto and the concept of standardization is no longer viable.8 The site acts as a framework within which the reproducibility and variability of the product are assessed as market-based values, and the rug, in addition to providing the there-and-now aesthetic experience, acts as an interface between the sites of its production and consumption. From the commercial showroom Tessellated Floorscape moved to the Flux Factory, a Long Island City, Queens, non-profit art organisation with gallery and artist residency programming, described by the art critic Holland Cotter of the New York Times as a cross between a youth hostel and a space station.9 The rug was a part of a large group show titled Housebroken, curated by Jean Barberis and Georgia Muenster, and on view from February 18th to March 21st, 2010. The exhibit was (based on the curatorial statement included in the initial open call for proposals), an exercise in architecture, interior design, social practice, and general aesthetics covering every room, every surface, and every object of the building and affecting every physical and conceptual space.10 Located in a raw two-story former greeting card factory, contents of the exhibit blurred with the content of the site the furnishings, surfaces, personal belongings and works in-progress by the current residents interacted with the artifacts, actions, and processes transposed into the space by the invited artists. The rug was installed in what would be considered the organisations administrative office, a space connected to the building entrance, grounded by a layer of decaying vinyl flooring, an eclectic assortment of furnishings, and storage for a range of items from theory books to power tools (Figure 5). The curators strategy was to have the rug installed so as to transform the definition of conventional office carpeting, but also serve as a type of new stage for artist performances that were scheduled throughout the duration of the exhibit. Tessellated Floorscape was in this way both sited and became a site for other works, oscillating between
its status as an object framed by the building interior and receding into the background in relation to temporal activity (Figure 6). Removed from the commercial realm and situated within a constellation of unique artworks that are predominantly handmade, specifically sited, and not for sale, the rugs potential reproducibility and multiplication and by extension market value became secondary to its physicality and visual presence in the exhibit.The sites framing of Tessellated Floorscape presented new dilemmas for those that encountered it: is the work to be looked at or walked on? Will it become the permanent office carpeting or does it vacate the building when the exhibit ends? Here in the context of art, and more specifically, within the kind of exhibit that asks the art to engage with the architecture of the site, the rugs affiliation to design practice has less to do with product (as was the case in the commercial showroom) and is more about its participation in the making of the interior. As an object whose utility is more explicit than any other work selected by the curators, the floorscape entrenched itself into the site by forming quick alliances with the surrounding objects office chairs, tables, filing cabinets and literally absorbing the sites atmosphere by getting progressively, dusty, odorous and stained.
Next, the installation traveled to York, Pennsylvania, this time to become a decorative element in a stage set for an artist video. The artist, Jonathan VanDyke, integrated Tessellated Floorscape into his set design for Elision (2010), a 12-minute, 4-channel video installation based on the opening scene of Michelangelo Antonionis 1962 film, Leclisse (Figure 7). The project, funded by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and produced in collaboration with the York Centre for the Arts, reframes the floorscape as a prop, one among a constellation of objects that supports the visual narrative and mood of the video. The rug weaves in and out of the artists own spatial composition of the stage set, its colourful surface marking the ground relative to groupings of other furnishings, accessories and objets dart (Figure 8). While the video, as a kind of visual site, reduces the spatiality of the rug to a flat field of pixels, it also provides a vehicle for its visual reproduction and multiplication. Perhaps the most significant consequence of this specific siting is the both the fragmentation and multiplication of the whole that occurs in at least three ways. To begin with, the artist took a liberty with the overall assembly of the tiles, taking advantage of its modularity and fragmenting the figure into multiple smaller clusters. Then, through the sheer
Above Left Figure 5: Tessellated Floorscape at Flux Factory during installation Above Right Figure 6: Tessellated Floorscape at Flux Factory during an interactive artist performance
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device of framing, the camera further re-crops and reshapes the clusters into partial, fragmented views. Finally, the four-channel installation intended for simultaneous four-screen projection acts as a kind of reproductive device, multiplying and distributing representations of the floorscape across multiple shots, screens, and spaces. Siting as such ceases to function as the placement of the object in a specific space, but rather exemplifies an engagement in a network of relationships that connects institutions, disciplines, and creative processes. While the physical location still matters, the operative definition of the site has been transformed (according to Kwon), to a discursive vector that is ungrounded, fluid, and virtual.11
functioning as a dance floor for the closing party.The rug, in other words, functioned as the thin veneer that subtly differentiates an area of the ground plane in order to attract and maintain an activity; a social site of interaction, pleasure, and intensity. In the upcoming year, the work is scheduled to appear in an exhibit at the University of Texas at Austin, where it will for the first time, as a material artifact, encounter the academic context. When not travelling, its periods of rest are marked by domestic occupation. Florian Slotawa, the Berlin-based conceptual artist, has since 1996 been producing a series of works titled Besitzarbeiten, for which he transports all the belongings from his apartment to a gallery, producing site-specific installations that leave his domestic space temporarily empty.12 In the same spirit, albeit to a less extreme More recently, Tessellated Floorscape had been reunited with degree, Tessellated Floorscape produces a void in the private loft its designers in Texas where it functions as both a rug in the while it is at work in public spaces, connecting in this way the studios loft space and a participant in the various exhibitions domestic realm with the urban context beyond. to which it is shipped. Enjoying yet another type of context, the rug participated in the exhibit Rough Cut: New Furniture PaRticiPation Design in Austin organised by the Industrial Designers Society of America. Displayed alongside prototypical chairs, benches, Given the discussion about the production of the rug as well stools, light fixtures, consoles, and tables by emerging industrial as the sites with which it has been associated, it may be all too designers, Tessellated Floorscape opened the exhibit as an evident that its continuing lifecycle has been contingent upon the equal participant relative to the furniture pieces, but ended up participation of multiple agents along the way. From the design
assistants, retailers, fabricators, shippers, curators, installers and cameramen, to the shoppers, gallery visitors, actors, and even lovers, Tessellated Floorscape makes explicit that which is always present but not always overtly revealed in the production of interior design. The relatively obvious fact that the travelling installation has been handled and experienced by many and in different ways is amplified by the demands posed by the rugs particular material and formal properties, and the necessity for active participation in its assembly, care and use underscores its social dimension. Like a jigsaw puzzle, or even a crossword puzzle, there is an underlying logic and authorship to its order, yet it has to be processed, figured out and ultimately owned by those working with it. If the fabricator touched every single random piece of remnant material and made a choice as to which tile is to be cut out from which material, it is the installers challenge to relate those tiles back into a working assembly. This somewhat tedious task translated itself into a particularly joyful process on the set of Jonathan VanDykes video in York, where a group of high school, theatre arts students who performed in the video was also in charge of assembling the set (Figure 9). By participating in its assembly, the students developed an endearing attachment to the rug, referring to it throughout the filming as theirs. A similar sense of ownership and responsibility
developed previously at the Flux Factory where the residents proposed a no-shoes policy in the space where the piece was installed throughout the duration of the installation. This seemed especially thoughtful for an artist collective space in which the mix of art-making, shared living facilities and high public traffic can yield an overall less-than-precious, gritty character. Inevitably, however, having served as the floor for a number of performances at multiple sites, the rug is already starting to show signs of wear footmarks, spills, and worn edges. If this were simply a modular rug made of standardised tiles, the kind that one finds in real offices and buys off-the-shelf, one can imagine replacing the affected tiles with new ones, interchanging the old with the new as required. However Tessellated Floorscape, made from animated digital templates, with a patchwork of materials handled in real time by real people, would in this way unravel and perhaps even vanish. The registration of time, the efforts specific to that time embodied by materials and geometries, begin to describe the fragility with which material environments hold together in space and time, and the sturdiness with which they carry our marks from the time that they are intellectually conceived to the moment they are discarded. In the opening of Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud writes: Artistic activity
Opposite Left Figure 7: On the set of Jonathan VanDykes Elision video project Opposite Right Figure 8: A scene from Jonathan VanDykes Elision video project
Above Figure 9: Student participant assembling portions of the rug
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is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence.13 Interior design, as an artistic activity, may already understand this notion of development and evolution all too well, given its responsive modes of operation and its service-oriented conventions. The aim of the installation, however, has been to frame the interior as a space within which the forms, patterns, and functions of the game allow for layered, continuing and pliable registrations of forces at play, a medium that facilitates the visibility of the multiple forms of participation. By focusing on the production of interior artifacts as the subject matter of interior design practice and expanding the notion of the site as a relational, nonstable condition, it becomes possible to expand the field of participation in the construction of interiors that goes beyond the client-designer dynamic. In theoretical terms, after all, participation is less a framework for the examination of individual viewers relationships to art than it is about the social dimension and group dynamics prompted by artists. While what this may mean for interior design generally remains open to further speculation, Tessellated Floorscape begins an outline for a practice that combines aesthetic pleasures with social networking and acts of reterritorialisation.The outline, as a preparatory stage of effort, may also be the appropriate moment for the cascading of questions that will undoubtedly only increase in relevance over time. For example, at a time when design processes are increasingly technologically integrated in order to maximise predictability of outcome and minimise risk, what is the role of social participation in the shaping of interiors? How can parametric processes accommodate material sustainability? How may nomadic movement serve as a model for the siting of contemporary interiors?
demonstrating a faith in institutions and an impatience with the public that contradicts whatever transgressions their works aspire to.15 While the conversion of the movement from art to design to one that is going in the other direction (the design object becoming art through siting and participation), is certainly not symmetrical, the necessary resistance to the commitment to a single value system as described by Scanlan may indeed be a powerful strategy for the advancement of design through acts of re-territorialisation. The ecology of interior design the relationship between the interior as a particular disciplinary environment and its participants is a living system. Its emergent properties are a consequence of the expansive framing of what provisionally defines it as an environment and who and what is counted as participating. As an interior design practice, Tessellated Floorscape is exploratory and as such resists closure. As both process and product, it has operated as an itinerant gathering of evidence, rather than as the application of evidence to preconceived positions. Like its ground-bound form dependent on adjacent relationships, the insights form a mesh of narratives, thickened and expanding over time.
NoteS
1. I co-founded ISSSStudio with designer Susan Sloan in 2006 in Brooklyn, NY; the studio has since expanded to Austin, TX where I currently direct all of its design and research activities. 2. My students Alexander Odom and Daniel Morrison pointed out to me the various rule-based material specifications that produce masonry blends on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, within which masons are encouraged to exercise their own judgment, preference and choice. 3. Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, Refabricating Architecture (New York: McGraw Hill, 2004), xiii. 4. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 30. 5. Kwon, One Place after Another, 26. 6. Kwon, One Place after Another, 11. 7. Kwon, One Place after Another, 29. 8. William Massie, Remaking in a Post-Processed Culture in Fabricating Architecture: Selected Readings in Digital Design and Manufacturing, ed. Robert Corser (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 104. 9. Holland Cotter, The New Bridge and Tunnel Crowd, New York Times, March 13, 2005, accessed January 20, 2011, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9402EFD81F3DF930A25750C0A9639C8B63&pagewanted=all. 10. The description comes from the curatorial statement disseminated through email announcements, blog postings, and Flux Factorys Facebook page, last accessed on January 20, 2011, http://www.facebook.com/event. php?eid=267467810714&index=1. 11. Kwon, One Place after Another, 29. 12. I first encountered Slotawas work at New York Citys PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in the summer of 2009. The installation there was the twelfth in the series. For online information of the PS1 exhibit, see http://ps1.org/exhibitions/ view/249. 13. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Le presses du reel, 2002), 11. 14. Joe Scanlan, Please, Eat the Daisies in Design and Art, ed. Alex Coles (London: Whitechapel and Cambridge MIT Press, 2007), 63. 15. Joe Scanlan, Please, Eat the Daisies, 64.
ConcluSion
In his essay Please, Eat the Daisies, Joe Scanlan criticises as laughable artist and designer Andrea Zittels A/Z Living Units for claiming to be anything other than art. The works were made to be inhabited but are, according to Scanlan, materially cumbersome, ergonomically cruel, and too shiny to suggest that anyone ever cared to interact with them. He writes: And while this is probably fine with the people who own them, a lack of wear is a serious flaw for any artwork that proposes use value as a fundamental aspect of its radicality.14 Provisionally defined by its itinerary through multiple sites as much as by its aspirations, Tessellated Floorscape (not unlike Andrea Zittels work in its blurring between art and design, but different given each authors disciplinary points of departure),has started showing some signs of wear: spills, bubble gum and rips. While the projects objective was never to be just looked at, and its designers never identified themselves as artists, the blur between design and art never posed much of a problem until the question of cleaning came up. Ironically it was the issue of maintenance that required disciplinary delineation. The dilemma to clean the rug and erase the marks left by its unfolding journey, or let it be and reduce its desirability as a used object brings into question not only the works perishable value, but also how public institutions, commercial and non-profit alike, would define its lifespan. Scanlans critique of art practices that engage with design (like Zittels), is ultimately that they do not fail to be useful as much as they prematurely commit to one value system to the exclusion of all others, thereby
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Domestic Ecologies: a study of gender and domesticity within Harold Pinters Rooms
Kirsty Volz : Queensland University of Technology, Australia
ABSTRACT
Harold Pinters work opens the walls to the relatively closed rooms of domesticity. The room of the love affair, the unpredictable liaison, the cramped cluttered rooms of poverty and the disaffected. This study uses Pinters rooms to analyse existing ideologies of gender, territory, power and domesticity. Pinters rooms are more often than not reflections of familiar domestic spaces. This research investigates Pinters rooms through a case study of a theatre set for one of his plays and textual analysis of selected works, developing an understanding of how Pinters characters reflect behaviours within the domestic environment, mimicking while subverting domestic ecologies.
through a selection of Pinters works. The first theme investigates the territorial relationship Pinters characters exhibit with their domestic space, is underpinned by playwright and anthropologist, Robert Ardreys book The Territorial Imperative2. The second theme looks at how Pinters female characters illustrate the cultural phenomenon of the housewife, the hybrid creature that is one part house and one part woman, through textual analysis of dialogue within Pinters plays. While there currently exists an extensive amount of literature that analyses Pinters work, this study is concerned solely with his rooms, their presence and impact on inhabitants and narrative: how they construct hierarchies of gender, power and territorial aspirations. To understand the Pinter room, this study begins by examining the design of a theatre set for a 2007 production of The Caretaker. I went into a room and saw one person standing up and one person sitting down, and few weeks later I wrote The Room. I went into another room and saw two people sitting down, and a few years later I wrote The Birthday Party. I looked through a door into a third room and saw two people standing up and I wrote The Caretaker3
INTRODUCTION For many theatre companies, Harold Pinters plays are a staple inclusion to the companys season. Sometimes described as realist, other times absurdist, his works have a knack of unsettling an audience into an uncomfortable laughter, or a stunned silence. Narrative within the Nobel Laureates work belong explicitly to the place in which it is being told. In this way, his plays are territorial in their specific relationship within the given space. The dialogue is often disjointed through a deficient acknowledgement or recounting of actions and conversations that may have taken place in diegetic spaces relative to the story. His stories are most often set within constrictive domestic settings where the audience will find themselves looking into a room within a house, perhaps a familiar space, with solid walls, real furniture, and maybe even a ceiling. The actors will be separated by the light on stage and the darkness that hushes the audience. Like the light from the microscope onto a subject, the audience will sit in the shadows, studying the physical and verbal interactions of the people framed by the given setting. The mimetic stage set will not only assist in this study of human ecology, but also admit the spectator to relate to the space; providing an opportunity for the audience to contribute their own memories pertaining to a room. These rooms within Pinters dramatic literature have both a metaphoric and physical presence. In the citation accompanying the playwrights Nobel Laureate it states, ...in his plays [he] uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppressions closed rooms.1 It is through this use of the room that we can analyse a study of relationships between subject and space, character and domesticity, and gender and object. In this study two themes will be addressed
Left The character Aston in Vena Cavas production of The Caretaker, directed by Shane Jones, set design by Kirsty Volz and Florian Kaiser. Here we see the objects dominant in the foreground while characters, the very subjects, are situated in the background. Photo by Ian Knight.
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THe TeRRitoRial ImPeRative

Pinters stage directions for The Caretaker firstly call for, of course, a room. This is followed by a list of more than 34 detailed properties and their locations within the room4. These prescriptive stage directions would at once appear to threaten the set designers creativity. However, the set requires much more than the objects and furniture requested in Pinters list. The set needs to contain and oppress its subjects; creating an environment that frames them in a way that is instantly recognisable to the audience. In a production of The Caretaker the role of the set is intrinsic to the story. The room is not owned by the characters; rather the characters belong to the room. It is the extent of their existence, it contains all that they possess: objects, beliefs and understandings. Ownership of this space is a core theme to the play as the characters engage in a territorial conflict over the room. The conflict itself binds them to the space, further oppressing their sensibilities and containing them within the room. In the initial stages of developing the concept for the room, the plays director suggested Francis Bacons triptych painting, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The paintings describe three figures perched on different objects draped in various arrangements of delicate cloth. The background of each painting is a red scuffed surface defined with rough perspective lines drawn to indicate the boundaries of a room, a contained space. Pinter was a known admirer of Bacons work5 and in these paintings there were three characters, just as The Caretaker has three characters, from which to develop a concept for the design. In Bacons paintings, the objects upon which each of the figures is perched are too far in the foreground to judge the origin of the object; the legs have been cut off by the base of the paintings frame. This influenced the decision to raise the set so as to expose the structure of the floor and place objects within the structure. In this way there was an indeterminate quality to the excessive clutter of the props. There were penetrations in the floor where objects retched out into the space of the room, framing the circulation paths of the actors. The wall surfaces were treated in the same scuffed surface as Bacons paintings, but they were also in a state of physical decay. Still present and definite, the walls reflected their inhabitants. While the set represents a room in decay, there is a balance of respect and destruction, of structure and organic decomposition. The walls had to be created before they could be deconstructed. The ceiling, cornice board, architraving and finished floorboards carefully created for a sense of realism, met with the absurd placement of objects appropriated by the decay of the room. The set was created in the hope that the audience would experience a disorienting realisation upon arrival. As Bernard Tschumi writes, that impossible moment where an architectural act, brought to excess, reveals both traces of reason and the immediate experience of space6. That experience being a familiar domestic ecology simultaneously subverted by the claustrophobic oppression imbued by the occupation of this room. The set was designed to instantly hint to its audience the territorial struggle that was about to unfold in The Caretaker.
Above Davies and Micks first encounter as their territorial battle begins the objects on stage interrupting their interactions. Objects retched from the floorboards dictate how the actors move while their characters fight over the same objects. Photo by Ian Knight.
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The Caretaker expounds the notion that the Pinter character is motivated by the need to defend his or her room7. In a number of Pinter plays, including The Caretaker and The Homecoming, there is this defence of territory brought about by the introduction of an intruder. Robert Ardrey writes that the intruder is invariably defeated and expelled from the proprietors territory. Through his study of various species of animals and territorial behaviours, Ardrey concludes that there is an unknown energy that inhabits the occupant of the territory in their home8. In The Caretaker the apparently passive character, Aston, retains his home from the territorial challenge of an intruder, Davies. While the motives of the characters are ambiguous, there is an evident struggle for territory and power. Davies is easily manipulated by the third character, Mick, into a false sense that he is entitled to the role of caretaker of the flat. This role becomes dependent on Davies ability to decorate the flat. When Mick discovers that he is incapable of his cosmetic aspirations for the space, Davies claim to the role of caretaker is revoked9. For Mick, the value of the tenant is directly linked to the value of the apartment. There is no loyalty to the occupant, only to the appearance of the room. This convolution between person and space, the assimilation between individual and ecology becomes intensified when intersected with gender. Ardrey writes that it may be misunderstood that competition between males is motivated usually by the possession of females, however it is more often than not also for the possession of property10. On protecting territory, Ardrey asks, how many men have died for their country? And then, how many women have done the same?11 Pinter responds to this through the sole female character in his play Homecoming, Ruth, who is one woman who succeeds in defending and gaining territory. From her very entry into the all male household, she asserts her confidence and autonomy as an intruder within the home12. This also contests Arderys theory that there is some universal recognition of territorial rights where the intruder is marked by a sense of inhibition13. Ruth transcends this ideology of the intimidated intruder as she interrupts the existing struggle for power within the house. Perhaps though, Ruths claim for territory is not through action but association14. Drama theorist Hanna Scolnicov writes that the feminine is an element of space while the masculine is an agent for action. Where a male character would lay claim to a space through an action, a female character is assimilated with the space itself. She does not own or belong to the space, rather she is an element of space.
and architecture are widely written about. This evaluation based purely on a womans biological usefulness de-personalises women16. Rather than having a place in the house, they are the place of the house. The woman is literally a House/Wife, as Jane Blocker describes, the hybrid being of half house, half woman. The woman is either consumed by the house or has consumed the house17. Pinters female characters are also embodied in household objects. In The Homecoming Ruths presence is compared to the disturbance of a chiming clock in the night18. In a philosophical argument about matter she also associates her own leg with the leg of a table19. The character of Emma in the play Betrayal also uses furniture and household objects to make sense of characters and situations. Throughout the play while Emma is in a relationship she is confined to a domestic setting, a room within the home, the apartment or a motel. It is only when Emma is not in a relationship that she is placed in a setting outside of the home. Emmas husband expresses the containment of femininity within domesticity when he says that women are not wanted in the squash club, the pub or the restaurant; that these are the places reserved for men20. This demonstrates Scolnicovs concept of mimetic domesticity in the theatre confining women to the home21.
ConcluSion
Pinters rooms proffer an environment for contests of gender, territory and power. They play on theatres most unsettling ability, that is, to mirror actual space. Through the physical reflections of domesticity, the audience is offered both a familiar setting to relate to and the opportunity to see a permutation of domesticity. By associating these concepts through space, the audience and the actors can share in a sense of reaching a new understanding. Elin Diamond writes about imitation in the theatre and its ties to femininity. She challenges mimesis, arguing that realist mimetic representations of space tie into traditional ideologies of femininity and the desire to imitate masculinity: the real belonging to the masculine and the mimetic belonging to the feminine22. Hilde Heynan writes in the same vein, placing the mimetic in opposition to the rational and associated with the feminine, although Heynan suggests mimesis as a tactic for subversion through the double gesture of assimilation and displacement23. As with the set for The Caretaker, there was the constraint of complying with the prescriptive stage directions and delivering the representation of a room, but there was also the opportunity for subtle subversion, to replicate and permute a familiar domestic room, to study a domestic ecology of how an individual behaves within the hidden confines of the home. This overlays a new understanding of the text, and a new representation of domesticity to the audience. The room in Pinters work is a device through which the audience can reach a new understanding of this relationship between self and the domestic environment. It is never the same room, but it is always the room that frames the subject. It is through mimetic space that the play can communicate with the audience in a most potent way. Mimesis can acknowledge what is known, while also enlightening the spectator through subverting a familiar context.
THe HouSe and Woman aS HyBRid CReatuRe

When Ruth is introduced to the room in The Homecoming, a story is told to her about the homes structure being affected by the removal of a wall after the mother of the house had died. Here, there is an association between the structure of the house and the mother15. With the wall removed, the structure of the household had been altered and this is associated with the absence of the mother. This illustrates Scolnicovs rationale of the feminine being assimilated with space. The mothers womb is the first and most satisfying home in our existence and associations between femininity, the womb
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NOTES
1. Nobel Prize. 2010. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005. Last Updated September 19. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005 Harold Pinter. Last accessed September 19, 2010 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/2005/index.html 2. Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative: A personal into animal origins of property and nation. (New York: Atheneum, 1966) 6-27 3. Lawrence Bensky, Theatre No. 3. Interview with Harold Pinter. (Paris: The Paris Review Foundation, 2004). 4. Harold Pinter, The Caretaker. (New York: Grove Press, 1971) 5. Penelope Prentice, The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic. (New York: Garlans Publishing, 1994). xxii-xxxv. 6. Nick Kaye. 2000. Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. (New York: Routledge, 200). 46-54 7. Victor Cahn, Gender and Power in the Plays of Harold Pinter. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994) 8 8. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, 10 9. Pinter, The Caretaker, 34 10. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, 11 11. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, 12 12. Cahn, Gender and Power in the Plays of Harold Pinter, 84 13. Harold Pinter, The Homecoming (London: Methuen, 1966). 14. Hanna Scolnicov, Womans Theatrical Space. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 2 15. Cahn, Gender and Power in the Plays of Harold Pinter, 86 16. Sandra. M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Towards a Feminist Poetic: Inflection in the Sentence in Intimus ed. Mark Taylor and Julieanna Preston (Chichester, England: Wiley Academy, 2006) 122-123. 17. Jane Blocker, Woman-House : Architecture, Gender and Hybridity in Whats Eating Gilbert Grape. Camera Obscura 39. (November 1998) 126 150. 18. Pinter, The Homecoming, 12 19. Pinter, The Homecoming, 46 20. Harold Pinter, Betrayal, (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978). 21. Scolnicov, Womans Theatrical Space, 4 22. Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater. (London: Routledge, 1997) 1-14 23. HildeHeynan, Modernity and Domesticity: Tensions and Contradiction in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial productions of gender in modern architecture ed. Hilde Heynan (London: Routledge. 2005, 22-23
Opposite Davies investigating his new environment prior to making advances on territory in The Caretaker. Here we see the character relating to space and object, an opportunity for the audience to study a domestic ecology. Photo by Ian Knight.
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MaPPing InteRioR AdjacencieS Film and photography successfully mimic the way we occupy the interior. Both give views to the placement of furniture, objects, and characters that move between them. Often small details such as a jacket resting on a chair or a glass filled with coffee or wine tells us if it is morning or evening and brings with it the element of time. These ephemeral details provide entry points into a narrative that we visually complete. The interior becomes animated with life based upon these subtle cues that appear and disappear over the course of a day. Inherently, the interior contains its own system that mimics that of ecology, albeit with a different set of elements than the traditional definition of an organic system. But if ecology is the study of interrelated elements within an environment, then the interior fulfills this definition. It also asks what we can learn by looking at the interior from the lens of this term. Like an ecological system, the interior references cycles of time by its users that organically flow from inside to outside, one room to another and one activity to another. Temporal elements act as variables that appear and disappear over the course of a day while permanent elements are constants that help ground the interior as a site. Both are measured by time. The following diagram locates the permanent elements into a series of nested rings that move from intimacy at the core (body) to the threshold of interior and exterior at the periphery. Each ring occupies a specific scale of the interior, sometimes gravitating towards the body (clothing) and other times toward the perimeter of a room (surfaces). All together, each ring is distinct unto itself but integral to others, mimicking a complete ecology. Time puts the diagram into motion. It activates the variables to change over the course of a day and can be mapped across permanent elements on the interior. A dotted line indicates adjacencies experienced on the interior, this begins with everyday acts such as getting dressed, occupying furniture, utilizing objects, having a sense of enclosure based upon the perimeter of a room, the proximities of everything within, and finally, the threshold between private and public interiors. Looking at the interior through the lens of ecology invites alternative ways of viewing this realm but also documenting the activities that shift from a static diagram to one that registers time and activity. If this is one form of redrawing the interior, then perhaps a further exploration of the term ecology could offer a new set of drawings or maps of the interior derived from the intricate relationship of parts within an ecosystem. Lois Weinthal
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MelBouRneS caf Scene
Interior Luxury at the Caf Australia

Annette Condello : Curtin University, Australia
ABSTRACT
Chicagoan architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin moved to Australia in 1914 to realise their expansive vision for its new national capital city, Canberra. By contrast, their first work built here was a diminutive interior, the Australia Caf and Bar (1915-16) at temporary national capital Melbourne. An insertion within an extant building, the Australia, however, was not the first caf to occupy 270 Collins Street East; the address was actually the locus of an interior architecture palimpsest. The Gunsler first occupied the site in 1879; the Vienna followed in 1889. Antony J. J. Lucas purchased the Vienna in 1915 and contracted the Griffins to expand it. This study surveys the Australia and its predecessors interiors and positions all three within the citys wider caf scene, aiming to cultivate an appreciation of the Griffins caf as a luxurious Australian-type venue. It argues that with the Australia Cafs completion in 1916, the Griffins realised the most luxurious interior erected in Melbourne, if not the country; their design involvement established a new rich avenue of Australian luxury bolstered with a Mayan Revival aesthetic. Their aesthetic, however, was apparently in advance of public taste. The Australia soon met with criticism; its faade was altered by others in 1920 and its interior was almost completely erased by 1938. This paper explores the Griffins caf design interventions for the Australia and the concept of interior luxury.
InteRioR luxuRy
Although Australia Caf, or Caf Australia, has been evaluated, past scholarship has discussed its significance only within the confines of the Griffins own oeuvre.1 Similarly, the Caf has yet to be considered through the lens of luxury. Luxury is defined as sumptuous and exquisite food or surroundings2 Interiors that exceed necessity are thought of as luxurious made up of rare or difficult to obtain materials. Luxury only makes sense when it broadens emotional experience by means of a new discovery.3 Luxurious interiors embrace the designers collective experiences and they demonstrate discoveries such as atmospheric effects in a designed environment. In this paper, interior luxury connotes the overall atmospheric effects, such as dilating the space with light, the creation of novel alcoves comprising sensual and rare qualities of local/ imported materials, and the synthesis of indigenous themes, that nourish a design. This concept is useful when analysing the Griffins Caf Australia interior design interventions.
Late nineteenth century Melbourne was a locus for luxurious interior architecture. Cafes, for instance, developed into rich environments comparable with their European counterparts. At the time, especially in London and Paris, cafes became luxurious social venues. In their survey Cafes and Bars: the Architecture of Public Display (2007), Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey observe that, through time, the coffee house became absorbed into the patterns of everyday life of the middle class, emulating luxurious domestic rooms and salons.4 In 1850s and 1860s, even Melbourne in the distant antipodes gained fashionable coffee houses. There, luxurious European-styled cafes began to proliferate in the citys centre. On Bourke Street, for instance, the Caf de Paris opened in 1858 and next the Crystal Caf in 1861. Modelled after their Parisian Belle poque counterparts and Londons Crystal Palace, the new cafs were luxurious within the Melbourne context; luxurious not only by their somewhat exotic stylistic associations but also owing to their imported building materials, furnishings and interior compositions. By the mid 1880s, the discovery of gold deposits in Victoria fuelled the Melburnian need to provide cafes and restaurants; up until then, the goldfields were catered for from tents.5 Gold fever stricken migrants, mainly from Greece, China and the United States, flocked to Victorias El Dorado. Melbourne soon grew hungry for luxury goods and luxurious buildings. Some successful fortune hunters poured their new wealth into entrepreneurial projects such as public bars, oyster saloons, cafes and shopping arcades. The citys building boom later led it to be characterised as the Chicago of the South.6 These new additions to Melbournes burgeoning skyline were luxuriously appointed with neo-classical ornament, marble cladding and mosaics. Luxury was not confined to architecture. The fare served within the new establishments was no less luxurious. Along with coffee, luxury goods such as imported distilled spirits, ices and oysters were on offer. Emulating the conspicuous displays then fashionable in Paris and London, Melbourne became a luxurious city because of the untold wealth lining the streets. As far as Melbournes caf scene along Collins Street was concerned, the Gunsler was the primary venue for the importation of luxurious materials and the acclimatisation of novel surfaces that informed the interior. French pastry cook, John Ferdinand Gunsler found his way to Melbourne in 1873 and would soon impact Melbournes caf scene.7 After several years working in Melbourne, he advertised for a partner to invest 5000 to open a new caf.8 In 1878, Gold buyer Henry George Iles answered his call, forming Gunsler and Co., purveyors, caterers, pastry cooks and confectioners.9 The next year, the pair purchased the western third of a newly-completed commercial edifice at 29 Collins Street East, three stories high with a central arcade entry. Architecturally, the building was apparently somewhat unusual. Categorising the structure as Romanesque, Australasian Sketcher reproduced an exterior view of the building and observed that the architect has endeavoured to satisfy the eye by the use of iron columns, so boldly placed in front of the plate-glass as to leave almost no room to walk between the shop front and the columns.10 The journal, however, did not identify the designer by name. Other features of the building attracted comment.
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The architects introduction of iron for the arcading and creative use of ceramic tiles to ornament the faade produced, it believed, created novel and pleasing effects. These, however, put the building a step in advance of the general street architecture of the city.11 As we will learn, the Griffins, some three decades later, would erect a similarly advanced structure at the same address. Novel effects made the Gunsler Caf unique as its interior surfaces blended unlikely cultural materials. Gunslers and Iles premises comprised three floors and a basement, located west or left of the structures central entry. London-born, Sorbonne-educated architect Lloyd Tayler (1830-1900) designed their caf insertion; he was possibly also the author of the building itself. No interior images of the caf have come to light. Australasian Sketcher, however, described the cafs fit-out in detail; Gunslers Cafe has on the ground floor a large restaurant, 23 x 77ft 9in x 15ft high, with counters for serving refreshments of all kinds to those whose time is too limited to seat themselves at the tables. The restaurant is lined all round with handsome mirrored and French polished cedar and Huon pine dado, 7ft high, behind which the fresh air for ventilation is introduced. The counter bar and departments for serving oysters and coffee, with their polished marble table tops, are all fitted up with curved and moulded Huon pine and cedar.12 As this description reveals, the Gunslers interior featured imported, that is luxurious, materials, like the French polished cedar dado. One native material, the Huon pine, was also used in the cafes interior, but not thought of as luxurious since it was a yellow-coloured timber and plentiful in Tasmania at the time. A period newspapers review of the caf enlarges: it has luxurious rooms reserved for the ladies and the basement contained the necessary cellarage accommodation for storing wines and spirits.13 There were intimate and private spaces within the Gunsler conductive to pleasure and the covering of the wall surfaces that transmitted a sense of this novel effect through imported and indigenous materials. This cultural kind of novelty was especially the case when the caf had murals. Spatially the cafe was large; it comprised a restaurant. In the 1880s, the scale of Melbournes caf-restaurants expanded to hotel size. In an attempt to counter the strong lure of Melbournes [alcohol-serving] public houses, conglomerates of temperance-minded businessmen began building elaborate alcohol-free palaces.14 One of these new alcohol-free establishments, the Federal Coffee Palace (1886-8), was erected at the corner of Collins and King Streets, not far from the Gunsler. This multi-storeyed structure shamelessly aped the classical styles of Greece, Rome and Renaissance Italy and it dripped with Palladian stucco.15 Like its other Melbourne counterparts, the Federal gained luxurious connotations by its use of foreign, if not exotic, styles and imported Greco-Roman materials. Coffee was not the only
preferred non-alcoholic drink as tea salons also eventually appeared in Melbournes arcades. By 1889 the citys population had more than doubled, necessitating the renumbering of Collins Street.16 The Gunsler, formerly at 29 Collins Street, was now renumbered 270. This was not the only change. Despite an economic crash, the 1890s saw the arrival of more migrants, especially Greeks and Italians; many would eventually find work in cafes and restaurants. After the crash subsided, Australia enjoyed a boom of restaurant dining around 1890 - 1910 the late Victorian and Edwardian eras of the English and La Belle poque of the French.17 Intriguingly enough, a Belle poque-styled gallery of the Neapolitan type known as The Block Arcade was constructed (1891-3) three buildings west of the Gunsler. It soon became an expensive shopping destination. Ultimately, the Block became famous as the place for the Melbourne elite to promenade.18 Caf Gunsler soon proved popular. Novelist and journalist Marcus Clarke (1846-1881) visited the place and said it was elegantly furnished and most expensively decorated. During the day time the Cafe Gunsler was usually crammed with people. Stockbroker, bon vivant and Collins Street resident George Meudell (1860-1936) recollected the Gunsler as a real European caf-restaurant, one well conducted on Parisian lines.19 By 1931, Australasian Home Beautiful could distinguish the Gunsler as the best known caf in Australia.20
Intoxicating tHe Vienna

Around 1889, shortly before The Block Arcade appeared, migrant Austrian entrepreneurs F. Edlinger and J. Goetz purchased and re-adapted the Gunsler Caf.21 Renaming it Vienna after their home city, the pair hoped to entice coffee drinkers and restaurant diners to a venue more Viennese than Parisian in feel.The project possibly required an architect; however, the designers identity is unknown. As in the instance of its predecessor, no images of the Viennas interior apparently survive. Consequently, it is impossible to determine the scope and extent of the Austrians modifications.Textual sources suggest that the Vienna soon grew as popular as the Gunsler. One patron assessed its new incarnation a very smart restaurant, where one could dine down the cellar on marble-topped tables.22 There, as with the Gunsler before it, a table was always reserved for exquisitely dressed girls. Also downstairs, men sometimes stood on tables and drank champagne and sang God Save the Queen.23 No doubt the caf served a lot of alcohol. Gunsler regular George Meudell now continued his patronage with the Vienna, characterising the new place as a club for clever men.24 There were no electric lights, another visitor reported, only gas lamps.25 One observer noted that the new Vienna Caf served fish suppers [to people lounging] on plush settees. However, according to Melbourne artist R Emery Poole, there were no cocktails in those days It was the twilight of sane liquor before the hectic dawn of American drinks.26 Although the Vienna Caf probably then did not concoct cocktails in its bar, it more than likely served wine, spirits and beer. The citys conspicuous displays of wealth proliferated but by the turn of the century the caf-restaurant and bar became malodorous presumably due to the liquor odours in various places.
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Edlinger and Goetz leased the premises to Greek migr Antony J. J. Lucas (1862-1946) in 1908. Lucas had arrived in Melbourne in 1866, early working as a waiter at the Gunsler, Viennas predecessor. Afterwards, he began his own entrepreneurial enterprise to furnish the public with dining, luncheon, tea, and supper rooms, so spacious, airy, and elegant as to gratify the eye and please the refined tastes of their patrons, while the quality of everything served up, and the table appointments and service, should be of such a character as to place the cafes on a level with the best of those which are to be met with in the great cities on the Continent of Europe.27 When he took over the Vienna, Lucas had already met with financial success and owned two elaborate cafs nearby, the Paris (1859) and Town Hall (1894). In 1915, Lucas purchased the Vienna outright. By then, however, the cafs clientele, along with its decades-old interior, had possibly deteriorated or perhaps fallen out of fashion. Moreover, the Vienna was now apparently locally known as a meeting place to indulge in pleasures other than drinking coffee. The caf, according to Meudell, had for hire a number of shabby cabinets particuliers, familiar to anybody who knows the boulevards of Paris and their purlieus, where ladies and gentlemen may meet for all kinds of lawful and unlawful occasions.28 Now possibly a covert brothel, the caf needed to change for the better and Lucas opted to renovate it. There were likely other reasons for this decision. Competition was probably foremost; by then, Melbourne was packed with rival cafs and restaurants. The outbreak of World War I also compelled Lucas to change the place. In 1915, a group of intoxicated soldiers staggered down Collins Street and when confronted with the name of an enemy city, they stoned the cafs faade.29 Patriotism may not have been the only motivation for the vandalism. The damage might actually have occurred simply because the soldiers had arrived at the Viennas bar too late for the 6 oclock swill. Previously, bars closed around 10 to 11 oclock but to curtail peoples alcoholic drinking habits the new closing time instigated by the Victorian government was 6 oclock.30 Whatever the cause, Lucas temporarily closed his caf to erect the Griffins design. Along with renovating the extant caf, Lucas also planned to enlarge it, securing a lease to expand west into W. H. Glenn and Co.s adjoining music warehouse in June 1915. Lucas ambition was, a newspaper sensationalised, to construct one of the largest cafes in Australia, equipped and planned on the lines of those recently erected in London and Paris.31 The account also noted that Nahum Barnet (1855-1931), a well-known Melbourne architect, was to design Lucas caf. Five months later, however, Walter and Marion Griffin were at work on the job. Why Lucas switched architects and how he came into contact with the American couple is unknown. By then, Walter had gained notoriety and visibility as Canberras author, at least in professional circles. As well, Lucas caf was
located in close proximity to Griffins office, just a bit further up Collins Street at 395. Coffee and tea drinkers, the Griffins may even have frequented the Vienna, owing to its location convenient to their workplace. Whatever the catalyst for their contact, all three were linked as migrants, outsiders to Melbournes social circles.
Remodelling tHe Vienna

By November 1915, Lucas had contracted the Griffins to remodel and expand not only the Viennas interior, but also its exterior faade. In a drawing dated that month, the Griffins proposed a two-storey high faade, covering Mullens bookshop and the premises above, but leaving the original third story exposed. By July 1916, the scheme had been set aside in favour of a one-storey faade, possibly due to lack of funds. In the end, only the cafs main entrance and another for the adjoining bar were constructed (Figure 1).
Above Figure. 1. Elevation and plan of the Griffins Vienna Cafe (1916). Source: National Library of Australia
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Once the drawings were completed, the existing cafs exterior and interior were stripped. Original traces left from the Vienna, like the wainscots and the shabby cabinets were all removed. They replaced the main entrance of the emptied-out Vienna Caf with a Grecian whitewash of smooth stone (Figure 2). The Griffins clad the exterior square-arch entrance of the Vienna Caf with refined details, demonstrating a lavish tile and stone, vaguely Mesoamerican geometric fantasy at least seven squareheaded archivolts of it.32 The cafs entrance corridor directed one to the left; it was enhanced with additional elements that unfurl a luxuriant Australian world a succession of exquisite rooms fern and fountain with lively piers. On entering the luxurious lobby with its comfortable leather couches, according to Marion Griffin, the imagination is immediately appealed to by glimpses, through fern room and fountain court, to the main dining room beyond.33 The Australia restaurant had a reputation for being one of the places at which Melbourne high society chose to dine. The Griffins, according to Christopher Vernon, reconfigured the restaurant into a linear, episodic sequence of three main rooms, each furnished with tables and chairs constructed of Australian timber to the couples design.34 In the Fern Room was a pair of white sculptural piers created by jeweller Charles Costermans (18881958). One side of the column featured a port Jackson ti tree, emblematic of Sydney and its harbour, writes Vernon, and on the opposite side, she portrayed Melbournes distinctive Port Philip fig.35 The surrounding walls of the Fern Room were lined with halved newel posts, which were ornate and designed to carry bowls of ferns and flowers (Figure 3).These posts were contrasted with other sculptural piers, extremely different from the Fountain Courts Australian columns. Depicting the Greek nymphs of the three main piers, Margaret Baskervilles sculptures of Daphne in particular, in the Fountain Court, Vernon notes metamorphosed into a tree makes her inclusion comprehensible.36 The Griffins Grecian themed-room design, seen here as a foreign and Australian alcove, outshone Melbournes coffee palace designs drenched with Palladian plaster work. The courts piers were capped with concrete light shelves and Louis Sullivan-esque
Opposite Figure. 2. The Australia Cafe entrance. Source: National Library of Australia Above Figure 3. View of the Fountain Court from the Fern Room in the Australia Caf. Source: National Library of Australia
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newel posts surrounded the grand staircase. The bizarre design, Donald L Johnson writes, is a subtle translation of European Art Nouveau and the Chicago School.37 Similar to Johnson, Karen Burns isolates the Griffins Fountain Court and likens its newel posts and piers with Sullivans similar newel post decoration in the Auditorium Building Complex (1889), Chicago. Suggesting that the Griffins appropriated the vegetable matter proliferating across the entablature, mutating into the intertwined leafy vines and then flourishing as a floral outgrowth,38 the designs of these are quasi-sullivanesque. Burns then notes, the three piers mutated from cuboid base along axes of growth and finally stabilised as caryatid forms.39 The caryatid-inspired or nymph piers recall the caryatids at the Erechtheoin, the ancient Greek porch at the Acropolis in Athens. The Griffins positioned the caryatid forms as if they were facing away from the main staircase, grounded in the floor but set free from holding up the ceiling. Four faceted glass basins were fitted between the structural columns, screening one room from the other. The basins, replete with gold fish, were up lit with coloured lights. From the Fountain Court, one could peer through the refracted light to the Banqueting Hall. Here the Greek/Australian theme merges with richly quasi-sullivanesque details. At the same time the fish basins indicate the integral organisation of the space of the caf. The Banqueting Hall in particular was the loftiest space, featuring an up lit, richly perforated vaulted ceiling and Bertha Merfields Dawn in the Australian Bush mural in the foil of the upper gallery. The hall, accessed through two passageways, confronted colonnaded eating galleries, a balcony with light fixtures and on the back wall the mural (Figure 4). The mural was the Griffins abstract representation of the bush. It also conveys a longing for wider horizons of the bush-patrons
could breathe in the native verdant qualities. Bathing the Banqueting Hall with skylights in the vaulted ceiling and showering the interior with the Australia sky, at the Australia Caf luxury was exposed to the setting. The environmental effects of this lofty space marked a new discovery of an Australian-type of luxury. The entire place embraced both foreign and national styles within its many-themed rooms. The Fern Room combined both styles, Chicagoan and Australian. The Griffins enveloped the caryatid forms into their Fountain Court design because after all, their client was Greek. The grand stair in this room resembled something foreign from both Europe and Chicago. The Banqueting Hall space within the Auditorium Building Complex in particular was influential for the Griffins, but they were antithetical to Sullivans work. Critically, Vernon suggests the couple abstracted a tree fern gully, a locally distinctive landscape type, and represented it in built form.40 Above all the entire work created an enclosure of luxury into spaces, containing Australian ambiences.
Evolution of tHe AuStRalia inteRioR

When the Vienna Cafe re-opened in 1916 as the Australia, a name according to Vernon was suggested by the Griffins and not Lucas, each themed-space was a spatial haven. The floors of the Fern Court (or tea salon) were lined with parquetry and furnished aptly with garden variety wicker furniture. The floors of the Fountain Court and Banqueting Hall were made out of native timber. Potted palms and ferns dotted each space. The wall and ceiling surfaces were coated with vibrant paints and flattened ornament plaster parts. The cost of the project reached 50,000.41 The cafs atmospheric effects showed the Griffins design of the Australian blackwood chairs and tables of culinary delicacies, with coffee and tea aromas, sounds of splashing fish - a visual efflorescence of interior luxury. The crockery Marion designed herself with a fragment emanating from the entrance of the caf was lavish, but one wonders if these items ever made their way to the tables inside Caf Australia. A caf then was not a caf as we know it now: it was a dining establishment on a sumptuous scale.42 Almost all of the advertisements published in the newspapers at the time when Caf Australia opened in 1916 relay how luxurious and sumptuous it was. For example: and in these luxurious surroundings there is at your command a chef, cuisine, and cellar of gratifying the most exacting whim.43 Of course, these advertisements were placed in the paper by Lucas himself. This picture of a luxurious interior, however, remains incomplete. One way to uncover the Griffins design interventions for the Australia Caf is to draw upon the works that they had encountered in Chicago. Ironically, coffee houses were not at all popular in Chicago; there saloonkeepers and German brewers predominated until around the end of World War One. Another way is to refer to caf precedents they might have visited in Europe and Australia itself. None of writings at the time, or scholarly writings, note how luxurious the bar spaces were.
Opposite Figure 4. Banqueting Hall of the Australia Cafe. Source National Library of Australia
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As documented in the Griffins drawing of the Australia Cafs front elevation, the square-arch entrance was clad with various materials.The stones used were white quartz and Norwegian green pearl granite, authentic gold Delft tiles from Holland and prism glass installed as wall panelling as well as pavement lights. Beneath the Griffins design of the square-arch and refined dado line was the remainder of the faade clad with black stone, resembling opal with obsidian flecks. No doubt it was at the Worlds Columbian Exposition (1893), when Marion, in her twenties, or Walter, a teenager at the time, might have visited the exotic Mayan architecture, like the replica of the Arch at Labna, must have inspired their design. Intriguingly, Mayan influences were incorporated in the Griffins work in the United States prior to their career in Australia, for instance the Frank Palma House (1911) in Illinois.44 The Frank Palma house in particular (aka the solid rock project) is compelling with its strong Mayan-inspired planes and flattened ornament; its faades uncannily appear in reverse in Caf Australias Fern Room. The entrance demonstrated a new and unique aesthetic introduced into Australia at the time, an Australian Mayan Revival Style. This is important as it pre-empted the Griffins future designs in Australia in the 1920s, especially the Mayan inklings detected in the Capitol Theatre and at Castelcrag. It is unclear, however, as to why the Griffins believed Mayan references to be appropriate in an Australian context. The Griffins Australia design blends Australian indigenous motifs within the Fountain Court and Banqueting Hall in a Melburnian context. They appropriated the lessons they learnt from Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan in Chicago, but they reworked it in an Australian manner, meaning the work became soporific; they architecturally imbued the vertical surfaces with pale opal-tints. The wall and ceiling surfaces in the Fountain Court were concentrations of extravagance a swathing of ornamental plaster reliefs painted with pastel colours. On the balcony level, flamboyant light fitting on top of squared columns, which were non-structural, pierced the space with the Banqueting Hall. Both of these luxuriant spaces provided clues as to how they were projected in a well-tempered Australian manner a subdued charm, which took cues from the weak sunlight of the native landscape and lights turned on only when required. This is what made the Griffins interior design luxuriant and advanced at the time, a naturally lit space for eating at twilight. The Griffins Australia design also blends European cafes and bars within the Fountain Court and exterior facade in a Melburnian context. Brimming with ideas of the Australian bush for the entire place, the Griffins may have considered Sydney and Melbournes caf-restaurants they possibly visited before designing the Australia Caf. In 1914, only around a year before they met Lucas, the Griffins made a European study tour. There they visited, amongst other places, Venice, Trieste and Vienna. Teetotallers, the couple may have called at Venices Florian (1720 and then refurbished in 1859) and the Caffe degli Specchi (Caf of Mirrors, 1839) at Trieste; each of these luxurious cafs was then, as now, well known. At Vienna, the Griffins possibly sought out Adolf Loos Karntner or American Bar (1907-08), named not to commemorate the country, but to identify the then novel American cocktails it served. For the couple, of course, it was the architecture, not the drinks on offer that would have attracted. Loos bar was luxurious owing to its cladding of exquisite black-
veined marble on its exterior walls and interior coffered ceiling. As far as materiality is concerned, there are Loosian interior influences at the Australia Cafe; judging by the presence of the coffered entrance and the black granite on the Griffins faade, but not in terms of the complex interactions of rooms. Instead, Australia Caf reflected the perplexities of the sheer variability of the Australian environment. Sculptural piers in the Fountain Court were carved out of white marble. The fish basins in the Fountain Court permitted diners or drinkers to enjoy Australian scenes in tranquil spaces. The interior atmosphere of the lounge was recorded in the Leader as: Oriental in its luxuriousness and beyond come the series of colonnades eating galleries, each semi-detached from the next by a gorgeous arrangement of oxidised gold tiles flanking deep fountains of changing opalescent hues, in which gold fish dart about unmindful of the kaleidoscopic change of the water from opal to soft green or pink crimson. The pillars are more than pieces of masonry necessary to support the upper floors they are sculptured work of art for the forest trees seem to have been petrified there.45 The changing effects of each space were ultimately exotic. The choice of colours and materials in Australia Caf reflected the native bush and crystallised opal seams. The Griffins had an acute environmental awareness of Australias Oriental neighbours. They were in awe of the Australian landscape, its minerals and its watercourses, and they used their own experiences to revive Lucas extant European-inspired interior. The Australia included two modern kitchens. An extension to the back of Glen Music shop was the new section to the cafe, the part where the Banqueting Hall and kitchen were located. Lucas advertised his caf in The Argus, beneath the banner of Melbournes Most Luxurious and Fashionable Caf: The vast, well designed, well lighted, airy kitchens are most modern in their equipment, and scrupulous regard is given to their spotless cleanliness.46 This advertisement highlights the cafs kitchens as modern. Marion
designed the menus as well (Figure 5), which listed real and mock turtle soup. The airy kitchens were two-storeys high and were immaculate with tile floors and walls, and equipped with the most modern culinary devices.47 The Australia formed a reliable hygienic respite. The design was the antithesis of all Melbournes other cafs in that it was modern and luxurious and the entry must have been a breath-taking experience. The Griffins included motifs drawn from the federal capital design, the Australian bush, America, Ancient Greece, Europe and Mexico. At the re-opening of the Vienna Caf in 1916, it was renamed as The Australia. Emphasising The Australia as the name of the caf, the main dining space offered patrons a sophisticated picnic in the Australian bush in an elegant dining conservatory. The mural itself was a landscape of interiority, a sensual haven. The name change was possibly made to avoid any more attacks on the building faade and to distance itself from the former Viennas repute for the immoral behaviour of its patrons. Viewed in the context of their next major building, the Capitol Theatre, the Australia Cafe reveals a lot about the Griffins interior ambitions. As interior designers, they created a luxuriant interior unknown to Australians and outsiders.
Above Figure 5. Marion Mahony Griffins design of the Australia Caf menu. Source: National Library of Australia
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WRecking tHe AuStRalia

Not all Australians thought the Australia Caf was spectacular. At least two influential critics disdained the Griffins design (and the couple themselves). In November 1916, only weeks after the Australia opened, architects George and Florence Taylor dismissed the caf as insane in the professional press. They attacked the building again in December. Labelling the cafs entry grotesque, the Taylors even went as far as to urge Lucas seriously consider the reconstruction of this ground floor frontage on aesthetic and architecturally correct lines before proceeding to carry the remodelling any higher.48 In 1920, Lucas acquiesced and altered the faade, removing, its imported Scandinavian granite blocks and prismatic glass tiles. These were replaced with a simple archway inscribed The Australia (Figure 6). Lucas faade revisions were made from an unknown architects hand, not the Griffins. As Lucas appreciated the Griffins aesthetic, he must have made the changes only for fear of losing patrons. Mr. Lucas, the Taylors gloated in July 1920, has evidently found out that grotesque buildings are not a sound business asset for the bar front is now being remodelled.49 For the Taylors, the Griffins brand of modernism was acceptable only behind closed doors, shielded from public view.
Though the Australia Caf had now lost its lustre, at its prime the Griffins entry introduced a new aesthetic to Australia, a sort of uniquely Australianised Mayan Revival, which exposed Art Deco nationally. Undoubtedly, Lucas was more than merely satisfied with his new Australia Caf and Bar. In 1921, he facilitated the Griffins commission to design Melbournes Capitol Theatre. The theatre would prove even more dazzling than Lucas Caf; inside the Capitol Theatre, Mayan motifs would run riot a thousand fold, an interior that embodies a sort of glamorous grotesqueness. Ultimately, Lucas caf fell out of fashion and he sold it in 1927.Then, there was a 1930s refit. The new owners, amongst other interior interventions, removed its luxurious fittings all of the Griffins furniture, replacing it with more traditional pieces. The interior itself was eventually dismantled, exposing the Gunslers earlier murals.50 In 1938, the twelve-storey Hotel Australia designed by Leslie M Perrott and Partners was built over Caf Australia, retaining its Banqueting Hall but not in its original forms they painted over the murals, placed new furniture within the hall and then added a Venetian Court. The hotel, in turn, demolished in the 1970s and replaced with an Australia Place shopping mall, today is the only reminder of what was Melbournes lush caf de luxe. The Gunsler, the Vienna and Caf Australia have all been erased from 270 Collins Street. The Griffins interior design interventions were advanced at the time. In the end, Australia Cafes interior was accepted, but the exterior was violated. Today, Melburnians are content to sip their coffee in graffiti-filled laneways.The Australia Caf was a century ahead of its time and the Griffins created exotic national ambiences. These ambiences guarded the persistence of a Mayan/Australian design trend as a theme that trickled through other Griffin projects.
NOTES
1 For endless conversations about the Griffins and comments on the paper I would like to thank Christopher Vernon. On Caf Australia see James Birrell, J. Walter Burley Griffin. (University of Queensland Press, 1964); Donald Johnson, The Architecture of Walter Burley Griffin (Adelaide: The Griffin Press, 1977); Jeff Turnbull and Peter Y. Navaretti (eds.), The Griffins in Australia and India: The Complete Works and Projects of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 1998); Christopher Vernon, The Silence of
the Mountains and the Music of the Sea: The Landscape Artistry of Marion Mahony Griffin. Marion Mahony Griffin: Drawing the Form of Nature. D. Wood, ed. Illinois: The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art (Northwestern University Press, 2005); and Alasdair McGregor, Grand Obsessions: the Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin (Victoria: Lantern, Penguin Group, 2009). 2 Oxford English Dictionary <http://www.oed.com>, accessed September 2010. 3 Siegfried Giedion. The Dangers and Advantages of Luxury, in Focus, 1(3) (1939), 34-38. 4 Grafe, & Bollerey (eds.), Cafes and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display (New York: Routledge, 2007), 10. 5 Michael Symons, One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2007), 130. 6 Wallace Kirsop, W. From Boom to Bust in the Chicago of the South: the 19th-century Melbourne Book Trade, The La Trobe Journal, 59 (Autumn, 1997), 1. 7 The Argus, 10 June, 1879, 3. 8 R. G. Meudell, The Pleasant Career of a Spendthrift and His Later Reflections (Melbourne: Wilke & Co. Pty. Ltd., 1929), 285. 9 The Argus, 4 March, 1878. 10 Australasian Sketcher, 5 July 1879, 55. 11 Australasian Sketcher, 1879, 55. 12 Australasian Sketcher, 1879, 55. 13 The Argus, June 10, 1879, 6. 14 Christine OBrien, C. Flavours of Melbourne: A Culinary Biography (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2008, 103). 15 Graeme Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (Melbourne University Press, 2004), 283. 16 M. Lewis, The Most Luxuriously Furnished Salon in Melbourne: Johnstone OShannessys 1885 Studio in La Trobe Journal, 76 (Spring, 2005), 78. 17 Symons, One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia, 133. 18 M. Lewis, The Most Luxuriously Furnished Salon in Melbourne, 77. 19 R. G. Meudell, The Pleasant Career of a Spendthrift and His Later Reflections (1929), 285. 20 Australasian Home Beautiful, c.1916. 21 The Argus, 5 June 1889. 22 D. L. Berstein, Hotel Australia, Melbourne: David Lee Bernstein (1939), 63. 23 Berstein, Hotel Australia, 63. 24 Meudell, The Pleasant Career, 286. 25 Berstein, 63. 26 Berstein, 25. 27 J. Smith (ed.), Cyclopaedia of Victoria (Melbourne: Cyclopedia Company, 1905), 158. 28 Meudell, The Pleasant Career of a Spendthrift, 286-287. 29 See McGregor, A. Grand Obsessions: the Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin (2009), 257-8. 30 Symons, 133. 31 The Argus, 2 June 1915, 16.
32 A. McGregor, Grand Obsessions: the Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, 2009, 259. Also, see Kristin Otto, Capital: Melbourne When it Was the Capital City of Australia 1901-27 (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company), 2009. 33 Griffin, Magic of America (c. 1949), II: 82. 34 C. Vernon,The Silence of the Mountains and the Music of the Sea: The Landscape Artistry of Marion Mahony Griffin. Marion Mahony Griffin: Drawing the Form of Nature (2005), 19. 35 Vernon ,The Silence of the Mountains and the Music of the Sea, 20. 36 Vernon, The Silence of the Mountains and the Music of the Sea, 19. 37 D. Johnson, The Architecture of Walter Burley Griffin, 103. 38 K. Burns, Prophets of the Wilderness, Transition, 24(3) (1988), 26, 30. 39 Burns, Prophets of the Wilderness, 26, 30.40 Vernon, 18. 40 Vernon, The Silence of the Mountains and the Music of the Sea, 18. 41 McGregor, Grand Obsessions, 258. 42 Robyn Annear, A City Lost and Found: Whelan the Wreckers Melbourne (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2005), 47. 43 The Argus, 3 Nov, 1916. 44 Marjorie Ingle, Mayan Revival Style (Utah: Peregrine Smith Books, 1984), 19-20. 45 The Leader, c.1916, 40. 46 The Argus, 18 Nov. 1916, 24. 47 Punch, 2 Nov, 1916, 709. 48 Building, 12 Dec, 1916, 60. 49 The Australian Home Beautiful, 10, 1 Oct, 1931: 52 50 Robyn Annear, A City Lost and Found, 96.
Opposite Figure 6. Collage of the Australia Cafe in 270 Collins Street, demonstrating its 1920 alteration. Author: A. Condello.
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Sustainable practice in retail design: new functions between matter and space
Chiara Rubessi : Universit Stendhal-Grenoble 3, France
The factors of aesthetics and social responsibility form what we can define as relational aesthetics of design, borrowing a concept from contemporary art that is a theory consisting in judging artwork which respond(s) to interpersonal relationships that represent, produce and raise2. Indeed, interior design must exhibit a new philosophy and aesthetics where projects and the resulting space must be judged not only on its aesthetic value, but rather on its ability to produce social relations between places, things and people. In this paper, I aim to discuss these issues by considering exhibit design, a specific discipline within the interior design field, and a specific area within it: namely bookshops in hypermarkets and commercial spaces, whose characteristics make them a typical example of global spaces challenging interior design in the areas of sustainability and cultural stratification. This stratification requires renewed consideration of the evolution of so-called Non-Places3 and their capability to promote, through interior design, the cultural appropriation of non-place-communities.
can set the age of the Great Exhibition in the mid nineteenth century, when for the first time there was the need to give recognition to the culture of merchandise, to institutionalise, and build even better world events where companies and states exhibited their great discoveries and technological innovations4. Furthermore, it was a time when the scnographes5, began to experience difficulties in communicating an object (tangible or intangible) in a space in which the event should happen.
ABSTRACT
This paper analyses a case study of retail design, Libreria Coop Ambasciatori, a project of interior design created in Bologna (Italy) in 2008 by RetailDesign Studio (Venice). The purpose of the paper is to examine a project of retail exhibition design, its components, and the design choices as an example of sustainability and social responsibility in what is called design practice. In particular, this paper points out the relevance of the choice of the materials as conceptual practice for design; indeed, the considered case study aims to contribute to a preliminary discussion about relevant issues for the exploitation of the conceptual materiality of design, in both defining sustainable spaces and new directions in exhibition and interior design.
In todays society the constant acceleration of technology impacts on the aesthetics of interior design. In particular, interior design has to face the issue of the innovation of space included in a broader context of economic development, as the French philosopher and urbanist, Paul Virilio, points out: La vitesse cest la vieillesse du monde emports par sa violence nous nallons nulle part, nous nous contentons de partir et de nous dpartir du vif au profit du vide de la rapidit. Aprs avoir longtemps signifi la suppression des distances, la ngation de lespace, la vitesse quivaut soudain lanantissement du Temps: cest ltat durgence.1 Besides aesthetic and economic factors, the current global context also considers among its priorities the constant quest for social responsibility as an instrument of environmental protection. Priorities which ask for a renewed architecture for public and private exhibition spaces and a renewed philosophy of interior design, informed by the two main elements cited above: aesthetic design and social responsibility.
Currently, the culture of exhibition design is increasing6 , and we understand the need by many disciplines, including architecture and design, for perspectives that can meet the demand for innovative solutions through the professional ability to confer the sense of things, places and spaces through the composition of communication elements.The scenario unfolding before our eyes also raises questions to the practice of exhibiting.The continuous renewal of technology in exhibitions and major technological revolutions in retail, such as the escalator, air-conditioning, the scanner at the cash desk, multimedia exhibition areas and more7, all produce new, increasingly persuasive communication The paper is structured as follows: firstly, I describe and briefly strategies, and involve the experience of people acting or living discuss the multiple facets of the practice of exhibition design, in exhibit spaces. which unlike other fields of architecture, as a discipline, is universally and traditionally considered a part of interior design, Within this scenario, exhibition design and its primary function enhancing its communication skills in the practice of exhibition of displaying and communicating must be able to update its key in expositions, retail, museums, fairs, events, etc. Next, I discuss factors and components such as social and economic issues by the effects on exhibition design frontiers in relation to current understanding how all the devices exploited in the design take sustainability requirements, and I point out the relevant role shape, work, and relate to the new interiors. Exhibition design played by materials both at a conceptual (design) and physical produces a sort of lash-up: an unexpected synergy created (built) level. I then describe the case of an Italian hypermarket between various economic, technical and cultural factors that bookstore, Libreria Coop Ambasciatori, where I highlight its combine to create an object, but also, more generally, to any contribution to a material-oriented approach and an example new entity8. of sustainable exhibit design. Lastly, a discussion of the case study and future work concludes the paper. The term lash-up assumes an interesting architectural semantic dimension in the Italian language: according to the sociologist Guido Martinotti, Iash-up is found in translation of the term composizione, i.e. the layout/placement of components within Exhibition design is rooted in the culture of image and visual a space 9 .The composizione is the material support of the communication, two liberal art forms from which exhibition emergence of sustainability in exhibition design which we look at design draws on symbols and metaphors. As a starting point we further in the following sections.
THe MultiPle FacetS of ExHiBition DeSign
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THe fRontieR of a SuStainaBle exHiBit

The term sustainable design was coined in 1973 by E.F. Schumacher in his book Small Is Beautiful, where he defines what sustainability is in architecture, building the concept into an integrated design process that requires minimal environmental impact and is mainly concerned with the relationship between humans and the natural environment. It is a philosophy that can be applied in architecture and interior design along with ethics, innovation, and basic considerations of human and environmental factors. Indeed, the designer needs to understand the issues and problems surrounding the practice of sustainability. To these ends, institutions and organisations responsible for ensuring the changes underway in architecture are ready to support new design practice, combining the principles of sustainability, waste reduction, seeking new words and ways to design new sustainable spaces10 even though the logic of the market has not been fully implemented (for example, bio-architecture in interior design is opening up a discussion about the importance and effectiveness of the practice of sustainability). Thus, the objective is to lay the foundations for a new and continuing design ethos aimed at updating training and the potential of the experts; a project that can make a valuable contribution to the culture of environmentally sustainable interior design while satisfying the wellbeing of the user that will live spaces and environmental needs. Designers have a direct role in the industry as service providers. They therefore may play a larger role recognising how their profession can contribute to physical imaging in society and thus the decision to reduce industrial impact on the environment. Strong support and encouragement for the designer comes from protocols, shared by most countries. Indeed, protocols support the identification and outline best practice for architects and engineers in the industry, aiming to become guidelines in final certification by establishing a market value for the green building by encouraging competition between companies on the environmental performance of buildings and consumer awareness among end users. For example, the standard protocol Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) (http://www.usgbc.org/), provides parameters for sustainable construction developed in the United States and applied in over 100 countries worldwide. Addressing the whole process (from design through construction and employment) and all parts of building, LEED opts for a holistic view of sustainability, using every opportunity to reduce environmental impact and emissions of various kinds of buildings under construction. At the cutting edge, LEED has become a universal design language, a system accepted and understood worldwide which in Italy, unlike other countries, has become the first example of a protocol adapted to the local cultural context, according to Italian and European regulations. Furthermore, LEED is a green building certification system, providing third-party verification that a building was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving a buildings performance. LEED certification is based on seven credit categories, including sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, and innovation in Design/ Regional Priority (http://www.gbcitalia.org/index.php). There are both environmental and financial benefits to earning LEED certification, including lowering operating costs and increasing asset value, reducing waste sent to landfills, conserving energy and water, developing healthier and safer buildings
for occupants, creating compact and walkable communities with good access to neighbourhood amenities and transit, protecting natural resources and farmland by encouraging growth in areas with existing infrastructure, and reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, the standard representation offered by protocols allows for infrastructural sustainability mainly in relation to environment impacts, whereas protocols usually do not consider sustainability in terms of impacts on heritage and history of the context of intervention (cultural sustainability). In this sense, they are more suitable at producing sustainable non-places, where identity, relationships, and history are superceded by anonymous, generalised infrastructures characterised by measurable qualities and performances. Thus, the designer has to embed protocols in places by re-using the existing cultural heritage to create an emotional involvement in the local context11. The dialectics between protocols (as non-places components) and cultural heritage exhibited, e.g. in building materials (as places components) produces a lash-up allowing emergence of a sustainable space where the identity between past and present creates a background for new functions mediated by the mixed materiality of protocols and heritage buildings. These issues ask for a multidisciplinary approach in order to compose in a conceptual materiality the material instances (protocols, heritage, history, etc.) of the different facets of sustainability; these facets can be provisionally clustered in the above-mentioned dimensions (infrastructural and cultural sustainability). Moreover, this approach requires training, knowledge-sharing, and active collaboration between designers and the different parties: architects, engineers and clients must interact in all phases of the project, from site selection, an in-house, the choice of materials, to the completion of the project. The adoption of such a multidisciplinary approach allows, on the one hand, the opening of a way of assessing much broader and complex issues, such as quality of life12. On the other hand, it exploits the quality of interior design as an instrument to re-think the relationship between the human being and its environment in terms of functioning and capabilities13 .In the following section, I discuss design Libreria Coop Ambasciatori in Italy (a LEED, Commercial Interiors certified building) via a case study considering the different facets of sustainability in exhibition design.
LiBReRia CooP AmBaSciatoRi: a caSe Study

Librerie Coop is a company in the Coop group (http://www.e-coop.it/portalWeb/portale/ index.jsp), one of the largest Italian retail corporations in Italy. Librerie Coop is the first branded chain of Coop bookstores. Coop, Consumer Cooperatives was founded in 1947 as the Italian Association of Consumer Cooperatives, aiming to initiate bulk purchasing to provide consumers with better conditions and purchase guarantees. Coop evolved from a consortium to Coop Italia as a cooperative company between 1968 and 1974 and was consolidated through a continuous evolution up to today, with the merger of its food sector with non-food areas in 1980. The basic idea stems from the need for cooperation and solidarity as a response to the traditional market approach in the retail sector.
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From the early pioneering experiences in more than a century and a half of history, Coop has become the first Italian distribution organisation closely linked with Italian political and social affairs. The original values are still the basis of the Coop, namely the centrality of people, their needs and their rights. It is in this spirit that the Libreria Coop Ambasciatori project has been designed.The aim is to promote a sustainable and innovative perspective in Italian distribution, mainly combining food and non-food, i.e. food and books, within a context of cultural events. On this subject, the project is a collaboration between Libreria Coop, a bookshop, and Eataly (http://www.eataly.it/index.php), a brand that brings together a group of small businesses operating in different sectors of the food and wine industry and devoted to distributing high quality products. It sees in the sale of books a way to make consumers of food well-informed and educated regarding sustainability. Retail brand bookstores are becoming more widespread in Italian as well as international department stores; e.g. La Feltrinelli (http://www.lafeltrinelli.it/), one of the major Italian publisher and bookstore chains, with its 98 Italian retail locations in different formats with medium and large centres in cities, in shopping malls and in non-places14, such as railway stations, airports etc. Indeed, the first aspect we investigate is the peculiarity of the Libreria Coop. The format of the building is oriented towards the re-use of existing cultural heritage to create an emotional involvement in the customer experience by offering a consumer-qualified experience. By not allowing the creation of junkspaces15, it provides a local context16 where the identity between past and present creates a background and life. The concept of Libreria Coop Ambasciatori has been designed by Paolo Lucchetta as a project built around man and his relationships, a: ... multiple-function building, combining many genetic codes ... once there was a street, which then became a market and later a cinema (at one stage, showing adult movies) ... this space seemed a great opportunity to propose a significant project ... in line with the new collective imagination. The project will give priority to the theme of ecology, conforming to LEED protocols 17. Thus Lucchetta considers the Libreria Ambasciatori as a place of books, where the books are the central characters of the space and the concept is inspired by a set of key factors: accessibility, both physical and cultural, ease of use and orientation, and finally information access to persons with disabilities. These factors aim to allow permanent learning through the complex network of materials and the concept of the Libreria Coop Ambasciatori. My point is that this experience points out a specific (and quite new) path for a sustainable exhibition design, which emphasises the conceptual materiality of design itself.
(restored and visible from inside the structure) and later in the Forties became a movie theatre. The building was closed around 1985, and it remained closed despite various efforts to partially restore it. The designers have sought and found the right balance between action and non-action18, trying to free as much exhibition space as possible (nearly 1,450 sqm: 70% Librerie Coop and 30% Eataly), thus allowing the installation of foodrelated activities, events and culture. As pointed out by Paolo Lucchetta: We decided to complete this work and at the same time removed all the modern additions, returning the outer building to its original historic shell19. The project has been able to hold together the strong historical character of the pre-existing building with the contemporary life of the new building and its fittings, embodying the idea of a new mixed-function. The following images show how the project has developed. As shown in Figure.1, the space is divided into three levels where brick perimeter walls have been preserved and are visible from inside the building: in the past the walls supporting the roof were the volume of the covered market. Here we find the first material instance of the conceptual design, with the heritage walls allowing the scaffolding for potential cultural actions of potential users (e.g. actions of a movie theatre integrated with actions of a covered market, affording new types of integrated action). The size, colour, shades and morphological characteristics of the bricks allow one to read the way the bricks have been baked and therefore the dating of the building20. New additions have been kept independent of the original structure, even where it is more damaged but structurally
Ex cinema AmBaSciatoRi: tHe Building

During the Eighties, the interior layout of the Ambasciatori (the building which hosts the Libreria Coop project) was radically changed. It is a nineteenth-century building, which was first used as a covered market that incorporates the facade of the medieval church of St. Matteo degli Accarisi
Above Figure. 1. Libreria.Coop Ambasciatori, render the project. by RetailDesign. 2008.
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in good condition, with the designer using light-grey cement to give the appearance of alive matter. This solution was also accepted by the city cultural heritage authorities and walking space: The physical gap left between the historic architecture and the concrete addition underlines how new architectural programmes can blend to great advantage with vestiges from the past21. Furthermore, this solution is a second material instance of the conceptual design, acting at design practice level instead of the user level. Concepts such as sustainability and social responsibility, deal with and have been exploited in the choice of the displays and in the choice of each single material used for the shelves, such as MDF, a mixture of recycled wood that respects nature. As shown in Figure. 2, shades of natural wood combined with red-Coop (a red used in the Coop logo) and metal are the elements that frame the books, which are the lead characters of the space. The lighting system consists of spotlights mounted on halogen rails providing diffused lighting which highlights the architecture, stressing the continuity of the brick walls and the light, which, depending on the space, varies from hanging lamps in the restaurant to stem elements for the book desks22. The library also consists of exhibitors, isolated from furniture and free-standing elements that allow management flexibility in offering the numerous library activities. The containers for books and shelves are devoid of their backs in order to make the brickwork of the building visible, while the
blue escalator (Figure. 3), is a symbol of the market function of the building,used for the key vertical circulation route and devoid of exterior cladding in order to display its essential function of distributing things and people23. The customer, besides being the centre of the bookstore, also takes a lead role in the forum space, a zone of physical and social (not virtual) social interaction, an agora which becomes a place of exchange and an area to host events and books, including a space dedicated to children, the customers of tomorrow.
Opposite Figure. 2 Libreria.Coop Ambasciatori. internal view. by RetailDesign, 2008. Above Figure. 3 Libreria.Coop Ambasciatori. internal view. by RetailDesign, 2008
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Furniture and antique displays take place inside the library on the first floor, which contains 700 books from the historic antique bookstore Palmaverde of Roberto Roversi, bought in 2006 by Coop, while the furniture can be considered as the third material instance of the conceptual design, giving an antiquarian function to the exhibit space. While the lighting of the library becomes a primary element of the project, it is seen as a desire to consider the ecological theme not only as an element of aesthetics, but as part of the design. The material used for the flooring is resin cement, which is soft and soundproofed.
be used and the definition of the project priorities as values of sustainability. To these ends exhibition design has to embed social and economic input into a multidisciplinary design practice that will recognise the changes taking place, allowing functional development that supports customer awareness. The retail part of interior design is the application point for the improvement and continuous development of innovative devices and practices for sustainable living spaces. As explained previously, the considered case study is an example of how to exploit the conceptual materiality of design both for the definition of sustainable spaces and new directions in exhibition and interior design.
It is a space that reflects and reproduces the typical small libraries of Italian historic centers. The Eataly space, though, with three AknowledgmentS dining areas spread over three floors caff, trattoria and osteria or tavern corresponds to three areas of the library bookstore I would like to thank architect Paolo Lucchetta and the sections: current affairs; literature; plus territory and local cultures. RetailDesign Studio for the documentation, the images, and The places are conceived like a cultural map of changing taste, the support. fashion and ideas in a huge interplay with customer-readers24.
ConcluSion
This paper discusses the issues of sustainability in exhibition design by means of a case study which describes a design experience carried out on a multifunctional bookshop space in Italy. While the case study is limited to the European context, the aim of the conceptual model is to provide an interpretative instrument suitable to support the adaptation and harmonisation of standard protocols in non-European countries. In particular, it aims to support the preservation of core cultural issues and heritage. Indeed, the paper points out the relevance of both protocols and heritage in the choice of the materials as components of a conceptual practice for the design of sustainable (multi-)functional spaces. In particular, materials have to embed a conceptual representation of what sustainability is for the parties involved and the social world implied and impacted upon, and how their relationship can be supported in a sustainable way. As Harvey Molotch points out The nature of the place affects the appearance of a product because it contains those elements, often subtle, taking part in its implementation25. Thus interior design must re-consider the critical central role of materials to
NoteS
1. Paul Virilio, Vitesse et politique, (Paris: Galile,1977) Speed is the old world swept away by violence: we are not going anywhere, we just go away and we depart for the benefit of the strong vacuum speed. Having long served striking distance, the negation of space, speed is equivalent to the sudden annihilation of Time: it is the state of emergency. (translation by the author) 2. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational aesthetics (Paris: Les Presses du rel, 2002). Trans. Estetica relazionale (Milano: Postmedia Books, 2010) 3. Marc Aug, Non-Lieux. Introduction une anthropologie de la surmodernit (Paris:Seuil, 1992) 4. Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral vistas: the expositions universelles, great exhibitions, and worlds fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester University Press, 1988) 5. Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial-Exhibitions that made Art History. Volume I: 1863-1959 (Phaidon Press Limited 2008) 6. David Dernie, Exhibition design (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2006) 7. Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, in October, Vol. 100, (Boston: The MIT Press, 2002), 175-190 8. Harvey Molotch, Where stuff comes from: how toasters, toilets, cars, computer, and many other things come to be as they are (New York: Routledge, 2003) 9. Guido Martinotti, In viaggio attraverso le cose in Where stuff comes from: how toasters, toilets, cars, computer, and many other things come to be as they are (New York: Routledge, 2003) Trans. Chiara Chiarini, Fenomenologia del tostapane. Come gli oggetti quotidiani diventano quello che sono (Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2005).
10. E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful. A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (London: Blond & Briggs Ltd, 1973) 11. Martinotti, In viaggio attraverso le cose. IX-XXIV 12. Martha C. Nussbaum, and Amartya Sen,The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 13. Nussbaum, and Sen. The Quality of Life. 30-38 14. Aug, Non-Lieux. Introduction une anthropologie de la surmodernit. 80-81 15. Koolhaas, Junkspace. 176-190 16. Martinotti, In viaggio attraverso le cose. XII 17. Paolo Lucchetta, Libreria Ambasciatori Bologna, Italy in The planArchitecture & Technologies in detail, no. 040. [03-2010]. 18. Hajnal Kirly, Abbas Kiarostami and a New Wave of the Spectator in Acta Univ.Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 3 2010. (Scientia Publishing House).136 19. Lucchetta,Libreria Ambasciatori Bologna, Italy. 117-121 20. G.P. Brogiolo, Archeologia delledilizia storica. Documenti e metodi (Como, 1998) 21. Lucchetta,Libreria Ambasciatori Bologna, Italy. 117-121 22. Archinfo, 2006: www.archinfo.it/nuovo-spazio-multifunzionale-sedeeataly-e-libreria-coop-progetto-retaildesign/0,1254,53_ART_198809,00.html 23. Lucchetta,Libreria Ambasciatori Bologna, Italy.117-121 24. Lucchetta,Libreria Ambasciatori Bologna, Italy. 117-121 25. Molotch, Where stuff comes from: how toasters, toilets, cars, computer, and many other things come to be as they are. 207
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roiretni na gnicudorp ;yaw tcerid a ni seigoloce roiretni fo noitacovni eht egagne ot es rever ni detnirp eb ot txet siht rof deksa evI gnidloh yb egap siht gnidaer eb yam uoy ,won yB .noitatneserper a gnicudorp ,cipot eht tuoba gnitirw morf tcnitsid sa ygoloce seye ruoy htiw ,sgnidnuorrus ,s regnfi ,txet fo noitisopmoc a egami detcefler eht ;ecafrus derorrim a ot pu lanruoj eht ,tnerappa semoceb ,redaer a ,uoy neewteb dna secafrus owt eht neewteb noitaler ehT .pot eht evoba erehwemos gnirevoh fo syaw tnereffid ,sgnidnuorrus dna stnemnorivne tnereffiD . ereh won a ,tnemom euqinu a sa detavitca dna evitca semoceb .semit dna snoitidnoc thgil tnereffid , esnes ekam ti ekam ot lanruoj eht gnildnah .seigoloce roiretni ;gnikam-roiretni nA eht fo thgiew eht ,won yB .gnimoceb syawla ,tnemevom fo ssecorp a ni snoitaler laropmet dna laitaps fo desopmoc ssensiht sihT seil txet dna egap sihT .lanruoj eht fo tser eht tneserp gnikam ecafrus latnoziroh a no gniyl si ti fi neve elbignat semoceb lanruoj ,tnerruc eht ot desopxe egap siht fo ecafrus ehT .seigoloce roiretni fo noitacovorp eht gnisserdda lla txet fo segap ynam fo pot no .gnimoceb erutuf fo ssecorp a ni elihw tsap/dessap sah tahw fo desopmoc tneserp a ,sokio keerG eht morf devired si eigolokeO 6681 ni eigolokeO mret eht denioc lekceaH tsnrE tsigoloib namreG eht dna stnalp fo yduts eht ygoloce fo gninaem laitnesse eht si sihT .emoh eht fo yduts eht sebircsed mret eht dna , esuoh gninaem eht sesirpmoc tnemnorivne ehT .tnemnorivne rieht ro ,tatibah rieht , evil yeht erehw secalp eht ni )snamuh gnidulcni( slamina ti hcihw no dna stcaretni laudividni na hcihw htiw s rotcaf lacigoloib dna lacisyhp eht lla gnidulcni ,msinagro na fo gnidnuorrus 1 .sevil ti hcihw ni tnemnorivne eht s retla dna sefiidom nrut ni msinagro ehT .laviv rus sti rof sdneped selyts efil ,efil fo sedom dna noitatibahni no sucof eht ngised roiretni fo ecitcarp eht htiw ereh snoitcennoc ynam era erehT sesserdda taht ecitcarp a sa dna ecaps ot noitaler ni roiretni fo tpecnoc eht gnisisahpme morf tfihs a eticni/etivni hcihw noitcnujnoc ehT .s roiretni fo gnikam eht ni y ramirp era snoitaler erehw eno ot gniht emos edisni gningised / ecaps gnitsixe stsigoloce roiretni ,seigoloce roiretni roiretni htiw ygoloce fo .seiceps dna secaps ecudorp ot esopmoc snoitaler erehw stceffa dna stceffe ,sessecorp sthgilhgih ,gnikam fo ssecorp a dna ecnenammi ,xufl ,secrof etanimretedni nihtiw nois remmi fo ereh esnes A ,gnikam-roiretni .saedi sti dna txet siht tibahni ot ereh ;noitatibahni elbane ot roiretni fo aedi siht erutpac tlewmU fo tpecnoc sih dna llkxeU nov bocaJ tsigoloib namreG y rutnec ht02 yl rae fo sgnitirw ehT no tnereffid yletelpmoc gnihtemos semoceb tcejbo y revE .stcejbus dna stcejbo ,secaps gnicudorp segalbmessa sa seigoloce diuqil fo lluf epip a semoceb ,rewofl a rof t roppus a si tlewmU ruo ni taht mets rewofl A .tlewmU tnereffid a gniretne .tsen ymaof sti dliub ot diuqil eht skcus ohw )suiramups suenalihP( gubelttips wodaem eht rof .rewofl eht ni dnuorg gnitnuh sti htiw tsen sti gnitcennoc ,tna eht rof htap drawpu na semoceb mets rewofl emas ehT 2 .htuom gib reh ni wehc ot reh rof doof fo les rom ytsat a fo t rap semoceb mets rewofl eht woc gnizarg eht roF ;efil fo sedom dna stibah fo desopmoc ygoloce na ,emoh a ekil si tlewmU hcae elihW .snoitaler dna secrof tnereffid hguorht decudorp s roiretxe dna s roiretni tnereffid fo laitnetop eht si dethgilhgih .stcejbus dna secaps ecneh dna segalbmessa gnicudorp gnikam-roiretni fo eno sa ngised roiretni fo ecitcarp eht ereH ,seitivitcejbus dna secaps ,ytiroiretni dna gnikam-roiretni ,noitatibahni htiw denrecnoc ecitcarp a sa ngised roiretnI tceffe ot ycnednet sti dna noitasilabolg fo ssentsav eht ot dnopser ot yaw lufrewop yllaitnetop a si .retnuocne dna tcatnoc namuh rof ytimixorp dna noit roporp fo ssol a .ygoloce roiretni na sa gnikam-roiretni ,emoh gnikam fo ,gnitibahni fo tca eht fo egnellahc eht ecneH .3 )6002 ,sserP ytis revinU drofxO :ailartsuA( .de dn2 ,evitcepsreP nailartsuA nA .ygolocE ,.sde ,nosliW arabraB & lliwittA reteP .1 htrae eht fo gnimarf eht dna ezueleD .trA ,y rotirreT ,soahC ,zsorG htebazilE ni detouq llkxeU nov .2 .14 )8002 ,sserP ytis revinU aibmuloC :k roY weN( Suzie Attiwill
Ive asked for this text to be printed in reverse to engage the invocation of interior ecologies in a direct way; producing an interior ecology as distinct from writing about the topic, producing a representation. By now, you may be reading this page by holding the journal up to a mirrored surface; the reflected image a composition of text, fingers, surroundings, with your eyes hovering somewhere above the top. The relation between the two surfaces and between you, a reader, becomes apparent, becomes active and activated as a unique moment, a now here. Different environments and surroundings, different ways of handling the journal to make it make sense, different light conditions and times. An interior-making; interior ecologies. This thisness composed of spatial and temporal relations in a process of movement, always becoming. By now, the weight of the journal becomes tangible even if it is lying on a horizontal surface making present the rest of the journal. This page and text lies on top of many pages of text all addressing the provocation of interior ecologies. The surface of this page exposed to the current, a present composed of what has passed/past while in a process of future becoming. the German biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term Oekologie in 1866 Oekologie is derived from the Greek oikos, meaning house, and the term describes the study of the home. This is the essential meaning of ecology the study of plants and animals (including humans) in the places where they live, their habitat, or their environment. The environment comprises the surrounding of an organism, including all the physical and biological factors with which an individual interacts and on which it depends for its survival. The organism in turn modifies and alters the environment in which it lives.1 There are many connections here with the practice of interior design the focus on inhabitation and modes of life, life styles which invite/incite a shift from emphasising the concept of interior in relation to space and as a practice that addresses existing space / designing inside some thing to one where relations are primary in the making of interiors. The conjunction of ecology with interior interior ecologies, interior ecologists highlights processes, effects and affects where relations compose to produce spaces and species. A sense here of immersion within indeterminate forces, flux, immanence and a process of making, interior-making, to enable inhabitation; here to inhabit this text and its ideas. The writings of early 20th century German biologist Jacob von Uexkll and his concept of Umwelt capture this idea of interior ecologies as assemblages producing spaces, objects and subjects. Every object becomes something completely different on entering a different Umwelt. A flower stem that in our Umwelt is a support for a flower, becomes a pipe full of liquid for the meadow spittlebug (Philaneus spumarius) who sucks the liquid to build its foamy nest. The same flower stem becomes an upward path for the ant, connecting its nest with its hunting ground in the flower. For the grazing cow the flower stem becomes part of a tasty morsel of food for her to chew in her big mouth.2 While each Umwelt is like a home, an ecology composed of habits and modes of life; highlighted is the potential of different interiors and exteriors produced through different forces and relations. Here the practice of interior design as one of interior-making producing assemblages and hence spaces and subjects. Interior design as a practice concerned with inhabitation, interior-making and interiority, spaces and subjectivities, is a potentially powerful way to respond to the vastness of globalisation and its tendency to effect a loss of proportion and proximity for human contact and encounter. Hence the challenge of the act of inhabiting, of making home, interior-making as an interior ecology. 1 Peter Attiwill & Barbara Wilson, eds., Ecology. An Australian Perspective, 2nd ed. (Australia: Oxford University Press, 2006) 3. 2 von Uexkll quoted in Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the framing of the earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) 41.
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BackgRound
The Social Production of Interiority: an Activity Theory approach

Lubomir Savov Popov : Bowling Green State University, USA
ABSTRACT
Postmodern transformations in philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences have led to new ways of interpreting the social production of space and the spatialisation of social and cultural phenomena. Emergent discussions about interiors and interiority typically emphasise the social nature of space, while related research examines the complexities of socio-spatial phenomena. This paper contributes to this growing body of literature by introducing an alternative view of interiority. More specifically, the phenomenon of interiority is viewed as a by-product of the processes of the social production of space and the appropriation of space through instrumental activities and symbolic interaction. Interiority is seen as first emerging with considerations for comfort and convenience; later branching out to embrace concerns related to experience, productivity, and efficiency. More concretely, interiority can be viewed as providing the necessary conditions for social agents to undertake their activities, as well as protecting them from undesirable influences. Activity is perceived as the major mechanism for the appropriation of space and also for endowing it with the quality of interiority. By interpreting interiority this way, it becomes possible to dematerialise it and liberate it from the constraints of structures, building shells, and technical systems, as well as the problems associated with them. This alternative approach will facilitate the incorporation of knowledge and methodologies developed in the social sciences and cultural studies for the purpose of producing knowledge in the areas of design research, programming/briefing, and space planning.
With the advent of postmodernity, the interest towards space in philosophy, the humanities, and social sciences has increased considerably. Some of the most influential philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century are leading these developments. The works of Pierre Bourdieu,1 Michel de Certeau,2 Jacques Derrida,3 Michel Foucault, 4, 5 Bruno Latour,6, 7 Henri Lefebvre,8 and many others have both signalled a new, sociocultural turn in the studies of space, and have charted new areas and directions for disciplinarylevel scholars. Postmodern philosophers have sparked exceptional interest in the study of space in many fields, including geography, architecture and interiors, urban planning, literature and film theory, history of art, organisational studies, and feminist studies and critical theory. The concerns and considerations that constitute research agendas in philosophy and the humanities have strongly influenced the research programs of disciplinary scholars. The foremost thematic areas that intertwine space and social phenomena emphasise power, empowerment, hegemony, control, domination and a myriad of other interests that are gradually emerging from the main domains examined. As such, the postmodern turn has infused the study of space with new aspects, focal points, and pragmatic discourses. Although many social philosophers and scholars are delving into issues of spatialisation of society and culture, most are concerned with the effects of spatial organisation of society on the phenomena of everyday life and the progress of our civilisation.9, 10 Much of this work is at the macro level, focusing on societal and geographical phenomena. However, with the spread of these ideas at disciplinary level, there has been an increase in scholarship about space and spatialisation in the humanities and the social sciences. This trend has made its way into areas like architecture and interiors, ethnography and cultural studies, literature and art history, and a number of similar fields. In architecture and interiors, this advancement is led by humanistically-minded scholars, feminist thinkers, and academics with backgrounds in literary studies and philosophy. Current discussions about interiors and interiority closely follow this model and offer a myriad of insights into the making of interiors and the emergence of interiority.11, 12, 13 These debates emphasise the social nature of space, interiors, and interiority and investigate the intricacies and complexities of the socio-spatial phenomena. These perspectives fostered a number of new thematic circles and reinterpretations of classic concerns and concepts. For example, there are new ways of viewing the boundary phenomena, thresholds, and interstices, the dialectics of inside and outside, and the complex relationships among interiorities and exteriorities. There is also a marked drive to go beyond the discussions of Euclidean space and aesthetic concerns, and to instead engage in debates about the embodiment of space, inhabitation, population, and the ecology of social and spatial phenomena.
IntRoduction
The emergent discourse on interiors and interiority presents us with a rare opportunity to benefit from a complex ecology of exploratory approaches and intellectual systems. Current developments bring together provocative ideas and imaginative visions.The community of scholars working in this thematic area has opened new avenues for envisaging, interpreting, and conceptualising interior phenomena. This paper is intended to introduce an innovative activity theory perspective and to offer a complementary notion of interiority, constructed from an activity theory point of view.
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Agenda and delimitationS

The purpose of this paper is to initiate an alternative discourse on the ecology of socio-spatial phenomena with the objective of using this knowledge in design research, design programming/ briefing, and evidence-based design. My goal is to highlight aspects and qualities of interiority that are rarely discussed and are complementary to most of the existing developments in this area. My objective is to construct a new vision about interiors and interiority that can be translated into disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourses in order to utilise substantial parts of disciplinary knowledge that already exists in the social sciences and design theory. This new approach will help bridge the global vision of abstract philosophical ideas with the utilitarian requirements of field research and project-specific studies. In addition to the issues discussed below, there are many other topics that also deserve to be examined. However, due to space limitations, even the concerns presented in the present study are only partially examined.
I take into account the terminological considerations of both Lefebvre and Low and on that basis I develop my own somewhat different formulation. This means that I interpret the social construction of space as being predominantly about symbolic interaction, ascribing meanings, and construing reality, while the social production of space refers to the socio-cultural phenomena that influence the generation and use of space. Excluded from this formulation is the material production of space, which encompasses the social influences on delivering new facilities.17
Activity tHeoRy
Lefebvre and Lows ideas about the production of space are fur ther interpreted from the perspective of activity theory. Activity theory is concerned with the interaction between humans (treated as subjects or social agents) and the object(s) of their interest. It postulates that a subject (social agent) interacts with the object with the help of a tool. The emphasis is on the facilitation, mediation, and ensuing relationships. Each basic category is fur ther developed into several sub-categories. New categories are introduced to account for additional considerations. From this perspective, built environment can be treated as a tool that facilitates human activity. The interactional and mediating phenomena discussed in activity theory make it a productive methodological instrument for the study of people-environment relationships. There is a myriad of activity models and frameworks intended for different purposes, some of them broader and more general, others more specific and discipline or problemoriented.18, 19, 20 They are based on the legacy of a democratic interpretation of historical materialism and the works of Vygotsky.21 Different versions of this approach are referred to as Scandinavian activity theory, activity methodology, and systemic-structural activity theory. They are design-oriented and are well known in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), design of socio-technical systems, educational and instructional design, and organisational design. The specific activity framework used in this treatise is developed for practical purposes such as providing guidance for the study of socio-spatial interactions. The development of the framework began with John Wades idea for organising building user information in programmatic research.22 Wade postulates several major categories: person, purpose, behaviour, function, and object. He describes the typical information that falls under each category. More impor tantly, he also denotes the functional relationships that may exist between adjacent categories. I developed and reinterpreted Wades idea in more detail as I incorporated ideas from the activity theory perspective. My intent here is to understand the mechanisms of interaction
MetHodological gRoundwoRk
The conceptual basis for this study originates from several sources. Its foundation comes from Lefebvres notions about the social production of space and the spatialisation of socio-cultural phenomena.14 Next, these notions are brought into operation by way of activity theory. This is possible because both intellectual platforms share a common foundation in dialectical/historical materialism that facilitates a smooth interface between them. Such an interface assists in the translation of the major philosophical positions at the disciplinary level. I use this interface to develop a conceptual apparatus that will enable me to reveal aspects and qualities of interiority rarely discussed, that are complementary to many existing developments in this area, and that are related to the social production of space.
THe concePt of Social PRoduction of SPace aS a guiding PRinciPle

Lefebvre has offered new insights, albeit at a very high level of abstraction, about the complexities of everyday life, urban habitat, and the role of space in the development of our civilisation.15 His treatises on the production of space have radicalised the fields of human geography, urban planning theory, culture studies, and sociology as his emphasis on the spatial dimension of socio-cultural phenomena has inspired scholars in these disciplines to consider more fundamentally the role of space in the trajectory of social processes. Setha Low builds upon Lefebvres ideas and elaborates additional distinctions.16 She conceptualises the process of the social construction of space in relation to the social forces that shape the ways we interpret our environment. She constructs the concept of social production of space with a stronger materialist stance, referring to the social influences on the process of the material production of spatial structures.
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between people, their built environment, the ensuing socio-spatial relationships, and the emergent phenomena in these processes. This activity framework has several dimensions. One dimension includes the categories of agents, goals, activities, necessary conditions, and built environment. All these components are moulded in par ticular ways by culture. The cultural aspect is not presented separately, but is infused within each of these categories. The term agent is very common in the social sciences and is related to the concept of agency. In this study it is used to denote entities capable of purposeful action, and range from individuals to organisations. Goals provide directions for activity. Activity itself can be viewed as a system of processes, ranging from physiological to socio-cultural. The way an activity is performed is shaped by culture and related phenomena. In the course of activity, agents develop needs for par ticular conditions. Agents also feel constraints and restrictions, have par ticular considerations, make decisions, and so for th. This component of the activity framework can be developed fur ther to include perceptions, meanings, and the social construction of reality. Necessary conditions emerge in the activities and interactions of the agents with other agents and the (built) environment. Necessary conditions are an impor tant category for this project. The built environment can be conceptualised regarding its physical features or the necessary conditions that it provides for the agents and their activities. If we look at the chain of mediation in reverse order, the built environment provides par ticular conditions that are necessary for activity processes and social agents. These conditions facilitate activities and operations, increase productivity, efficiency, comfor t, and convenience, and suppor t the health, safety, and well-being of social agents. However, while providing necessary conditions, the built environment might also create obstacles, obstructions, constraints, and a number of unintended and undesired effects.
the major mechanism for interaction. Activity processes can be organised conceptually by domains and levels that range from physiology and psychophysiology, through cognitive levels and personality aspects, to group interaction and the cultural determination of action. In relation to built environment, social agents perceive, make sense, develop, share, and negotiate meanings, evaluate, prioritise and set preferences. Agents are guided by social norms, rules, and schemata. 23 Social agents require particular conditions to support their functioning and activities. We can conceptually organise these conditions into several categories based on levels of activity processes and their constituent components. For example, the physiological level is crucial for the organismic functioning of humans. We can also envisage psychological, social-psychological (or group/interactional), operational, and cultural levels and aspects. The necessary conditions facilitate social activities and make them more efficient and productive. Agents need comfort and convenience for economy of effort, for saving their energy for more productive tasks or for recuperating faster after exhausting social action. Agents also want exciting experiences and aesthetic stimulation. In order to acquire the necessary conditions, people have created instruments to develop and sustain them. The easiest way is to demarcate or envelop a space in some way and then to control the conditions in that space. Depending on the necessary conditions that have to be produced and sustained, the demarcation or enveloping of space can be produced with different means, ranging from symbolic systems to material structures. In some cases, merely marking the landscape has been enough to allow activity processes to take place without conflicts. In other cases, it has been necessary to physically enclose a particular area and to hold the envelope with a support structure. Such enclosures and boundaries serve people by providing particular conditions for them and their activities. This is most obvious in extreme climates. I would like to focus the readers attention not on the buildings structures, but on their ability to provide the necessary conditions for the activities of social agents. From this point of view, the key to the phenomenon of interiority is in the realm of the necessary conditions that these structures provide. In essence, the envelope, enclosure, or skin are nuisances because they require resources and labour, have considerable side effects, and create numerous problems. We wish to have all of the advantages that they bring without any of the problems they create. The built environment is not an ultimate goal by itself; it is rather only an instrument for providing the necessary conditions. In this respect, the ultimate interiority happens when it is produced without materials, boundaries, and enclosures. Thus, from this perspective, interiority is not about enclosure, containment, and boundaries, but about the necessary conditions - in the broadest sense possible. Interiority is a system of environmental qualities that supports social agents and their activities. Interiority emerges with considerations for comfort and convenience that later broaden to include delight, productivity and efficiency.
In PuRSuit of neceSSaRy conditionS: A genealogy of inteRioRity fRom an activity PeRSPective

A discussion of space, interiors, and interiority is complicated because of the variety of conceptualisations, meanings, connotations, nuances, and usages of the same words. There are many terminologies and parlances that are used in different paradigmatic traditions, discourses, and disciplines. The most common conceptualisations are referential, directional, and locational, like interior/exterior, in/out, inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, and so forth. Another group of conceptualisations emphasise enclosure, containment, void, and emptiness. Modernism in architecture and design has advanced the relational concept of space and notions about flow of spaces, interpenetrations, and degrees of transition between inside and outside. All these conceptualisations have emerged and have persevered because of particular disciplinary or practical needs. My intent is not to challenge them, but to develop and disseminate a complementary view on interiors and interiority.Social agents appropriate space during their everyday functioning. Activity is
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THe Social PRoduction of inteRioRity fRom an activity PeRSPective : THe dialecticS of Social PRoduction and Social conStRuction
The genealogical perspective is intended to relate environment, necessary conditions, and the phenomenon of interiority as it makes a case for the primacy of socio-spatial interactions and human needs in the process of interiorisation and the production of interiority. Once the structures and boundaries are built, people start interacting inside them and with them.The socio-spatial interactions become two-way processes and have multiple aspects. This perspective offers an insight into the multiple ways social agents appropriate space and interpret their activity situations and engage in the social construction and production of interiority. From the activity theory point of view, interiority can be conceptualised as a system of qualities of space. As such, interiority is an emergent phenomenon. In everyday life, interiority emerges in the course of social appropriation of space. In its broadest sense, activity is the major mechanism of this appropriation. Human experience facilitates the construction of meaning and endows spaces with additional social qualities. Other socio-cultural phenomena contribute to this process as well. This position can be expanded in scope and depth depending upon ones scholarly objectives. The process of interiorisation and interiority can be further discussed in relation to social production and social construction of space. In this project, they are interpreted as two complementary visions that overlap and allow us to discuss somewhat different aspects. The processes of social production and social construction are intertwined because of the multi-faceted nature of human activity and the amalgam of objective and subjective phenomena.The conundrum of precise differentiation between such notions stems from the idiosyncrasy of symbolism and its embodiment in human activity. In this project, I conceptualise the social production of interiority regarding the appropriation and use of space. By using space, people endow it with human qualities. In this line of thinking, the process of interiorisation and the notion of interiority can be envisaged in the light of spatialising human activity with all of its complexity, interactivity, and subjectivity. In comparison, I conceptualise the social construction of interiority in the sense of social construction of reality, with an emphasis on human experience, symbolism, interpretation, making sense of social reality, and developing personal and socially shared meanings and expectations. These processes are strongly influenced by socio-cultural factors, and by virtue of their nature are heavily loaded with subjectivity.
interactions and the ensuing appropriation of space and production of interiority. The production of interiority happens during the appropriation of space in the process of its use.The development of activity structures in space can be interpreted as spatialisation of activity and the culture that shapes it. We can also say that the spatialisation of activity leads to the production of interiority. Conceptualisations like appropriation, use, activity and spatialisation provide viewpoints that allow us to construct in multiple dimensions a complex, intangible, and abstract phenomenon. As mentioned previously, the scope of this paper does not include the influence of social factors on facility development or the material production/construction of buildings and interiors. By organising, developing, and executing their activities in real situations, people spatialise their activities and engage in the production of space. This conceptualisation can be interpreted from several aspects. One concerns the embodiment, materialisation, dimensioning, and production of an activity functional area. Another aspect concerns the method of performing the activity, which greatly impacts the organisation of material components. Although related, this goes beyond the embodiment of space and emphasises the cultural dimensions of both activity and space.The notion of spatialisation is important for understanding the process of interiorisation. The spatial-material dimensions of human activity generate needs for particular clearances among the boundaries and other large objects in the area of activity processes. By spatialising activity processes, we produce relationships between objects and boundaries and we produce space. People require not only conditions to support basic physiological needs, but also conditions for managing social interaction, communication, and the amount of information. Several examples are privacy, territoriality, and density, as well as social status and its non-verbal communication. When considering the incarnations of higher-order human needs, the process of production of space becomes more complicated. The spatialisation of activity involves new mechanisms for providing for these needs: vanity screens, partitions, increased distance between workers, and so forth. The footprint of an activity and the activity area become much larger. Area size can vary depending on the introduction or removal of considerations, requirements, and restrictions. The amelioration of space with the help of building structures resolves a host of problems, but it also creates a new problem and new tasks for designers how to organise human activity and material components so that enclosures are used in the most efficient way, procuring optimal levels of comfort, convenience, and productivity. This becomes the core issue of space planning and, by implication, of architecture and interior design. From the opposite side, when we look at the people who interact with spatial-material environment, we see how they produce space. By virtue of their activity engagements, they also become co-creators and co-designers of space when they adjust and change current settings and adapt them to their needs. In this way, when people organise their action space, they transform the spatial-material structures into components of interiors, as well as the means for producing interiority.
SPatialiSing activity and aPPRoPRiating SPace: THe Social PRoduction of inteRioRity

The ideas about embodiment of space and the spatialisation of society and culture can be revisited from an activity theory perspective with the intent of delving into the mechanisms of socio-spatial
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When we interpret the social production of space in this way, there are several problems or tasks that emerge. From defining space and interiority, we move towards organising space. The problem with space organisation in enclosed, contained, and restricted areas is one of great importance. When we enclose space, we limit its size because we are limited by our resources. The limitation of size brings a number of side effects. Although the enclosure and the boundary offer us the benefits of a well-tempered environment, one that is well adapted to the processes of our bodies and activities, it may also generate side effects or undesirable outcomes. This is also part of the key to understanding the complaints associated with the confining, restricting, and controlling nature of interiors. Besides the social situations where such results are deliberately targeted, in the rest of the cases these are side effects of technical, technological, or financial restrictions.
sending messages, and mediatisation.The interior becomes a medium by itself.The interior becomes the arena where users and designers intentions and desires for personal expression intermingle or clash or enter a complex dialogue of participatory co-designing or co-finishing. The expressive aspect of interiority is very important. The appropriation of space starts as purposeful behaviour that includes taking ownership of space. This complex and diverse process is completed through communication tactics, using symbolic behaviours and messages. The interior messages convey statements, warnings, status signs, rules of conduct, levels of control, ownership, and so forth.24 The social construction of interiority contributes to shared rules and expectations, reduces ambivalence and uncertainty, and prevents conflict in the use of space.
Navigating and negotiating activity SettingS: THe Social conStRuction of inteRioRity

From a complementary point of view, the social construction of interiority can be seen as a learned process.The notion of the interior is learned in the process of acculturation, the sharing of meanings, and the production of a system of conventions. People develop an understanding and a feeling about what is interior and what is exterior as a result of the use of space and the appropriation of space, but also as a result of communicating with each other and sharing, adjusting, and aligning perceptions, conceptualisations, and choice of words. This is a typical pattern of the social construction of reality. Because of the large number of aspects and degrees of transition between interiors and exteriors, the multitude of conventions is overwhelming. Anyone who has engaged in clarifying, relating, and organising the terminology about space has had first-hand experience with these problems. People are acculturated and accustomed to particular perceptions and conventions of spaces and interiors in particular. Because the concept of interiority and the implication for inside-ness have a very strong referential function, people use it for communication and navigation in everyday life. Both through acculturation and personal experience, people become aware of particular features that produce interiority and start interpreting spaces on the basis of these features. As a result, people start developing a taxonomy of spaces and tacit references that they use for navigation when performing everyday tasks. Because the social construction of space is fluid, vague, and transient, there is great variety in the interpretations, and very different types of spaces are perceived and categorised as interior. The social construction of interiority is a complex process that depends on the perception and sense-making of boundary features, degrees of enclosure, social conventions, behaviour rules, symbolism, verbal cues, and labelling of spaces. Interiority can be signified by any component of an enclosure that creates the perception for a deliberate segregation of space with the purpose of serving the users. In some cases, in order to communicate interiority, it is enough to mark the space and communicate its intended function. In this respect, interiority becomes about communication,
Concluding RemaRkS
The phenomenon of interiority emerges in the processes of the social production of space. This production itself occurs through the appropriation of space. Such an appropriation is achieved by instrumental activity and symbolic interaction.The process is based on the spatialisation of activities and cultural patterns.Thus activity becomes a major mechanism for appropriation of space and for endowing it with the quality of interiority. From this vantage point interiority can be seen as an assemblage of socio-spatial qualities. Alternatively, interiority can be envisaged as a system of necessary conditions for the social agents and their activities. In this approach to conceptualising interiority, we can dematerialise it and liberate it from the constraints of structures, building shell, and technical systems, as well as the problems associated with them. This proposal does not exclude or preclude other perspectives. It is intended as a complementary point of view that will enhance, balance, and advance current approaches to interiors, interiorisation, and interiority. Applying such an approach to interiors and interiority allows us to translate our subjective experiences, feelings, visions, and insights into a more explicable system that can be communicated among several parties in the building development process.This approach is more concrete, pragmatic, and applicable than a number of other intellectual developments that exist at the philosophical level. The current conceptualisation of interiority makes the relationships between the philosophical and disciplinary levels more visible and helps to relate the philosophy and theory of interiors to planning, programming, and design practices. The activity theory perspective on interiority fosters concerns regarding the organisation of space with the purpose to facilitate human activity. These concerns actualise most extensively in facilities programming and space planning. Programming is the major facility development phase for specifying necessary conditions and translating them into design requirements. If we agree that interiority is about necessary conditions provided through the organisation of space, symbolism, and experience, then interiority becomes intimately connected to programming and space planning.
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Typical paper limits impose a number of difficult choices and lead to the exclusion of interesting and important issues. There are aspects that have been only briefly touched upon and issues that need to be developed in more detail. Similarly, there are notions that are implied, but not yet explicated and involved in the current discourse.That said, the perspective on interiority presented in this paper charts a number of possibilities for future research and development.
24. Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior : A Euro-American Paradigm, in Interior Spaces in Other Places: IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association) Symposium, eds. Mark Taylor, Gini Lee and Marissa Lindquist, 1-6, http://idea-edu.com/Symposiums/2010-Interior-Space-in-Other-Places.
NoteS
1. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, Trans. Randall Johnson (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 3. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Trans. Gayatri Chakravor ty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976). 4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 5. Michel Foucault, Of other spaces, Diacritics 16 no.1 (1986): 22-27. 6. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 7. Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An Ants View of Architecture, In Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, ed. Reto Geiser, 80-89 (Basel: Birkhuser, 2008). 8. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publ., 1991). 9. Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 10. Setha Low, Spatializing Culture: The Social Production and Social Construction of Public Space in Costa Rica, American Ethnologist 23 no.4 (1996): 861-879. 11. Suzie Attiwill, Towards an interior history, IDEA Journal (2004): 1-8, http://www.idea-edu.com/ Journal/2004/2004-IDEA-Journal. 12. Christine McCarthy, Before the Rain: Humid Architecture, Space and Culture, 6 no.3 (2001): 330-338. 13. Christine McCarthy, Toward a Definition of Interiority, Space and Culture, 8 no.2 (2005): 112-125. 14. Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 15. Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 16. Low, Spatializing Culture. 17. Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Ziga, Locating Culture, in The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, eds. Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Ziga, 1-47 (Oxford: Blackwell Publ., 2003). 18. Gregory Bedny and Waldemar Karwowski, A Systemic-Structural Theory of Activity: Applications to Human Performance and Work Design (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2007) 19. Vassily Davidov, Problems of Activity as Mode of Human Existence and the Principle of Monism, in Activity: Theories, Methodology and Problems, ed. V.P. Lektorsky, clinical ed. Yrj Engestrm, trans. Aleksandr Mikheyev, Sergei Mikheyev, and Yevgenii Filipov, 127-132 (Orlando, FL: Paul Deutsch Press, Inc., 1990). 20. Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi, Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) 21. Harry Daniels, Michael Cole, and James Wer tsch, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 22. John Wade, Architecture, Problems, and Purposes: Architectural Design as a Basic Problem-Solving Process (New York: Wiley, 1977). 23. Amos Rapoport, Culture, Architecture, and Design (Chicago, IL: Locke Science Publishing Co., 2005)
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What can we learn from the Bubble Man and his Atmospheric Ecologies?
Hlne Frichot : RMIT University, Australia
ABSTRACT
With this essay I present the fragile thought-image of the soap-bubble to venture an augmented understanding of what an atmospheric ecology might be, what it might include, and how it might contribute to a thinking of interiors. In contemporary digital design the soap-bubble or soap film is most often investigated for what it can tell us about material behaviour, and how an understanding of material behaviour as it occurs in Nature can be innovatively applied to design problems. Soap film can be studied in terms of what it tells us about surface tension and minimal distribution of material, which then allows the designer to better understand tensile structures. It also contributes to an understanding of cell walls (from the scale of the microscopic to the macroscopic), and how an interior condition responds to the pressure of an exterior condition. Appropriated from nature through a process of biomimicry the behaviour of soap film and soap-bubbles has been broadly used to test speculative design schemes and also to generate new digital techniques and technologies. I propose to liberate the thought-figure of the soap-bubble from this set of technical studies and applications in order to extend an understanding of how it can be used to frame atmospheric ecologies, especially after the manner in which soap-bubbles cluster and froth. Ecology here must be understood in an expanded sense that encompasses not just naturally occurring systems, championed by special interest groups that fight for a specific environmental niche, but also subjective and social ecologies, and how these different systems remain profoundly intertwined. I draw on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, Jakob von Uexkll, and also Gregory Bateson to offer other visions of what an atmospheric ecology might be, and how it can offer us more open definitions of the interiors in which we need to find a way to survive.
He would arrive nearly every Saturday mid-morning on Kathe Kollwitz Platz, Prenzlauerberg, Berlin, in the vicinity of the statue of Kathe with her slumped shoulders and large, benign face. We called him the Bubble Man, and his jubilant and participatory audience was composed mostly of children who had strayed from parents busy with market-day activities around the square. As the grown-ups collected fresh produce, drank beer or sipped coffee, or simply lazed in the playground one eye on the little ones the bubble man would serenely arrange his instruments and his large bucket of soapy water. He would wield one humble home-made instrument after the next. Makeshift loops of string would be langorously dipped into a mess of suds and then held aloft at the end of long slender bamboo poles and moved in slow arcs through the air until enormous deformed spheres would bulge and sway above the waving arms of screaming children hell bent on their destruction. (Figure 1) The bubble blowing instruments were all constructed of flexible bamboo rods, sometimes with leather arm-bands, and weighted with glass baubles. They sported string frames of varying degrees of hairiness. Different lattices of string created different bubble
Above Figure 1. Image of the Bubble Man at work in Kathe Kollwitz Platz, Prenzlauerberg, Berlin. Photograph by Hlne Frichot, 2009
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effects. There were star-shaped frames, simple loops, and V-shaped frames that could be opened and closed. (Figure 2) Some bubbles were enormous lumbering beasts, and others spluttered in clusters of smaller rainbow streaked spheres. There were also bubble-blowing hoops that flung foam through the air, which landed in the hair of gleeful children. What the Bubble Man wielded between his deft hands was a set of instruments by which worlds, fleeting in their existence, ecological niches of exquisite ephemerality, appeared briefly only to abruptly vanish. With this essay I hope to liberate the thought-figure of the bubble from the techniques and technologies of contemporary design with which it has come to be predominantly associated. Instead, after such thinkers as Peter Sloterdijk, Jakob von Uexkll, and also Gregory Bateson, I suggest that the bubble offers us a glimpse of existential territories that might be provisionally defined in terms of their fragile atmospheric ecologies. As Sloterdik has pointed out, what is the so-called atmosphere if not that large scale sack or bubble within which our very world is contained?1 This simple thought effectively offers up the conception of a global ecological interior, accompanied by the exigency of care lest the delicate atmospheric bubble that supports us be obliterated once and for all. If you listen to the mathematicians and geometers, as well as to digitally adept architects and designers hunting for novel form-finding techniques, you will hear that the soap-bubble, erstwhile symbol of vanitas, can be defined by the strict rules that determine its geometry and surface tension and what happens when one soap-bubble encounters another soap-bubble. A study of the soap-bubble informs the designers attitude to technicity, that is, it suggests what technical benefits and applications can be derived from an understanding of how soap film systematically organises
itself. An understanding of how soap film distributes itself into surfaces can then be employed toward form finding procedures. Manuel De Landa explains: The spherical form of a soap bubble emerges out of the interactions among its constituent molecules as these are constrained energetically to seek the point at which surface tension is minimized.2 In a later essay he adds: Soap film will spontaneously find the form with the minimum of surface tension. Without any constraints (such as those exerted by a frame made of wire or rope), the form that emerges is a sphere or a bubble.3 By adding constraints, such as additional frames composed of string, bamboo poles, and the like, the symmetry of the bubble-sphere is broken and a wide variety of other shapes emerge out of a space of possibilities. Although the tendency of the bubble is toward the perfect sphere, contingencies and irritations, most often created by an environment, will take the material of soap film and deform it in one direction or another producing a plethora of bubble permutations. The soap film, in response to its chance encounters in a world, settles on a form for the time being, and then, as the bubble man knows so well, it disintegrates into its ambient surrounds. As De Landa has pointed out, investigations by architects and engineers into soap film have led to an understanding of the architecture of cell walls from a microscopic to a macroscopic scale, and the way cell walls, such as those belonging to the bubble, are supported by internal pressure. Knowledge gained in the study of material and biological systems can and has been transferred into the scale of architectural constructions. While the sphere might be the most essential version of the bubble, as an ideal imposed from above, or transcendentally it is not so interesting. What is interesting, as the Bubble Man demonstrates, is the immanent behaviour or expression of soap film. Despite their apparent insularity, we can assume that no individual bubble operates in isolation, at the very least a bubble will become deformed in contact with the environment into which it is released, as the temperature, the breeze, the light, will challenge its spherical perfection. Or else, one bubble-cell will bump up against a neighbour, and local relations between neighbours will in turn influence how a larger system develops, and how a recognisable form or foam emerges: Bubble forming feedback loops. These interactions, relations and encounters, and circuits of affect all contribute to what can be identified broadly as atmospheric ecologies, which operate across a range of scales. In response to a given a number of determined constraints that act as a simple set of rules, soapbubble experiments develop as form-finding techniques that are not determined from above or in advance, but self-organise their relations from below.That is to say, soap-bubbles arrange themselves in the neighbourhood of each other to create foams that are not moulded by some mastercreator, but erupt on a scene as though happenstance. Once we begin to speak in this way, about
Opposite Figure 2. Diagram of bubble making tools used by the Bubble Man. Hlne Frichot, 2009
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self-organising systems, about what has come to be described by many as the phenomenon of emergence, we enter into a whole discursive and practical arena of contemporary, digitally orientated, architectural fascination, a new biotechnological and augmented material paradigm. The expressive behaviour of soap-bubbles have inspired the experiments of contemporary avant-garde digital architects such as Lars Spuybroek of NOX, who is keen to pursue biomimicry, or how to borrow from Nature to create forms that perform well in response to environmental and other specified conditions.The architectural follies designed by NOX do not necessarily look like bubbles, but they do tend to be billowing, bulbous and sleek, and sometimes even seem to foam up out of the ground. NOXs celebrated HtwoOexpo water pavilion (1994-1997), suitably located by the foaming waves of coastal Netherlands, is an early example of their work. While images of the water pavilion tend to focus on its external silvery form as it heaves up out of the ground, it was in fact dedicated to the interactive experiential qualities that are aroused in contact with water. That is to say, the emphasis in this architecture was supposed to be located in its atmospheric interior. Writing about Spuybroeks work, De Landa argues that Soap film models are literally analogue computers with which the shape of a large variety of tent forms simple sails as well as pointed, arched, humped and wave tents can be calculated.4 Spuybroeks soap-bubble experiments were originally inspired by the German engineer, Frei Otto, who is wellknown for his collaboration with the architect Gnter Behnisch on the stadium and associated pavilions designed for the ill-fated 1972 Munich Olympics (Figures 3 and 4). This was an early study in light-weight and tensile structures that took advantage of soap film experiments to gain a better understanding of what could be achieved in spanning broad areas by using minimal materials stretched gossamer thin. In addition, there are those design schemes that literally copy the structure of clusters of soapbubbles, for example, the broadly publicised Beijing National Aquatics Centre, or Water Cube designed by PTW Architects, and constructed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It is also curious to note that the fragile soap-bubble has more than once lent itself to being represented through monumental design means at the scale of the global event that is the Olympics.
Opposite Left Figure 3. Image of the Munich Olympics Stadium. Gnter Behnisch architect with Frei Otto 1972. Photo by Hlne Frichot 2009. Above Right Figure. 4 Image of the Munich Olympics Stadium. Gnter Behnisch architect with Frei Otto 1972. Photo by Hlne Frichot 2009.
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The soap film experiment could be undertaken by a child. A simple frame is dipped into soapy liquid, and the film that results self-organises such that a surface of minimum tension results, which can in turn be mathematically defined. Such experiments have allowed advances in the creation of tensile, or tent-like structures, which operate under tension, rather than compression (such as the sedentary brick house). Once the minimum surface is resolved this also allows for an efficient and lightweight distribution of materials. The material and behaviour of the soap-bubble informs experiments employed in form-finding for designers and engineers both pre and post the ready availability of digital design technologies.The benefit of the digital augmentation of design processes means that these experiments can be accelerated and considerably complexified. As a result the soapbubble loses some of its ephemeral qualities and the emphasis is placed instead on the architectural end product, or what the final built form should look like and how it should perform. Although there are aspects of contemporary architecture and design that increasingly engage in ephemeral, experiential, and interactively immersive environments, the design disciplines still prefer that their forms do not promptly splutter out of existence following their precarious construction. The German philosopher and public intellectual Peter Sloterdijk, who has constructed a magnum opus based on the sphere, which includes a celebration of the humble figure of the soap-bubble, also makes an account of the structural physiognomy of this wondrous form. 5 Sloterdijk admits a particular interest in bubbles where they cluster as foam: From a physical perspective, [foam] describes multichamber systems consisting of spaces formed by gas pressure and surface tensions, which restrict and deform one another according to fairly strict geometric laws.6 He is interested in extending the figure of the soap-bubble, where it clusters and congeals into foam, and suggests that [i]t seemed to me that modern urban systems could be easily understood with analogy to these exact, technical foam analyses.7 Sloterdijk takes the bubble that we know from childhood adventures, and attributes it with an ontological, as well as an ethical and ecological weight. Being is not quite round, but rather like a fragile, wobbly, bubble-like environment that atmospherically envelops
us. In the context of the contemporary city in particular we are like co-isolated bubble beings colliding randomly into each other, suffering briefly, sometimes beautifully, only to be directed haplessly toward dissolution: An explosion of air and sticky stuff. As a retort to clever digital architects Sloterdijk says: its mainly an expression of the fact that modern mathematics has caught up with organic form, of course, novel graphic and animation software programs also help. It is not simply the triumph of mathematics over nature, he warns: Its not at all a question of a return to nature, its an insolent game played by computerassisted mathematics at the expense of organic form architectural biomorphism should be interpreted as a symbol of the fact that technique has attained the necessary savoirfaire to declare its responsibility over organic form.8 Sloterdijk instead tempers such form-finding enthusiasms with how foam can describe the episodic clusters and enduring symbioses of social collectives. 9 He explains: The co-isolated foam of a society conditioned to individualism is not simply an agglomeration of neighbouring (partition-sharing) inert and massive bodies, but rather multiplicities of loosely touching cells of life-worlds.10 The bubble here, and the way it amasses into globules and heaving masses of foam can not only be remarked upon for its elegant formal and material implications, but also suggests a way in which to approach all manner of atmospherically bound ecologies or environment-worlds. With this essay I venture a critique of the ways in which soap film as a system is studied in a restricted sense, which only allows for specific technical applications. By making the soap-bubble an image-thought instead, other kinds of systems can be considered that move beyond the technical sphere into the question of social collectives. It is from Sloterdijk that I borrow the atmospheric component of my conceptual conjunction atmospheric ecologies, as he recognises the atmosphere as extending beyond that sack of air that encloses planet earth. In essays such as Atmospheric Democracy or Airquakes11 he also forwards arguments that tie together historically emerging understandings of contextual atmospheric conditions, such as the invention and application of gas warfare during the second-world-war, and how these impede on social and political relations.
The multifarious chambers that compose foam are both fragile and resilient, opaque and transparent. Like Gottfried Leibnizs simple monads these chambers and their relations to one another own both obscure and clear zones, they apprehend each other in moments of blinding clarity, or else they remain oblivious. If you lend foam an ear, as we did when we were children listening to our bowls of rice bubbles, the sound of its fizzing, snap, crackle and pop, is the white noise, continuous murmur of the city composed of so many lives and things emerging and then passing away. Or else, it is the static and electric hum of our increasingly electronically mediated existences, with attendant software and hardware, twittering, flickering, googling. Dont listen too closely to the geometers and mathematicians who will tell you that the meeting place between bubbles always follows the same predictable geometry. What cannot be predicted is which bubble will survive, and for how long, and with what constellation it will discover itself circling. Determined to meet, yes, but how this encounter will work itself out remains part of the creative unpredictability of a plethora of contingent forces. Each bubble is a life. And as the 17th Century Dutch vanitas painters show through their depictions of fragile soap bubbles, life is fleeting, ephemeral. What we have through the thoughtimage of the bubble, and how it seethes as foam, is an image of environment-worlds whirling about in a maelstrom, a plurality of singular bubble-worlds jostling about. I argue that it is crucial to extend the image of the bubble and soap film from its technical specificity and understand and remember how the bubble also illustrates the structures of existential territories inclusive of dire ecological catastrophes, both natural and manufactured. Rather than becoming a form whose shape and behaviour we mimic, the bubble can offer a way into understanding our intimate relationship with our environment, whether we are a tick, a house fly, a child or a grown-up. Sloterdijk suggests that the biological concept of the environment emerged with the work of semiotic biologist, Jakob von Uexkll (1864-1944) who identified the mutual belonging that coheres between organism and environment. 12 Uexkulls essay A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men 13 depicts bubbles as spheres of existence. He proposes that we take a stroll into the unfamiliar worlds that
surround us, those microscopic as well as macroscopic celestial worlds to which we most often remain oblivious. To do so, he says, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with perceptions that it alone knows. Then, should we find a way to step into one of these bubbles, these otherwise closed monadic cells, a new world comes into being.14 We see that each bubble of organism-plus-environment reveals another world and its few or several, simple or complex, carriers of significance, or affects.15 Different organisms own different sets of affects that make them more or less likely to identify and respond to some object in their environment. These affects or perceptual cues pertain to the range of the organisms perception, what they are apt to perceive of a world, and therefore what their perception necessarily excludes. Each soap-bubble, as Uexkll explains, harbours different loci, and in each there exist the directional planes of operational space, which give its space a solid framework.16 The soap-bubble that encloses each creature in its world owns not only a specific spatiality, but a particular tempo. While some affects seem to suggest innate or genetically derived responses on the part of the organism, other affects emerge as a matter of habit, for instance, the way we typically follow one pathway or another to get to work or school in our environment-world, or even the way we become habituated to the use of the everyday tools and utensils that are available to us. When our habitual pathway is blocked, or our tool breaks down, then we can become confounded and momentarily lost in our bubble-world. Perhaps we are even momentarily given a fleeting view into other bubble worlds through this moment of rupture. Under Uexklls curious gaze environment-worlds [umwelten] multiply profusely, and should we be privy to all of these worlds simultaneously our senses would be overwhelmed, as would our capacity to make sense. A balance must be struck, so that we can achieve at least a minimum of communication between our environment-worlds, whether our concerns are shared or divisive. Sloterdijk argues that at the scale of the human organism such worlds can even include: a national assembly, a love Parade, a club, a freemasons lodge, a workforce, a shareholder meeting, a concert hall audience, a suburban neighbourhood, a school class,
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a religious community, drivers stuck in traffic jam.17 The challenge would appear to be how to avoid these environment-worlds amassing as isolated archipelagos or congealing homogenously like dough. The delicacy and resilience of foam suggests a structure that is neither too heterogeneous nor too homogenous, neither too individuated, nor overly indistinct. Importantly the bubble-cell also reveals something of our seeming will to individuation and cellular or capsular existences. If the bubble that is our cellular environment-world only allows us to see so much, and keeps us blinkered in a habitual tuned-out way to all the rest, then no wonder we manage so badly when it comes to the bigger ecological picture, what Uexkll calls, quite simply, Nature. Is it that we are constrained to do the best that we can given the limited affects and circumscribed environmentworlds that are available to us? Or can we do better than this? Flix Guattari opens his essay, The Three Ecologies, with a quote taken from Gregory Batesons Steps to an Ecology of Mind: There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds. Another way of stating this is that now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture,18 and bad ideas can have a devastating impact on both natural and artefactual systems. It is clear that Bateson has had a profound impact on Guattaris argument in The Three Ecologies. It is also from Bateson that Gilles Deleuze and Guattari borrow the concept of the plateau for their book, A Thousand Plateaus. Following Batesons argument, what Guattari points out is that where Charles Darwins theory of natural selection pinpoints the family line, species or subspecies as the fundamental unit of survival, Bateson argues that the unit of survival should be understood as organism plus environment and that, in turn, it is only through bitter experience that the organism learns that if it destroys its environment it also destroys itself.19 It seems, though, that the habits of thought that plague us are even more ingrained than Bateson himself believed. Bateson, anthropologist and second order cyberneticist, includes in his definition of ecology not just the natural world, nor even just a combination of constructed and natural worlds, but also the world of ideas, or Mind. In his collection of essays entitled, Steps to an Ecology of Mind where he insists that [t]here is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds20 Bateson is making what might at first seem a self-evident point, but it is one we habitually forget. That is to say, the systems with which we think, or do not think critically, cannot be separated out from the environmental system that we inhabit. In fact, the very act of thinking is part and parcel with what I have called atmospheric ecologies, and poor thinking impacts on muddled acting, which concatenates through serial atmospheric effects. Importantly, Batesons definition of Mind, which draws on cybernetic theory, is an immanent Mind, not a god-like mind that is transcendent or separated out from environment worlds. Bateson argues strenuously that you cannot separate Mind out from the structure in which it is immanent without that structure falling into crisis. Further to Batesons expanded definition of ecology is his insistence that the unit of survival must be considered as a combination of organism plus environment. 21 This is a sentiment that resembles Uexklls understanding of the inextricability of creature and world. A Mind is an aggregate of ideas that thinks beyond the human individual by whom we habitually circumscribe thought. An aggregate, or ecology of ideas includes, for instance, organism plus computer plus environment, and the interaction between these parts. Whats more,
drawing definitive lines between where one component begins and another ends is of limited abstract use in better understanding the ecology in which they work. Batesons essays in Steps to an Ecology of Mind are a collection of papers that cut across the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, biological evolution and genetics, as well as venture into the then new discipline of cybernetics, which finally allows him to make many fruitful transdisciplinary observations. In the preface he explains that these essays offer a nearly exhaustive account of his research engagements from the mid 1930s through to the early 1970s. Although we might object that his work is now nearly forty years old, he is nevertheless still offering us lessons on how to rethink ecologies, lessons that we do not yet appear to have got. He discusses the risks of global warming, rampant and unchecked technological progress, and he offers inventive and creative expansions on the definition of how ecological systems may be understood through cybernetic explanation. Ecology in the widest sense, he explains turns out to be the study of the interaction and the survival of ideas and programmes (i.e., differences, complexes of differences) in circuits.22 If you place one bad idea in the circuit it is likely to proliferate. For example, When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise What interests me is my organization, or my species, you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure.23 Bateson uses the example of Lake Erie: You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated into the larger system of your thought and experience.24 Here we see ecology, society, your subjective position, and psychiatry being articulated by way of a cybernetic system or circuit both in terms of the ideas being circulated and the very real material responses that are forthcoming (Bateson is keen to point out that Cybernetic theory deals not with cause-and-effect, but with stimulus-and-response).25 Readers of Dr Seusss childrens book The Lorax, a tale of environmental woes born out of greed and rampant consumption, may be familiar with the figure of Lake Erie.The Lorax, a short tempered environmentalist and spokesperson for his environment-world, which is getting all glugged-up with the pollutants produced from the harvesting of the lovely Truffula trees, makes reference to this exemplary site by exclaiming, I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.26 Lake Erie, one of the five Great Lakes of North America, was an infamous example in the 1960s and 1970s of an environment befouled by heavy industrial pollutants. I do not spuriously mention this childrens tale, for the stories we tell children, and what they show us of ourselves, play a considerable role in this argument. It is worth noting in the most recent edition of Batesons Steps to an Ecology of Mind (2000), which is introduced by his own daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, there have been included a series of what are called Metalogues.27 These are dialogues between a father and a daughter about all the muddled things that happen when we try to sort out questions and problems about our environment-worlds or the places and situations in which we find ourselves. The metalogue entitled, Why do Things Have Outlines? is of particular use here, as it in part asks
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the question of how do we delimit an interior, and how do we modulate the forces that continue to insist from the exterior, that is, how best do we think about and manage an interior atmospheric ecology? Part of the point is that problems can be grappled with exactly through an open dialogue, and sometimes it is worth asking what might at first appear to be simplistic questions. Whats more, such conversations can also be undertaken as a process, even an evolutionary process of learning, as Bateson himself insists, between human organisms and nature. Between father and daughter, the two interlocutors consider whether or not discernible outlines are valuable, and these outlines of which they speak can be ascribed to all kinds of things (beyond the task of a childs colouring-in book), such as conversations, flocks of sheep, minority groups, and even machines. On the one hand an outline helps us recognise something clearly and distinctly, on the other hand, an outline sometimes fixes on things too early, and does not allow them to develop. The outline also tells us what is inside and what is outside the system in question, what belongs to the group, and what does not, but only in the given context, and at the current moment: tomorrow things could have rearranged themselves again. As children know, this is how bubbles work too, all too fleetingly. We wanted to talk to the Bubble Man and ask him about his strange and wonderful inventions, but his performance was self-enclosing, and he seemed to barely notice the imminence of destruction that invariably followed each act of creation. Except sometimes for a small, brief smile that would quietly emerge on his face. The Bubble Man was not just technically adept at choreographing his ballet of bubbles, but was also held in his own bubble of existence, his unit of survival composed of organism plus environment. His sphere, it has to be stressed, was itself embedded in the larger sphere of the public place that is Kathe Kolwitz Platz, Berlin, and also in the midst of the particular set of activities that take place there on market day. As Uexkll has shown, to see the world from his point of view, we would have had to take a stroll into his atmospheric ecology or sphere of existence. Or else we might have quite simply ventured to begin a dialogue with him, in order to better grasp how his atmospheric ecology worked alongside ours. We might have asked him, based on his observations, why is it that we are so good at the hell-bent destruction of our own bubble-worlds?
NOTES
1. Peter Sloterdijk in conversation with Jean Christophe Royoux, Peter Sloterdijk: Foreword to the Theory of Spheres in Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux, Cosmograms, (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005) :225. 2. Manuel De Landa, Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form in Ian Buchanan, ed. A Deleuzian Century, (London: Duke University Press, 1999):499-500. 3. De Landa, Materiality: Anexact and Intense in Lars Spuybroek, ed. Nox, (London:Thames and Hudson, 2002): 374. 4. De Landa, Materiality: Anexact and Intense, 375. 5. See Sloterdijks Spheres trilogy: Sloterdijk, Sphren-Blasen, Mikrosphrologie [Spheres I-Bubbles, microspherology] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998); Sloterdijk, Sphren II: Globen, Makrosphrologie [Spheres II: Globes, macrospherology] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999) Sloterdijk, Sphren III-Schume, Plurale Sphrologie [Spheres III-Bubbles, pluralspherology] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004). See also Sloterdijk in conversation with Jean Christophe Royoux,
Peter Sloterdijk: Foreword to the Theory of Spheres in Cosmograms, pp. 237-238; Sloterdijk, Cell Block, Egospheres, SelfContainer in Log 10, Summer/Fall 2007, pp. 89-108; Sloterdijk, Foam-City, in Log 9, Winter/Spring 2007, pp. 63-76, p. 63; Sloterdijk, Airquakes in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 27, 2009, pp. 41-57. 6. Sloterdijk and Funcke, Against Gravity: Bettina Funcke talks with Peter Sloterdijk, in Bookforum, February/March 2005. http://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_05/funcke.html 7. Peter Sloterdijk and Bettina Funcke, Against Gravity: Bettina Funcke talks with Peter Sloterdijk. 8. Peter Sloterdijk in conversation with Jean Christophe Royoux, Peter Sloterdijk: Foreword to the Theory of Spheres in Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux, Cosmograms, New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2005, pp. 237-238, p. 237. 9. Sloterdijk, Foam City in Cynthia C. Davidson ed., Log 9, Winter/Spring 2007, 63-76; 63. 10. Sloterdijk, Foam City, 63-76; 64. 11. Sloterdijk, Atmospheric Politics, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, MIT Press, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2005): 944-951; Sloterdijk, Airquakes in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 27, 2009, pp. 41-57. 12. Sloterdijk and Royoux, Peter Sloterdijk: Foreword to the Theory of Spheres, 231. 13. Jakob von Uexkll, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men, in Claire H. Schiller, ed. and trans., Instinctive Behaviour: The Development of a Modern Concept, (New York: International Universities Press, 1957). 14. Uexkll, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men, 5. 15. For further readings of Uexklls work both philosophical and architectural see: Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988) ; Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell, (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2004); Catherine Ingraham, Architecture, Animal, Human: The Asymmetrical Condition, (London: Routledge, 2006); Michael Hensel and Achim Menges, eds. Morpho-Ecologies, London: AA Publications, 2006. 16. Uexkll, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men, 28-29. 17. Sloterdijk, Foam City, 63. 18. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, (London: Athlone Press, 2000): 43. 19. Flix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, note 1, p. 70. 20. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, London: Granada Publishing, 1978, pp. 459, 460. 21. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1978: 459. 22. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1978: 459. 23. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1978: 460. 24. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1978: 460. 25. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 379. In 2008 a book of collected essays was published that returned specifically to the ongoing currency of Batesons research, especially in relation to biosemiotics. See Jesper Hoffmeyer, ed., A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as a precursor to Biosemiotics, (New York: Springer, 2008). 26. Dr Seuss, The Lorax, (London: WM Collins Sons and Co Ltd, 1973). 27. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000): 3-60.
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Remote SenSeS, Intimate EcologieS: AnemocinegRaPH (2007-2011) Before we knew how to circle the ear th, how to circumscribe the sphere of human habitation in days and hours, we had brought the globe into our living room to be touched by our hands and swirled before our eyes.1. The year after the Sputnik became the first man-made object to circulate with heavenly bodies, philosopher Hannah Arendt noted, paradoxically, that our expansion into the universe has led to a decisive shrinkage of the ear th. She suggests that when Nature is understood from a point outside the ear th (the place where Archimedes wished to stand) beyond the reach of our senses, it is as though we can dispose of it from the outside. Later, the first whole-ear th photograph sent from Apollo 17, photo AS17-22727 (1972) became an emblematic image of global unity for environmentalists and multi-national corporate organizations alike. Yet the diminishment of the ear th and the separation between the human and the non-human are also encapsulated in the singular image of a harmonious planet. The human privilege of the remote perspective can be an estranging vision from the biota and atmospheric phenomena that is around and inside us. The ar t project Anemocinegraph reframes remote weather satellite images and surface recordings of local micrometeorological events. The anemocinegraph is a Nineteenth century wind measurement instrument that was never physically constructed and exists only as a drawing. In this fictional anemocinegraph, images are projected on half spheres, the size of a living room globe, to be touched lightly. The audio composition of Anemocinegraph is based on a data sonification of the wind fluxes of CO2 gas from a real micrometeorological instrument, the sonic anemometer. Micrometeorology is the science of small-scale turbulence and diffusion of wind flow close to the ground; the slippage of air between buildings, or an eddy that causes a vor tex of leaves to fly. These small-scale weather events are fleeting performances of air inside the planets boundary layer. Over several weeks I collected surface-based video recordings of these transitory moments around my home in Auckland. Also passing over the hanging screens are weather images from the NOAA satellite 13, collected during the same time period, courtesy of the LandcareResearchNZ database. New Zealands islands are always partially obscured by sequences of animated cloud. The changing weather patterns at the synoptic scale of satellites mirror the tiny micrometeorological movements. The endless flux of local weather across the surface of the earth is an alternate spatial schema; a series of counterpoints to the cloudless clarity of the whole-globe image.
1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago University Press, 1958): 251.
Janine Randerson
Animocinegraph (2007-2011) 10-20 opal perspex spheres, dimensions variable
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Enhancement of Critical and Analytical Thinking in the Context of Interior Design History
Kyuho Ahn : University of Oregon and Mihyun Kang : Oklahoma State University, USA
ABSTRACT
Through this study, a pedagogical case study was developed, implemented, and disseminated in which students applied interior design historical contexts to a studio project based on Beechers design history education framework suggesting that design history should be taught to engage students in critical and analytical thinking and to integrate the knowledge gained into current design applications.1 Students were asked to develop an exhibition design installation (Application) as a team project based on the teams analysis of a design topic or artifact of its choice (Analytical/Critical Thinking) from the existing 1885-1925 exhibition (Accessibility). A focus group study was conducted to investigate students perceptions regarding design history while they worked on this project and then to investigate learning outcomes once they had completed it. Intellectual engagement and learning progress were observed in the students; these may have resulted from the integrated application of the material within an actual design problem. Three major learning outcomes: engagement, critical/analytical thinking, and understanding of design history in multidimensional contexts, were observed. Additionally, students experienced positive aspects of design skill learning due to the actual installation of the project.This study provided a comprehensive view of how the students responded to interior design history in their design problems.
This notion of students perceptions of irrelevancy and lack of interest in design history could result from many reasons. Interior design via reality TV is portrayed as a decorative profession. Many designers treat historical contexts as stylistic and decorative elements for personal and intuitive artistic taste, whereas interior design is formally recognised as a multi-faceted profession that deals with creative solutions for functional, socio-cultural aspects and aesthetic values for users through a complex design process.3 It seems that the pedagogy of design history education, in which conventional instructional methods tend to be isolated into visual context areas, linear relationships, causes and effects, chronological order, and memorisation, consequently fails to prepare interior design students for the professional workforce. From this perspective, design history is seen as static knowledge and is not relevant to complex contemporary interior design practices for the 21st century. This perceived irrelevancy of design history has been reflected in many areas. For instance, The Interior Design Professions Body of Knowledge: 2005 Edition reports that the perceived value of design history among design practitioners is quite low. Additionally, historical contexts were excluded from the National Council for Interior Design Qualification Exam, and instructional goals of the design history curriculum in the Council for Interior Design Accreditation (CIDA) Professional Standards 2006 provided a lack of clarification on pedagogical impacts of design history education.4 This has worried many educators, and CIDA Professional Standards 2009 reflects this concern very well. One of the most notable changes in the standards is critical thinking, recognised as one of the most vital elements in interior design education,5 and multidimensional aspects of design history are emphasised by devoting a single set of standards to history.6 Many design historians and educators suggest that pedagogical efforts emphasise that design history should be taught to develop students analytical/critical thinking, be viewed as multi-faceted, and provide historical precedents to inform design decisions.7 This idea of rethinking design history pedagogy has been acknowledged by historians since 1996 at the Cornell Symposium, the first historian symposium to discuss history education and its relationships to design studio education. In a follow-up survey to identify profiles of history teaching among four-year FIDER (Foundation for Interior Design Education Research and now CIDA) accredited interior design programs, results indicated that 60% of history professors teach one or more design studios, that most history courses are reorganised consistently to make the history relevant to other design courses and/or studios, and that 66% of design programs require three to five courses in interior design history, plus art or architectural history or both.8 Despite these efforts, historians perceived a lack of integration between history and students design work. As a follow-up to the symposium and survey, a thematic issue of Journal of Interior Design in 1998 disseminated extended dialogues on interior design history education. In this publication it was stated that interior design history tends to focus on the chronology of stylistic classifications and that Eurocentric designs should be reconsidered. Design history education
An anecdotal pedagogical experience in design history illustrates concerns about students learning and misperceptions about design history in interior design curriculums. Brandt states: as incoming majors commence the first of a four-course sequence in the history of interior architecture, furniture, decorative arts, and textiles, their faces register the same looks of trepidation that their predecessors wore. What is your greatest concern about undertaking this class? they are asked to indicate on a note card. Memorizing dates, one responds. Not being able to remember images on slide exams, replies another. Mixing up different styles and periods, notes a third. Articulate about voicing their fears, they are less expressive when asked to describe what they most look forward to as the semester begins. Discussions with colleagues, ranging from design historians to studio instructors and guest critics, suggest that todays students still fail to make the connection between the study of the artifacts of their professions past and their approach to tackling a studio assignment. Conversations with students reveal that many view history as irrelevant, intimidating, and frankly uninteresting.2
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for the 21st century should cover the dynamics of history as making a major contribution to students creative processes and critical thinking.9 This idea is well reflected in CIDA Professional Standards 2009, and this research embraces it. Therefore, this study hypothesised that offering different pedagogies by engaging students in analytical and critical thinking within a hands-on design project as a team would enhance student learning in multidimensional aspects of design history. Through this study, a pedagogical case study was developed, implemented, and disseminated in which students applied interior design historical contexts to a studio project based on Beechers design history education framework suggesting that design history should be taught to engage students in critical and analytical thinking and to integrate the knowledge gained into current design applications.10 A focus group study was conducted to investigate students perceptions regarding design history while they were working on an interior design studio project and then another was conducted to investigate learning outcomes once they had completed the project.
LiteRatuRe ReviewS
Although teaching chronology and Western-Eurocentric design history provides interior design students with useful information to identify design and stylistic movements of Western Design, terminologies, details, and techniques that are also important parts of CIDA Standards 2009, it conflicts with the concepts of diversity and multiculturalism 11 dominant in 21st century professional interior design education. Historians believe that non-chronological and analytical aspects of history could enhance students abilities in problem solving.12 Architectural history studies share a notion of material culture study that seeks iconographic patterns and symbols in determining meanings and cultural values. From this perspective, interior design history should be dynamic; conceive of objects as events, not things; and emphasise the relationship of an object to its environment.13 History provides great opportunities for students to learn precedents of dealing with complex issues and critical/ analytical thinking. Some historians claim that history should be
a departure of innovation and creative inquiries. In this regard, history is viewed as unfinished and speculative. Attiwill suggests that history should become a question of building a platform for arrivals and departures where the emphasis is not on finding and fixing meaning but on making sense, on producing and inventing.14 Findeli suggests that design history education, eventually, should lead the students to develop their own philosophy of history and, consequently, to be able to adopt a critical attitude to such ideologically loaded concepts as progress, avant-garde, innovation, outdated, historic preservation, revival, etc.15 Jennings claims that interior design history associated typology based on multidimensional aspects such as use, morphology, function, cross cultural, aesthetics, etc. that are time and place specific and are socio-cultural contextual, could promote critical/analytical thinking. Such an approach would allow students to connect history to contemporary interior design practices. Brant also found that a thematic approach, such as conceptual, aesthetic, and technical aspects in nature, can engage students in critical/ analytical thinking and promote positive student learning experiences in design history courses. Analytical thinking helps a designer to explore and clarify design problems, and critical thinking supports evaluation of a problem and exploration of solutions.16 Meneely and Portillo found that student engagement in critical/analytical thinking resulted in higher levels of creativity in a design problem. However, as Meneely indicates, critical and analytical thinking are less preferred and tend to be avoided or overlooked by interior design students in the design process. Beecher also claims that lack of integration between history and creative experience gives students the impression that historical designs are remote and irrelevant to their work in design studio.17 Therefore, careful instructional methods are necessary to engage students in critical/analytical thinking. To overcome this problem, Beecher proposed a new pedagogical framework that promotes critical and analytical thinking associated with multidimensional historical contexts, such as political, cultural, social, and/or technological factors, and students design history knowledge that should be integrated into their design applications. Three pedagogical aspects, accessibility, analytical/critical thinking, and application of interior design history
are proposed for better learning outcomes.18 This research emotional capacity in the learner to engage in a creative process follows up Beechers pedagogical model by implementing it into (person); stimulating emotional engagement through appropriate learning contexts (process); facilitating the emotional interfacing of a design studio. the learner with the outcomes of a creative process (product).23 Accessibility refers to familiarity and its relationship to history and students; it is critical to engaging students in the analytical PRoceduRe process. For instance, giving students opportunities to find signs of the past in their everyday lives and surroundings and making A total of 32 students enrolled in a junior level interior design connections between historical conditions and contemporary studio participated in this project as an outside classroom team everyday life are important means of presenting an accessible assignment. Most students had taken at least one art history history.19 Analytical perspectives of multidimensional aspects class previously and were taking an interior design history course such as socio-cultural, physical, political, and economic issues, concurrently. Each team consisted of three or four members moral and spiritual beliefs, etc. should be used to improve critical by drawing; a total of ten teams were formed. Each team was thinking skills. This non-linear, analytical approach may enhance asked to develop an exhibition design installation (Application) the applicability of history in the studio and engage students in based on the teams analysis of a design topic or artifact of its critical/analytical thinking; in turn, it may enrich the interior design choice (Analytical/Critical Thinking) from the existing 1885-1925 curriculum. Understanding the designs of the past through the exhibition (Accessibility). An exhibition of three-dimensional application of an analytical and critical process offers students an artifacts and architectural images, including descriptions, from the opportunity to define, compare, and evaluate their own projects era was provided near the students design studio throughout within a contemporary context.20 the semester (Figure 1). After viewing the exhibit, teams were asked to select and analyse an issue (controversial or educational) In critical thinking, engagement takes a vital role in the or a topic (artifact/building/design theory) of their choice from thinking process and it is strongly associated with emotional the period. A guest lecture on design issues in this era was also aspects that include risk taking, emotional discomfort and provided. Teams then planned in a designated display showcase challenges, affective pleasure in the problem solving process, an experimental exhibition and their design applications, which and meaningful outcomes.21 Carmel-Gilfilen and Portillo reflected their analysis and/or possible application of the explained that critical thinking is crucial in the problem findings. There were two showcases that were dedicated for the solving process and involves not only a cognitive dimension, installation.Therefore, two teams were able to exhibit at the same but also an emotional dimension and affection, attitude, and time. For this study, the first two teams were considered as the maturity dimensions.22 First Group, the next six teams as the Middle Group and the last two teams as the Last Group. Each team had approximately two This notion of an emotional dimension in engagement is weeks to complete its project and was required to present the shared by others. Beecher suggests that instruction pedagogies project in a PowerPoint presentation during class. While students should facilitate the engagement of students in positive learning worked on the group project, a focus group study was conducted. experiences. Spendlove argues that emotion, known as Emotional The sample was a convenience sample with students voluntarily Intelligence, conceptualised as an overarching concept within a responding to email and verbal requests. 28 students volunteered triadic schema (person, process, and product) of art and design for the first interview. One additional student volunteered for education and as the ability of self-disciplined and self-motivated the second interview, making a total of 29 student participants risk taking, takes a vital role in engaging students in positive, in that interview. Extra credit points were given as an incentive to creative learning. Triadic Schema theory emphasises developing volunteers; an alternative means of obtaining credit was offered to
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assessment tools were exams based on memorisation using fill in the blank, matching, and multiple choice questions. In the interior design history course, additional assignments such as research papers and weekly quizzes of matching, short answer, and multiple choice questions, were required. Most of the 26 students had no experience with history-related projects (two students did). One of these students had taken a historic preservation course and the other had done a team project in which students developed a design concept from an art-piece as an inspiration that required research on historical contexts in a creative problem-solving course. Based on the interviews, most students (23) feel that design history is important. They are aware that history influences contemporary design and design decisions and that it provides precedents. For instance, one stated: I think design history is very important just because we have the old saying of history repeats itself. I believe that what we learn in history or why we have the classes is all pieces or all furniture or all aspects of an architectural building are going to at some point resemble or mimic an older piece so if you have design history then you are informed about how these pieces relate to each other and how you can use them, and what time period they came from so you can relate that to the design aspect. This student is aware of the importance of history, but he or she understands historical contexts as a simple form and as a cause-effect relationship. Students participating understood design history as visual references of specific styles or as foundational knowledge, rather than as complex contexts of design precedents. For instance, students said that design history knowledge is useful for communication with clients when historic styles are considered: I think it is important because a lot of people want antiques and stuff incorporated into design, and you need to be able to differentiate between time periods and different pieces. I think having design history helps because when you talk to a client they may not know specific terms for things so if they say that little pointed thing over there you can kind of get an idea what style they like even if they cant say what they like. These statements may indicate that this perception of the linear and ornamental aspects of interior design history have resulted from the current design history curriculum that focuses on chronological and stylistic contexts of design history. This limited view of design history education is reflected by students perceptions on the importance of design history knowledge in design practice and in securing employment.The interviews found that although students consider design history important (19) in the practice of interior design, they think it is less important (16) than other design related knowledge (Table 1). Also, students perceptions on possible applications of design history knowledge is limited to certain design areas in which visual references are the main concerns, such as design history specific projects (10), historic preservation (8), museum design (3), and movie set design (1). Only three respondents indicated that design history provides designers with precedents to inform design decisions.
Opposite Figure1. Existing 1885-1925 exhibition (Accessibility)
those who chose not to participate.The participating students were divided into six groups of three to six students each, primarily so that team members were in the same group. In this way, the students within each group could discuss their projects and learning in more detail. Two interview sessions were conducted with each group. Each session took approximately 30 to 50 minutes, depending on the level of student involvement. During the first session, the subjects discussed perceptional opinions on design history with a moderator while they worked on the project.The second session was conducted after completion of the project to investigate any perceptional changes on design history and to record students learning experiences. The moderator provided participants with an information sheet that contained an informed consent form, which the participants signed. The data were video-recorded and then transcribed.The data was categorised and themes were merged into categories to identify learning outcomes of design history related to the studio project and interior design students perceptional changes on design history.
FindingS and diScuSSion : PReviouS deSign HiStoRy couRSe exPeRience and PeRcePtionS
Of the 28 participants who volunteered for the first interview, 25 had taken an art history course in their first year; 21 had taken an interior design history course, an elective that covers topical and critical issues after the year 1900; and 22 were concurrently taking a required interior design history course that covers architectural history and furnishings prior to and including the 18th century. Students perceived that instructional methods of the art history course and the required interior design history course are often lectures with slides in a chronological approach, whereas instructional methods of the elective interior design history course are lectures and discussions to cover contemporary design issues rather than historical contexts. In the art history course, major
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Importance of history in Importance of design general (23*) history knowledge in the practice of interior design (22*) Important Not important 23 0 Important Not Important 19 3
Importance of design history knowledge to get a job (22*)
Importance of design history knowledge compared with other design related knowledge (20*)
SHOWCASE #1 Charles Darwin and His Influence on Art Nouveau: scientific discovery (the theory of evolution), its controversy, and its influence on design Design Application Focus: Style Art Nouveau
SHOWCASE #2 The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Modular Design: The Industrial Revolution and its impact on design Design application focus: Building Technique, Modular Construction (Grand Central Station)
*number of actual respondents
The study revealed that attitude of instructors, in-depth information on a topic covering its background, activities such as field trips and/or research papers, and various types of assessment tools are the things that hold students attention and make the course interesting. Students indicated that hands-on experiences make a history class interesting and help them retain more information. In addition, students feel it is difficult to retain information when the assessment tool is based on memorisation, such as defining and matching images on a test. One student stated:
fiRSt gRouP
Important Not Important
14 8
More Important Equal Less Important
3 1 16
The interviews found that students thought they would gain a great deal of positive learning and retain more information if the outcomes of history courses were tangible and applicable: [i]n design classes it is all tangible and you can draw it and you can do whatever, but I feel like in our history classes here its all like write it down write it down write it down look at a picture write it down. it is helpful when things are more tangible.... Most students (26) had no experience applying design history to a studio project and they felt the project would offer them positive learning experiences due to its tangible, hand-on approach. Some students indicated that it would be beneficial for their education if other aspects of design, including technology, materials, and finishes, were covered in design history courses.This may indicate that students perceive instructional contexts in interior design history courses as dimensionally limited.
Middle gRouP
the art history class my freshman (first) year [sic] we just had tests and when you are learning so much information it is hard to retain because I just had like my short term memory and I crammed for tests and in heritage I do forget a lot of it because you are cramming so much and we have so many tests.
Filament Technology Advancements Through the Incandescent Lamp: invention of the light bulb and its technology advancement Design application focus: Technology and History
Eclectic Revival: World War I and the movie industry affecting building styles in California Design application focus: Style, Theme
LeaRning outcomeS afteR PRoject comPletion

Three major learning outcomes associated with design history education were observed: engagement, critical/ analytical thinking, and understanding of design history in multidimensional contexts (Figure 2). Additionally, students experienced positive aspects of design skill learning due to the installation of the project.
LAST gRouP
Le Corbusier: The New Spirit, Success from Scandal: social issues, styles, technology, controversial reaction Design application focus: Theme, Multi-directional, Critical Issues
The Jazz Age: art and culture reflecting critical issues in social and political changes (the great migration, womens rights movement, Cubism & Dadaism, alcohol prohibition) Design application focus: Theme, Multi-directional, Critical Issues
Opposite Table. 1: Student perception on design history (28) Above Figure 2: Student outcomes (Design Application)
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Engagement : A high level of student engagement was observed, and students found the projects fun and exciting. Several factors increased the level of engagement. First, the aspects of the three-dimensional hands-on project positively affected students engagement in the design process. As one student stated, students had never before done this type of history project; a tangible 3D installation to be viewed by others made students more engaged and excited and, therefore, they retained more information:
This statement suggests that multidimensional topics with which students are familiar challenge them with intellectual engagement and this, in turn, leads to positive learning experiences. This supports Spendloves framework 24 that emotional intelligence (challenge) is an important contributor to a positive learning experience.
Critical/analytical thinking: Additionally, critical/analytical thinking skills within historical contexts were enhanced. One student having to take those steps like you do the research and indicated his or her feelings upon seeing another groups then try to find of way of illustrating and then the actual project before his/her groups work was installed: building; it helped me remember the information. I saw that our work is way off. We are not even on the right track, but I learned that there are different styles Secondly, students chose topics with which they were familiar and and that people do think differently and that people have developed more detailed information. This may have engaged different ideas. students and promoted intellectual curiosity and teamwork: This statement indicates that he or she realised that alternative ways of thinking and presenting a design are possible. Although students did not specifically address critical thinking and its impacts on design history, one student of an early group that chose Art Nouveau as a topic and ended up researching Darwins evolution theory indicated that he or she gained critical Students chose thematic topics that addressed multidimensional the insight that design has been influenced by diverse factors: issues such as controversial, socio-cultural, and/or political issues. One Darwin didnt only influence the way people were student from a group that chose a music type, jazz, stated that she thinking but also the way of design. Which [sic] I had no was highly engaged and excited after overcoming multiple problems: idea that he had an effect on design, and not only that there was a point early on once where we had kind but [sic] the design was controversial like a lot of people of picked our idea but it was hard to figure out what we loved it or hated it just as like with Darwin they either were going to research because we had come to [the] loved him or hated him. So that was kind of neat. idea of jazz. Then once we got into it we were like wait a minute not all these ideas are in our time frame or really Students also gained problem-solving skills even though they going to work for this. So now we really have to research received limited resources for the project including: groups jazz and figure out what it is about and I was a little scared choosing their own topics in the design period, only a two that we werent going to find anything that was going to week time line, the physical site contained to display showcases come back together and make a cohesive statement about and the need to utilise critical or design issues associated with that time period. Then all of a sudden these little things design history. No specific requirements regarding format of started popping up and it all started fitting into place and presentations were given. Each group encountered unique challenges to solve, which required teamwork, problem-solving thats when it kind of got exciting. I think it was cool because we got to research kind of what we wanted to; we didnt have to do the parts we didnt want to do. Like we didnt have to do the war necessarily or like we kind of centralized on the ones we thought most exciting.
skills, time management skills, and communication skills. As a result, cultural, and political contextual changes of that era. The topics students indicated: covered included individualism, alcohol prohibition, womens rights, Cubism and Dadaism, and the great migration: (I learned) problem-solving (skills) definitely [sic]. (I learned) working with others, overcoming obstacles I learned a lot about the time period that we did. In just and having to decide what to do and consult with each other. history in general I thought it was very exciting. we did a specific time period and what was going on that made This study therefore suggests that design projects associated with that time period so important and I dont think I had critical issues in design history may stimulate students intellectual realized the connection of the events of that time. Like curiosities and that multidimensional investigations may spur world war one with prohibition and with women all of critical insights. Although each teams display arrangements were sudden [sic] being able to vote and looking at it as a whole somewhat influenced by the other teams due to the available as well as in parts kind of made it nice because I didnt see visual examples, design applications and approaches to the topics the whole originally. were quite varied.
DeSign media SkillS
History as multidimensional contexts: Design results and student responses indicate that students gained more understanding of design history when it was presented with a holistic view and in multidimensional contexts. Students perceived design history as a multidimensional and complex entity, in comparison to the first discussion. In the first group of installations, students tended to focus on specific topics more directly related to interior design, such as design styles or building technology. In the middle group, students tended to pick a topic with a broader range, such as World War I and its impacts on building styles, the light bulbs advancement, or the Chicago Worlds Fair. Students began to see connections between multidimensional historical contexts and their influence on design. However, student topics and design applications were still more of a direct implication of the topic they chose. For instance, the exhibition of the group that chose incandescent light bulb development as its topic focused on the bulbs developmental phases rather than on its influences on current design industries. Student discussion of issues during each groups presentation extended students cognitive boundaries. In the final group of installations, students successfully demonstrated an understanding of design history as a dynamic system of multidimensional contexts. Students demonstrated that design history is evolving as a result of complex interactions of social, cultural, political, and/ or technological factors. The project titled The Jazz Age reflected the holistic understanding of design as an art form reflecting social,
Students were eager to present their displays, and they gained new design media skills. Students also integrated into the project design skills and knowledge they had learned in previous classes. The aspect of a three-dimensional, life-size installation and a team-based project that required communication among members contributed to students skill development. Students said they learned visual communication skills including Photoshop, legibility, 2D/3D composition, presentation, and model-making skills: [w]e did learn more about 3D space because I think that is something that we are not really used to dealing with because we are working with everything on paper. Even though we are doing floor plans and kind of looking at it that way I think you actually saw how you had to change things or find something different to fit. Students tended to apply their new knowledge to a design solution as thematic, which Beecher suggested as a pedagogical technique to improve learning outcomes. Students engaged in the early process said that the project was challenging for them due to the lack of examples. Although the level of engagement was high, students stated that the lack of accessibility to critical issues was a major challenge.
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Despite the benefits and positive learning outcomes, students still perceived that history is less important than other areas of knowledge in becoming an interior design professional and that this type of project does not improve their employment prospects. This may indicate that although students critical thinking and design skills may be enhanced by a design history project, they still perceive design history as less relevant to interior design practice and, therefore, contributes less to job readiness. Also, it appeared that students might perceive that a good portfolio providing visual representation of design skills is a major tool to finding a job. This may indicate that students perceive that other aspects of design, such as critical and analytical thinking, are not important criteria to securing a job. One student stated,
the problem-solving process due to hands-on experiences that most students favour. Such problem-solving enhances student intellectual skills in analytical and critical thinking. Second, design history is understood as live, continuing events that are evolving and that result from complex interactions of multidimensional factors (social, political, cultural, and/or technological). The purpose of design is to solve human problems within the built environment. Therefore, design history knowledge that has examined multidimensional contexts will assist professional interior designers in solving current design problems. Finally, student feedback indicated that introductory information regarding critical issues during the era should be added to improve accessibility and student engagement. Development of easy access to curriculum materials, such as a website with introductory critical issues, might reinforce active learning. Careful project scheduling to increase student engagement was also suggested. In this studio, students did the project outside the classroom, although each group had opportunities to get the instructors feedback. However, it appeared difficult for a team to find outside class time that met every members schedule due to commitments such as jobs, other school events, and other homework.
I dont know if this project necessarily made me feel competitive; I think it was more that we just really enjoyed the project. It was fun to actually get to see it in the display and materialized and see how it all fit [sic] together. As far as putting in a portfolio the image you dont see the sides of it and its not the same as standing in front of it and a lot of the research points we made in the presentation and that again is kind of hard to capture in a portfolio so it is definitely something I will take with me but I dont know how much it is of a selling point to To investigate students perceptions regarding design history someone else that I did this. while they worked on the interior design studio project and This statement suggests that covering multidimensional aspects to investigate learning outcomes once they had completed the of history and implementing them throughout the interior design project, this study employed focus groups conducted before curriculum may increase appreciation of history among interior and after the interior design project. This study involved interior design students and practitioners over time. It also suggests design students in one studio class. A survey with a larger sample that the topic of history in CIDA Professional Standards 2009 and statistical analysis would increase the external validity of the might be categorised in Section II, Critical Thinking, Professional findings. Values, and Processes, instead of in Core Design and Technical Knowledge.
3. National Council for Interior Design Qualification. Definition of interior design. http://www.ncidq.org/AboutUs/AboutInteriorDesign/ DefinitionofInteriorDesign.aspx. 4. Council for Interior Design Accreditation. Professional Standards 2006 (Grand Rapids, MI: Council for Interior Design Accreditation, 2006): II-10. 5. Council for Interior Design Accreditation. Professional Standards 2009 (Grand Rapids, MI: Council for Interior Design Accreditation, 2009): II-12. 6. Council for Interior Design Accreditation. Professional Standards 2009 : 11-17 7. Beecher, Critical Approach, (1998), Alternative Models, (1999); Carmel-Gilfilen and Portillo, Creating Mature Thinkers, (2010); Findeli, Design History, (1995); Jennings, Case for a Typology of Design, (2007). 8. Jan Jennings. Object Context Design:The State of Interior Design History, An Introduction to the Thematic Issue, Journal of Interior Design 24, no. 2 (1998): 3 9. Jennings. Object Context Design: The State of Interior Design History, An Introduction to the Thematic Issue,. 10. Beecher, Alternative Models, 37-39. 11. Theodore Drab. Prejudice as an Obstacle to Multiculturalism in the Teaching of Design History, Journal of Interior Design 24, no. 2 (1998): 12 12. Beecher, Critical Approach, 4. 13. Beecher, Critical Approach, 10.; Suzie Attiwill, Towards an Interior History, IDEA Journal (2004): 6. 14. Attiwill, Towards an Interior History, 7. 15. Alain Findeli, Design History and Design Studies: Methodological, Epistemological and Pedagogical Inquiry, Design Issues 11 (1995): 60. 16. Jason Meneely, Educating Adaptable Minds: How Diversified Are the Thinking Preferences of Interior Design Students? Journal of Interior Design 35 (2010): 27, 29. 17. Beecher, Alternative Models, 38. 18. Beecher, Alternative Models, 43. 19. Beecher, Alternative Models, 38. 20. Beecher, Alternative Models, 43. 21. David Spendlove, The Locating of Emotion Within a Creative, Learning and Product Orientated Design and Technology Experience: Person, Process, Product, International Journal of Technology & Design Education 18 (2008): 51. 22. Candy Carmel-Gilfilen and Margaret Portillo, Creating Mature Thinkers in Interior Design: Pathways of Intellectual Development, Journal of Interior Design 35 (2010): 3. 23. Spendlove, Emotion Within Design and Technology, 49. 24. Spendlove, Emotion Within Design and Technology, 46.
ConcluSionS
This study demonstrated that interior design studio projects incorporating interior design history have benefits for student learning of design history. First, students can be highly engaged in
NOTES
1. Mary Anne Beecher, Alternative Models of the Past: History/Theory/ Criticism Course, Journal of Interior Design 25 (1999): 39. 2. Beverly Kay Brandt, A Thematic Approach to Teaching Design History in a Multicultural Setting, Journal of Interior Design 24 (1998): 17-18.
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Homes for Life: A critical ecological study of an Independent Living Project

Jill Franz : Queensland University of Technology, Australia
ABSTRACT
In this paper, an ecological lens is applied to an independent living project aiming to provide homes for life for adult children with disabilities. The qualities of the project as ecological praxis are highlighted along with the implications for an open-ended enquiry into ecologies for and of the interior. In terms of the ecological concern for intimate modes of being, interior design is shown to be well placed through its association with environments in which people spend most of their life and through powerful concepts such as interiority and home which link to fundamental existential notions of self and identity. However, despite the interior being a significant generative force, this has not happened to the exclusion of other disciplines. Ignoring territorial urges to claim areas and concepts as ones own, the paper describes how the project has actively encouraged design disciplines to trespass in each others territories. Ecologies for and of the interior, while recognising the need for discipline emphasis, also demand an integrated and collective approach through what is in effect transdisciplinary practice.
This paper is the outcome of applying an ecological lens to an existing project, the Living in Independent Living Project; a process that highlights qualities of the projects ecological praxis while at the same time informing an open-ended enquiry into ecologies of the interior. As background, the paper provides a description of the project; how it has evolved, how it is organised, and what it is aiming to do. It then identifies key ecological concepts and what they mean when applied to the project, procedurally and substantively. The paper concludes by drawing out the implications for the project as it continues to evolve, as well as what it means for the design disciplines such as interior design that are involved in the project.
THe indePendent living PRoject: BackgRound

The project involves three organisations working collaboratively to provide housing that enables adult children with disabilities to live independently and, if they choose, remain in their home for as long as possible. These organisations include a not-for-profit community organisation (Kyabra) described here as the NGO (non-government organisation), which is also the builder for the project; a group of design practitioners offering pro-bono design services (Design Action arm of the Design Institute of Australia, DIA); and a university (Queensland University of Technology, QUT) undertaking procedural and substantive research for the project (Figure 1).
Through its community and social enterprise work, the NGO became increasingly aware of the deepening hopelessness and despondency of parents of adult children with disabilities, and what would happen to their children when the parents could no longer care for them as they had done in a conventional home setting. Contributing to this are the numerous barriers that these families face, including: an inadequate public housing system with families being on waiting lists for over sixteen years; little or no funding available for the personal care support needed for independent living; and a private rental market with no accessible or affordable accommodation. As highlighted by a local universal housing design action group: current housing designs do not work for many people. Families with children, older people, people with a temporary or permanent injury or illness, and people with disability deserve more1. At the time of writing there were 52 families known by the NGO, and in the local area, to be in this situation and who had approached the organisation to help identify possible options. In response,
Above Figure. 1 Independent Living Project - organisational structure
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the independent living collective was formed and commenced exploring the idea of designing and constructing co-located houses; one that would accommodate the parents and the other son or daughter. Supporting this is examination and development of appropriate care, legal and financial models that ensure continuing tenancy and support for the child when the parent or parents died or can no longer provide provide ongoing care for their child.The vision underpinning this is one of a home for life regardless of the type or level of disability.
individual who does not adapt is coping less well than the one who does. As they go on to point out: there are many instances in which people adapt to environmental circumstances they should never be asked to tolerate. Similarly, there is a possibility that failure to adapt may wrongly be attributed to individual pathology or failure rather than to toxic or hostile environmental conditions7. While these limitations need to be considered, ecological theory is useful in reminding us that people are not viewed as passive beings impacted on by the environment but dynamic entities with the relationship being one of reciprocity and mutual accommodation. Added to this is an understanding of the complexity of the environment and of it having extended settings as well as immediate settings8. In the following section, the discussion shifts to an application of these understandings to the independent living project. This ecology of practice or ecological praxis will be discussed in two ways: procedurally in terms of the collective itself, how it is organised and how it operates; and substantively with respect to how it engages with the situation at hand, what it understands as the issues, and so on.
Key ecological concePtS

For many researchers and theorists, the biological notion of ecology as dealing with relationships between organisms and their environment has provided a way of describing and understanding the transactional nature of human-environment interaction, and for some theorists such as Carel Germain, offers a more organic and dynamic world view than systems theory2. As cited in Kemp et al3 from an ecological perspective: People are viewed as interdependent, complementary parts of a whole in which person and environment are constantly changing and shaping the other4. In Germains view the key quality is one of interconnectedness which in relation to people and environment involves a dynamic dialectic relationship. This reflects the position of Kurt Lewin who earlier sought to provide an alternative to the dominant individualistic and reductionist view in his holistic proposition that behaviour is a function of person and environment. Accepting the above position has implications for how we work in and with aspects of our world. Problems need to be recognised as part of a complex web, and attempts to address problems have to be person related as well as environment related. Because of the dynamic nature of the person/ environment interaction, intervention has to be intuitive and generative, inclusive and collaborative, with outcomes viewed in relational terms aimed at flexibility and transformation. From an ecological viewpoint, the environment is multi-layered and multi-faceted, it has temporal dimensions as well as being both physical and social. Issues that at first glance appear to be localised will in fact be connected to broader environments, crossing several boundaries, into other areas such as socialecological justice involving social change and activism. Understanding of the person in this context also demands a preparedness to recognise different yet interwoven aspects: the individual and the collective; the sensing human being as well as the thinking human being; relationships with the environment and other people that are emotional, social and existential as well as physical. There is however potential danger with applying earlier thinking of ecological theory, particularly in relation to the notion of evolutionary adaptation. As Kemp et al5 point out, such thinking connotes adjustment to rather than change in environmental conditions6. Of particular concern is the assumption that successful adaptation equates to health and well-being, and that the
ecological PRaxiS : PRoceduRal aPPRoacH

The vision of the collective is one of a model of collaboration and housing that is inclusive and sustainable. This aligns with the NGOs vision of fair, sustainable communities that instil hope, embrace diversity, promote safety, and in which all people feel a sense of belonging. Values explicitly proclaimed by the organisation include: social justice; respect; cultural recognition; belonging; participation and inclusion (as enshrined in Human Rights and Disability legislation); self-determination; hope; collaboration; innovation; and accountability. The values of participation, inclusion, and the like, are reflected in the decision to adopt a consensus design approach. In this approach, as first formulated by Christopher Day 9, decisions are made not on a democratic vote based on individual views but rather through a consensus of something that is beyond but still acceptable to the individual. Based on the writing of Cooley10, these aspirations of the NGO and the collective, in their concern for intimate modes of being, the body, the environment, and large contextual ensembles relating to such things as the general rights of humanity, provide the basis for an ecological praxis11 and, as will be illustrated, a praxis that is also inherently aesthetic. Citing Grosz12, Cooley13 defines aesthetic as a practice that is close, intimate, internal comprehension of and immersion in the durational qualities of life14. Ecologies of Practice, then, refers to aesthetic practice that evolves in sympathetic relations, i.e. with an attunement to the process of that practice15. This is not a new understanding, as acknowledged by Cooley16 in her references to Henri Bergson17, 18 and his reading of ecologies as a condition of always being in-relation, a condition demanding commitment to aesthetic practice19. The project described in this paper started as a conversation between the NGO project manager and the research coordinator. Informed by an intuitive appreciation of the multi-dimensional
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nature of the task at hand, these people in turn connected with networks they were involved with, attracting other people to form the bones of the collective illustrated in Figure 1. As the project evolved additional people and organisations became involved, including sponsors, suppliers and lawyers. As the collective formed, its complexity became increasingly apparent. Complexity here was seen in relation to, among other things, the size of the group, the heterogeneous nature of the group (different organisations, disciplines, professions, client groups with varying disabilities and family requirements), as well as the nature of the issue itself, associated policy, regulations, and the like. What was developing overall was in fact a dynamic web of relationships involving mind, body, practice, work, community, and the need for flexible inter-relation enabling the potential for change and adaptability20. As pointed out by Cooley21, this notion of adaptability links with Gregory Bateson22 and his concept of ecological health involving the readiness for change necessary for survival, as well as to Guattari23 and what he calls ecological endeavour. While attempts were made in the early stages of the collective to control the complexity by formalising and structuring the development, this often proved frustrating and fruitless. It was almost as though the forming process, or more to the point, the becoming process, had its own logic; one that was essentially intuitive, generative, inventive, evolutive and transformative. As the project continues to proceed, project participants are becoming more attune to allowing future direction to emerge from immersion in and acquaintance with the project, which in turn informs a sympathetic communication between the collective and the world beyond the project. A recent example involves a client family and initial attempts to engage with them and understand their specific needs and aspirations. The family is currently comprised of a mother and father in their early sixties and a daughter (who we will call Kristine) who has lived with them and been cared for by them and a support network all her life. There are also two other adult children who no longer live at home. In order to understand the needs of the family, including the daughter, a meeting was arranged one evening in a meeting room at the NGOs office. The meeting was attended by interior design, industrial design, graphic design and architecture representatives as well as an occupational therapist, the research coordinator of the collective and the design action project manager. It was videotaped with the familys permission. The designers and consultants asked questions of the parents ranging from their understanding of home through to more specific needs and desires (their new home as separate from that of their daughter), as well as Kristines desires regarding her current and future needs and opportunity for learning and personal growth. The meeting lasted approximately two hours. Feedback from the family several days later suggested that they found this process a little too confronting and that they needed to know more about the project and be involved in decisions about how they would participate. In response, a smaller representative group of the collective met with the parents at their home bringing them more fully up to date as well as talking about how they would like to participate in the study.Together the group formulated a more inclusive approach,
in the process acknowledging intuitively that our knowing and being were mutually implicated, that it was a project of reciprocal connectedness needing time and the development of trust, and that the family had to be more involved in all aspects of the project. For Fisher & Owen24, this in effect involved a process of repairing identities that had been spoiled through a lack of recognition and stigmatisation in both private and public spheres25. According to Fisher and Owen, this is a process that should involve acknowledging the range of factors (environmental, socio-economic, physical and emotional) that contribute to the stigmatisation. They further postulate that this process can act to undermine peoples sense of self-worth, which in turn contributes to a closing down of the possibilities for self-transformation and future development26. The challenge then is also an ethical one of pursuing a way of being with and through ones practice, practice which is deeply committed to thinking about the interconnectedness of life and life processes (be they biological or socio-cultural) and the resulting sedimentations that is the artwork [in this case, the building and associated support systems] in its becoming27 Understanding the practice as an ethical one, is an idea that connects with Felix Guattari28 and what he describes as ethico-political articulation29. In terms of the above, the research component plays a significant social justice role30. A deeper investigation of ecological theory confirms the need to make research a dedicated component of the project and for this research to be action-based. This reflects the view that knowledge developed of itself will not be sufficient to change practice or even inform practice, particularly if so-called expert information is inaccessible. The complexity and dynamic nature of person-environment interaction mentioned previously demands that research and practice go hand-in-hand and that the research as well as design practice is participatory and emancipative. Actions taken collaboratively with clientconsumers to effect change and empowerment provide the crucible within which new insights on fundamental processes of human adaptation and change emerge31.The complexity of the project is also evidenced in its ability to sustain the research of two PhD students; one who is undertaking an interior design-focused phenomenological study, and another who is using critical discourse analysis to understand and contribute to relevant Australian and local housing policy. Addressing what is sometimes regarded as a dichotomy, the collective also explicitly negotiates the relationship and inherent tension between the individual private and external professional dimensions of those involved in the project, particularly the design and other consultants on the project, all of whom are volunteering their services outside their normal work responsibilities. An aspect of this negotiation is to see these elements as different subjectivities contributing to the identity of the designer or consultant. Fisher & Owen32, citing Stronach et al33, describe how professional identity itself can be caught between economy of performance, that privies policy frameworks, and ecologies of practice that recognise and value experiential knowledge, in particular the affective and relational aspects of practitioners work. One of the first research activities for the Livingin project was to invite participants to share their experience, motivations and fears in relation
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to the project in the process affirming the value of all aspects of how this is manifest in the project is by involving designers in all their identity and of the need for the project to ensure that these aspects of the house design regardless of their discipline. are recognised and where possible addressed. Owen & Fishers34 position equates this to awareness of the need to open up spaces SuBStantive focuS for recognition through inter-subjective processes of identification. According to Cooley38, the concept of ecologies has several The responses provided by the participants began to illustrate how interconnected meanings, including the original Greek reference the project could enhance their social positioning by enabling a to it in relation to a house or dwelling. As mentioned previously, more positive sense of self through the opportunity to participate the collective decided to use home as a fundamental generative in relationships not normally afforded in their everyday practice; concept. This was considered appropriate for several reasons. an external, public, paid role complemented by an internal, private, First, the longer the children with disabilities could remain in their unpaid caring role. Many saw the project as a means of developing home the less pressure this placed on hospitals and governmentexpertise which would in turn enhance their design their own funded institutional care. In this way home is seen as a form professional design skill and have wider application beyond the of health and social care intervention. Second, home denotes a project. Overall, involvement in the project represented a calling sense of dwelling, inviting and even demanding a more holistic to social change agency 35 and a corporeal generosity or openness and integrated approach to the design and provision of housing. to others. In addition, the collectives approach is at the family and While the project originally started as a response to the need community level as well as the individual level. Unlike traditional for adult children with a disability to remain in a familiar home interventions and policy that equate independence with selfenvironment when their parents could no longer care for them, it sufficiency and overlook inter-subjective processes39, the focus quickly became apparent that this was tied to larger social justice for this project is on the individual, family, carers and others as issues. As highlighted by Pike & Selby36: physical, social, emotional and existential support networks. In the context of our project then, the notions of independence Problems cannot be understood within a simple cause(s) and empowerment are understood more as a positive sense and effect(s) framework. They are locked into a dynamic, of self-emphasis informed by inter-subjective processes, as interwoven and multi-layered web in which interaction and opposed to the individual moving to being totally autonomous relationship are the principle features37. and in control40. By taking this position, the approach challenges managerial discourse prevalent in UK and Australian health and In this sense then, what was originally conceived as an extension disability policy, that for Owen & Fisher41, gives emphasis to of usual professional roles changed to recognition of the need for the public sphere and the role of the citizen as a self sufficient multiple roles; for example, the designer as researcher, the designer individual. This outlook operates at the expense of (in the case as educator, the designer as activist. This recognition of designers of this project) parenthood and the role of family in providing and researchers as social change-makers further reinforced the a meaningful life for their children with disabilities; one based on need to undertake this project in a more integrative and holistic recognition and potential rather than deficiency and stagnancy. way. Further, it highlighted a requirement to accept the need to In contrast, the project explicitly recognises the private/interior work from the local to the international, from the small to the sphere in a relational way with the public/exterior sphere. In large, from the inside to the outside, from a few disciplines to all, the project seeks not to find deficiencies within individuals many disciplines, and ultimately iteratively between and across who might be seen as lacking the ability to live independently; these areas and associated boundaries. One small example of preferring instead to recognise the complexity of peoples lives,
and the role of family and others in supporting all individuals, regardless of their circumstances42. In this respect, it supports a model of citizenship that includes an ethic of caring based on acknowledgement of human interdependencies43 and the development of the ecological self . In contrast, from a psychological perspective, this project regards disconnection as one of the primary sources of human suffering, further supporting Western notions of self rooted in separation, competition, and unbridled devotion to autonomy44. Added to this is an attempt to understand Kristine and her disabilities and capabilities in a more holistic way, recognising that aspects of individuality and the human condition (physical, cognitive, emotional and existential) are interconnected, and that an environmental response to one disability may in fact exacerbate the ability to cope with another disability. In this respect, the project explicitly challenges current Universal Design guidelines that fail to recognise multiple and interconnected disabilities, preferring to focus almost exclusively on access and mobility aspects. While research exists about the relationship between disability and the environment, this tends to be somewhat homogenous with little information: on the varied experience of disabled persons [sic] within their everyday environments or life-space45 However, of the studies that have been undertaken, what has emerged is increasing recognition of the role of the environment in the personal redefinitions that accompany chronic illness [or increasing disability]46 and how environmental experiences underline and perpetuate social divisions between the able and the disabled [sic] 47.
a crucial role to play. The action research model, adopted as the umbrella methodology for the project, is well placed for critical exploration and evaluation of the operation of the collective as well as of the substantive aspects and the ultimate goal of effecting social change.The latter will involve explicit investigation into how we can facilitate the designers and other project participants in using their multifaceted identities to, as described by Gardner50, navigate complex environments and strengthen integrative change. Adopting an ecological perspective has highlighted the recurrent interplay of movement and complementarity between: hermeneutic and critical interpretative processes the whole and the particular of participants experiences the collective and the individual the intuitive/emotive/creative and the analytical/intellectual structured the context (or scene) and the plot (or action) the inner and outer domains the strengths and limitations51
In relation to design practice, the focus shifts to increasing the responsiveness of the physical environment while being cognisant of its connection to other physical environments, the social environment and the potential of all people concerned to learn and grow. Professional intervention is understood to be concerned with: (1) liberating, supporting, and enhancing peoples adaptive capacities (coping), and (2) increasing the responsiveness of social and physical environments to peoples needs52. Ecological theory also highlights the need ImPlicationS for environmental intervention to help clients review their Reflecting on this project from an ecological perspective, it is environments in order to participate more fully in their shaping now apparent how emotional work48 constitutes a significant and associated meaning making. component of the labour required to develop ecologies of practice but how these also involve considerable organisational Overall, the ecological lens has brought into focus the need to and practical dimensions49. The challenge then is how to do move beyond familiar spheres and build alliances between and both things without one impacting in a negative way on the across sectors such as environmental and social justice53, and at other, but rather informing the other in positive and constructive macro and micro levels, recognising that in many cases there are ways. As believed, the research component of our collective has global forces such as capitalism at the root of social and other
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injustices54. This is of particular relevance for the Livingin project, and all the design disciplines involved, as it currently grapples with its not-for-profit status while seeking to generate funds through social enterprise activities which ultimately are utilised to sustain the organisation.
8. Kemp. S., Whittaker, J. & Tracy, E. Person-Environment Practice (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997): 70. 9. Day, Christopher, Consensus Design: Socially Inclusive Process (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2003). 10. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice: 267-276. 11. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice: 269. 12. Grosz, E. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). What does this mean for a specific discipline such as interior 13. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice. design? With a focus on the ecological concern for intimate 14. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice: 270. modes of being, interior design is well placed through its 15. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice: 271. association with environments in which people spend most of 16. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice. their life, and through powerful concepts such as interiority 17. Bergson, H. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover which link to fundamental existential notions of self and identity. Publications, 1998[1911]). 18. Bergson, H. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of As evidenced in this project, the interior has been a generative Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Dover Publications, force but not to the exclusion of other disciplines. Ignoring 2001[1913]). territorial urges to claim areas and concepts as ones own, the 19. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice. project has actively encouraged design disciplines to trespass in 20. 21. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice. each others territories and experiment with a range of discipline22. Bateson, G. Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of specific concepts. Ecologies for, and of, the interior while being Chicago Press, 2000[1972]). aware of the need for discipline autonomy, also recognise the 23. Guattari, F. The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton many benefits of multidisciplinary even transdisciplinary practice. (London: Continuum, 2007 [1989]). 24. Fisher, P. & Owen, J. Empowering interventions in health and social care: Recognition through ecologies of practice. Social Science & Medicine, AcknowledgementS 67(12), (2008): 2063-2071. 25. Fisher, P. & Owen, J. Empowering interventions in health and social In writing this paper I wish to recognise the selfless contribution care: Recognition through ecologies of practice. Social Science & Medicine, of my fellow colleagues involved in the independent living project, 67(12), (2008), 2064. Fisher, P. & Owen, J. Empowering interventions in health and social and the courage, trust, immense goodwill and generosity of the 26. care: Recognition through ecologies of practice. Social Science & Medicine, participating families. 67(12), (2008),2064. 27. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice. Journal of Visual Culture, 7(3), (2010), 273. NOTES 28. Guattari, F. The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London: Continuum, (2007[1989]). 1. Queensland Action for Universal Housing Design, Position Statement, 29. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice: 267 and 268. http://www.qauhd.org/sites/default/files/QAUHD_Our%20Position_3Mar11.pdf 30. Kemp. S., Whittaker, J. & Tracy, E. Person-Environment Practice (New Accessed 21st March 2010. York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997) 203. 2. Kemp. S., Whittaker, J. & Tracy, E. Person-Environment Practice 31. Kemp. S., Whittaker, J. & Tracy, E. Person-Environment Practice, 203. (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997): 42. 32. Fisher, P. & Owen, J. Empowering interventions in health and social 3. Kemp. S., Whittaker, J. & Tracy, E. Person-Environment Practice : 42. care: Recognition through ecologies of practice, 4. Germain, C. Space: An ecological variable in social work practice. 67(12), (2008). Social Casework, 59, (1978): 539. 33. Stronach, I., Corbin, B., McNamara, O., Stark, S. & Warne, T. Towards 5. Kemp. S., Whittaker, J. & Tracy, E. Person-Environment Practice an uncertain politics of professionalism: teacher and nurse identities in flux. 6. Gould, K. Life model vs. conflict model: A feminist perspective. Social Journal of Educational Policy, 7(1), (2002):110-138. Work , 32, (1987): 43. 34. Fisher, P. & Owen, J. Empowering interventions in health and social 7. Gould, K. Life model vs. conflict model: A feminist perspective: 43.
care: Recognition through ecologies of practice, 67(12), (2008). 35. Gardner, M. Linking Activism (New York: Routledge, 2005):10. 36. Pike, G. & Selby, D. Global Teacher, Global Learner (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988) 4. 37. Gardner, M. Linking Activism (New York: Routledge, 2005) 4. 38. Cooley, H. Ecologies of practice. Journal of Visual Culture 7(3), (2010): 273. 39. Fisher, P. & Owen, J. Empowering interventions in health and social care: Recognition through ecologies of practice, 67(12), (2008), 2063-2071. 40. Fisher, P. & Owen, J. Empowering interventions in health and social care: Recognition through ecologies of practice, 67(12), (2008), 2063-2071. 41. Fisher, P. & Owen, J. Empowering interventions in health and social care: Recognition through ecologies of practice, 67(12), (2008), 2063-2071. 42. Fisher, P. & Owen, J. Empowering interventions in health and social care: Recognition through ecologies of practice, 67(12), (2008), 2063-2071. 43. Fisher, P. & Owen, J. Empowering interventions in health and social care: Recognition through ecologies of practice, 67(12), (2008), 2063-2071. 44. Jordan, J. Relational awareness: transforming disconnection, in Linking Activism, Gardner, M. (New York: Routledge, 2005):17. 45. Kemp. S., Whittaker, J. & Tracy, E. Person-Environment Practice:186. 46. Kemp. S., Whittaker, J. & Tracy, E. Person-Environment Practice: 187. 47. Kemp. S., Whittaker, J. & Tracy, E. Person-Environment Practice :189. 48. Hochschild, A. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). 49. Fisher, P. & Owen, J. Empowering interventions in health and social care: Recognition through ecologies of practice, 67(12), (2008): 2063-2071. 50. Gardner, M. Linking Activism. 51. Gardner, M. Linking Activism: 22, 23. 52. Kemp. S., Whittaker, J. & Tracy, E. Person-Environment Practice :42. 53. Gardner, M. Linking Activism:189. 54. Gardner, M. Linking Activism:196.
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Book Review
Interior Design: a critical introduction by Clive Edwards
Oxford, Berg Publishers, 2010 Reviewed by Mark Taylor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
This book is another contribution to the growing influence of interior design/interior architecture within architectural education and practice. It also contributes to the number of introductory publications including Dorothy Stepat-DeVan, Introduction to Interior Design (1980), Stanley Abercrombie, A Philosophy of Interior Design, (1990) and the Basics Interior Architecture series by Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone. Others in this field include Dianna Rowntree, Interior Design (1964), Stanley Abercrombie, A philosophy of Interior Design (1990) and Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone, What is interior Design? (2010) as well as those that are aimed at equipping the reader on how to establish and run an interior design practice. As interiors gains popularity in the public mind, the practice of defining interior decoration/design/ architecture is not simple. For example some books have claimed there is little in the way of theory, or construct history in the shadow of architecture, whereas others have exposed broad areas of theory and complex histories (Sparke, Rice, Massey, Taylor and Preston). The place of sceneography, photography and cinematic spaces (Hannah, Mulvey, Shonfield) have also been identified as contributing to the discourse, as has the political, social and sexual examination of space (Hayden, Meade, Colomina, Hartzell, Berrett-Brown). While much of this work has revealed the interior as a fertile and contested ground of criticism as well as practice, other academics have begun to question the delimitation of the interior through enclosing walls, and the nature of containment. In Interior Design: a critical introduction, Clive Edwards proposes a critical transdisciplinary approach to examining the design of interior architectural spaces, their furnishings and equipment, as undertaken by interior designers.There are twelve chapters which seem to reflect three areas; firstly the history
of the interior, the profession and the professional practice of interior design (the business end), secondly the process of design generally and interior design specifically, and thirdly elemental aspects of the interior such as colour, light, decoration and space. Sustainability has a chapter of its own and covers general understandings of sustainable practice, design process and materials.Throughout the book there are a number of strategically placed short prcis of important or influential figures, and a number of case studies describing interiors relative to the chapter theme. In the introduction Edwards surveys some recent findings and proposals about the interior, defining the difference between interior decoration/design/architecture, and issues that seems to preoccupy those intent on claiming territories and drawing professional boundaries. While this is an informative discussion the constant anxiety over who said what about whom, does not demonstrate a disciplines maturity. The second and third chapters offer respectfully, a history of the interior and the development of the profession. Acknowledging the possibility of multiple histories and the problems of Western centric style focused linear histories, the author presents a traditional synchronic framework, especially in relationship to styles and trends from the nineteenth century to the present day. The profession and design education is similarly treated, but focuses on both North American and UK developments nothing about Europe, Australia, Asia or Central and South America. While I acknowledge an in-depth analysis of professional development outside the US and UK might be beyond the scope of this book, it might go some way to answering the critical component of the title, even if that criticism pointed to the need for such a study.
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Chapters 4 and 5 provide an insight into general processes of design, and interior design in particular. Despite confirming that design processes vary, there does seem to be some blurring between design as abstraction and process and design as material practice. This in itself is not a problem if the critical approach examines these relative to various theoretical formulations. For example the problem of linear design processes is dealt with by outlining a general model and noting the limitations of such abstract models in reality. However the detailed examination of a design process (Chapter 5) immediately reverts to a linear model that mirrors traditional practice. What it does not do is examine critical practice or research-led practice that might adopt new techniques and technologies to advance design outcomes. Further the premise for design is based upon slightly dated principles such as proportion, balance, symmetry and axis that underscore classical readings of architecture. While I am not against the historical significance of such ideas, and their impact on the built environment, we also have to look at the effects of new mathematics informed by non-Euclidean geometry, and rapid prototyping. What design currently has is the ability to compute complex mathematical forms very quickly, and thereby offer an alternative framework around parametric design, and file to file manufacturing. Having said that, the case studies in this chapter leave a lot to be desired, they are certainly not exemplary projects, and should have illustrated a more critical approach to either the traditions espoused, or offered new formulations. As the book shifts into the more elemental sections on Space, Colour and Light, the historical tone that introduces each chapter gives way to the didactical. When describing the contributions of philosophers and psychologists to the understanding of space the authors position is not clear on how such ideas inform thoughts on spatial organisation and wayfinding. That is, the examples lack discussion about how theories might inform design practice, even the broader aspects of interior design practice (urban interiors, performance, narrative, installation and art practice). In a similar manner the chapter on Colour provides a short introduction to colour history/theory and psychology, before reverting to an empirically driven statement about colour planning. To some extent these later chapters exemplify a problematic raised by the challenge of the book: how do you present a critical introduction to a discipline that is only just beginning to articulate its activities? To some extent a good concluding chapter would have been more effective than leaving the reader adrift after the final chapter on The business of interior design. It might have been worth examining current design teaching and research emanating from tertiary institutions. Despite these questions I have raised, Interior Design: a critical introduction deserves a readership. While I have no doubt it will assist first year students orientate themselves to the expectations of traditional practice, interior design clearly needs a second, more inspirational volume that unpacks a more critical academic and research orientated approach to the discipline.
Publication Review
Inventario: Tutto progetto Everything is a project
Creator: Beppe Finessi Editor: Corraini http://www.inventario-bookzine.com Reviewed by Eleonora Lupo, Polytechnico di Milano, Italy
The list as representation system is an expedient presentation alternative to the showing of a finished form, which is referential and closed in on itself. In literature, Umberto Ecos reading of Homers Iliad, among a number of citations related to biblical scriptures, illustrates the contrast between the description of the shield of Achilles and the power of the Greek army. The first description is shaped by enumeration of the shield world [even if the incredible number of represented scenes makes it difficult to reproduce it visually], The second is a list or a catalogue made of countable items that we can not enumerate specifically the ships of the Greek army, and suggests the physically infinite perceived through the indefinite.1 The need to postulate an aesthetic infinite of an objective kind is related to the shortcomings of the inventory and not to a subjective feeling about the sublime to which the representative modality of the list responds. The recent Italian publishing project, Inventario, situated between book and magazine is curated by Beppe Finessi and published by Corraini with the support of Foscarini. Drawing reference from the example sourced from Ecos writing translated to the physical and material field, the subtitle Tutto progetto Everything is a project, expands upon the infinite list when it
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says everything is design. In fact, the rhetoric of representation through visual lists that permeates the history of the entire production and experience of the arts and human creativity, from the painting collections of Giovanni Pannini, to the lists of wonders, to the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warbug, returns in the name and on the cover of Issue No. 1, is a visual inventory, a collection of flower pots, adopting and interpreting in such a way a modality, now back in vogue, to tell the stories of artefacts through catalogues or reviews. At the scale of the object of use the editorial work of Clive, Hansen and Mendell in the book Hidden Forms questions, through the photographs that are almost synopses, the significance of collection and storage for the definition and specification of the values of the objects.2 Unlike the logic of the list that corresponds to a primitive, yet necessary, form of organisation in which many different properties align without establishing any hierarchical relationship among them (in a similar logic to the set theory), the inventoried collection corresponds with an order of sensory experience that has a very specific function. The value derived from collecting in relation to the category of completeness as opposed to utility is flanked by the value of classification ordered by type, category and exemplar, according to taxonomic rules.
or The Architecture of Art on those situations of art and architecture interface and Good design about nature and design and finally on the photographic practice in Other Gazes.
through the manner of collecting and presentation according to museological logic. 3 Inventario, moves beyond concern with reflecting upon the status of contemporary forms of art, to adopt a museological practice through the gaze of the scholar and the ethnographer and field researcher of design who can go in depth Technical Matters shows the construction aspects of a project and identify design behaviours beyond the specific discipline Life as a project, in which passions, struggles and dreams become projects. From the techniques of display the visual and narrative tricks needed to build around each repertory a specific story is borrowed, almost like a temporary exhibition, capable of both cross-fertilization and completeness, and able to explore language coherent to content, to set up a catchy yet sophisticated and expressive poetic. In this sense the Inventario project is an interior, a series of rooms functionally characterized in which contemporary interdisciplinary research finds the space and visibility to debate the ethics of the aesthetics of the project.
Moreover, even as the inventory is primarily a quantitative and qualitative recording of a given collection, at the same time Inventario functions to easily find, track and retrieve, typically a quality of the archive. Sorting and filtering can actually make possible the act of effectively preserving to allow consultation when needed. Therefore Inventario, more than a list, becomes a repertoire of design forms where the repertoire, compared to the archive, has a use-value that is related also to the future possible. New forms can be inspired by or come from the intertwining of traced paths, and not just limited to the documentation value. In this sense, Inventario is a co-existent approach to the synchronic and diachronic repertoire: it intertwines the typological and classificatory matrix with the temporal dimension of historical research, building lists and taxonomies that are collections over time, or evolutionary series of forms of project. Presentations such as New Masters and Near Future are included on the production of the most interesting protagonists of the project, both established and emerging. Inventories by Authors or Construction by Clues describe in detail the multifaceted If the scientific classification of things is structured on the basis production of selected architects and designers [in the first of formal, structural or functional configuration, in Inventario issue, Attilio Stocchi and Guy Rottier, respectively], or Theory on these rules are the result of an innovative and sophisticated methodological and disciplinary aspects. approach to interpret and narrate the world of design: an original leitmotiv that traces interdisciplinary paths between design, art, But if this were not enough to describe this editorial approach architecture and photography. Stories of designers, exemplary that pursues critical research on how to represent and organize works, analysis of recent projects at the different scales from the variety of project, theres more. And its all in the word objects, interiors and buildings assume all the risk in order to represent. Inventario is designed as a visual device to show its convey an independent and deliberate critique offered from time collections. In fact it consists exclusively of columns, [boxes designed to host only content explicitly sought and ordered to time by a variety of different critics and designers. in a certain way], which in a sense function as windows in a By this logic columns such as Normal wonders are included, project of overall exhibition. To sort and display corresponds borrowed from Alessandro Mendini to indicate the astonishing to a practice that is redeemed by the exclusive specificity collections of everyday objects, Bagatelle collections around a of the museological field to expand different forms of seemingly minor issues such as swings, Absolutes emblematic communication; above all to those of contemporary artistic works, One thing leads to another about forgotten objects, production, in which, through what James Putnam calls Judicious pairing, on the relationships between art and design museum effect the value is attributed to the work of art
NOTES
1. Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists, (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2009) 2. Franco Clivio, Hans Hansen and Pierre Mendell, Hidden Forms: Seeing and Understanding Things (Writings on Design), (Basel: Birkhauser, 2009) 3. James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001)
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Biographies
Kyuho Ahn is an Assistant Professor of Interior Architecture at the University of Oregon. His research and practice lie in the area of exhibition and commercial design, with emphasis on consumer response to environmental stimuli, Atmospherics, and cultural studies. He previously taught interior design at Oklahoma State University and California State University, Fresno. His professional work includes a Korean Airlines exhibit, LG Electronics brand shops, SK grocery stores, SsangYong Motors exhibits, and an LG semiconductor museum. Suzie Attiwill is Associate Professor and Program Director of Interior Design, RMIT School of Architecture and Design, Melbourne, Australia. Suzie has an independent practice involving the design of exhibitions, curatorial work, writing and working on a range of interdisciplinary projects in Australia and overseas. Publications include: Urban and Interior: techniques for an urban interiorist Urban Interior. Informal explorations, interventions and occupations Germany: Spurbuchverlag, 2011; Spatial Relations in Making Space: artist run initiatives in Victoria Australia: VIA-N, 2007; and co-editor with Gini Lee,INSIDEOUT IDEA Journal 2005, Brisbane: QUT Press, 2005. From 1996 to 1999, she was the inaugural Artistic Director of Craft Victoria and editor of the journal Craft. Suzie is the current chair of IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association - www. idea-edu.com), a founding member of the Urban Interior research group - www.urbaninterior.net and a member of the Design Institute of Australia Andrea Branzi, architect and designer was born in Florence in 1938, where he graduated in 1966. Since 1973 he has been living and working in Milan. From 1964 to 1974 he was part of Archizoom Associates, the avant-garde group whose projects are currently preserved at the Centre for Communication Studies and Archives at the University of Parma, and his thesis and several projects are kept at the Centre Georges Pompidou Paris. Co-founder of Domus Academy, the first international school of post-graduate design he has authored numerous books on the history and theory of Design, and has curated numerous exhibitions of this sector Italy and abroad. In 1987 he received the Career Golden Compass. He is Professor and Chairman at the Faculty of Interior Design at the Politecnico di Milano. Annette Condello lectures in design, culture and research methods in the Department of Architecture at the School of the Built Environment, Curtin University, Perth, Australia. Her scholarship focuses upon the architectural transformation of luxury in the ancient world and
its impact on the modern and contemporary West. She is also exploring the architectural dialogue with cuisine, spoils, glamour and fashion in Southern Europe, the Americas, Australia and currently the Philippines. Rachel Carley completed her PhD in Architecture in 2006. Her thesis, Whitereads Soundings of Architecture, moulds a series of contours between the British artist Rachel Whitereads sculptures and architectural discourse. Soundings are taken in order to explore the complex ways in which the artist enlists architectural drawing and modelling practices to shed light on the rich interior lives of quotidian spaces and typological structures frequently overlooked. Current post doctoral research critically examines the relationship between literary constraints (in particular the work of George Perec) and interior design studio pedagogy. Since 1994, Carley has also been designing slip cast, earthenware ceramics that have been extensively published in New Zealand design magazines. Dr Jill Franz is a Professor in the School of Design, Faculty of Built Environment & Engineering, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. She has extensive experience in senior management at the discipline, school and faculty level as well as in design research, curriculum development and teaching. She has successfully supervised 3 PhD students and 3 Masters students to completion and is currently supervising 11 PhD students undertaking research in a range of areas including: design and healthy environments; architectural design methodology and practice; universal design and design for disability; work environments and productivity; design discourse and education; library environments and education; domestic violence and the built environment. In terms of her own practice, Jill has approximately thirty years in design and design research, focusing on socially responsible design and the experiential relationship of people and environment. Specifically, she has had extensive involvement in various design practice and research projects to do with developing design interventions to support independent community living for people with disabilities and the development of participatory and consensus approaches to design and design education.Through this research and community-based project work, she has worked with a broad cross-section of stakeholders including public sector and private sector groups, local business people, academics, professional designers, consultants from a variety of disciplines as well as the end-users of specific project outcomes. Jill has also just completed several terms as Executive Editor of the international IDEA Journal (ERA Arated). Dr Hlne Frichots research examines the transdisciplinary field between architecture and philosophy. Her first degree is in architecture, and she practiced as a graduate architect in Perth, Western Australia, throughout the 1990s. Returning to study philosophy, and literary, cultural and critical theory, she completed a PhD in philosophy at the University of Sydney (2004). With Esther Anatolitis (CEO Melbourne Fringe) she has co-curated the Architecture + Philosophy Public Lecture Series since 2005. Hlne has lectured in architectural design, theory and history in Australian universities since 1995, including UWA, Curtin University, University of Melbourne
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and RMIT University. She has also been an affiliated researcher at TU Berlin (2009). Hlne is part of the DRI (Design Research Institute) research flagship Mediated City. Mihyun Kang is an Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University. She holds a PhD in interior design from University of Minnesota, a MA in interior design from Iowa State University, and a BS in housing and interior design from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. She has commercial interior design experience that includes work in Korea and the United States. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of California Davis. Her research focuses on sustainable interior design and methodological exploration and utilization for special population. She has presented at national and international conferences and has published in several scholarly journals. Dr Gini Lee is a landscape architect and interior designer and is the Elisabeth Murdoch Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Melbourne. As the past Professor of Landscape Architecture at Queensland University of Technology she focused on landscape design and theory regarding the curation and postproduction of complex landscapes and interiors. As the former Head of School at the University of South Australia she was involved in spatial interior design and cultural and critical landscape architecture studies. Her PhD entitled The Intention to Notice: the collection, the tour and ordinary landscapes, investigated ways in which designed interiors and landscapes are incorporated into the cultural understandings of individuals and communities. She is a registered landscape architect, executive editor of the IDEA Journal, a member of the Queensland Heritage Council and chair of art + place for Arts Queensland. Eleonora Lupo, Assistant Professor of Design at the Politecnico di Milano, Ph.D. in Industrial Design and Multimedia Communication at the Indaco Dept. of Politecnico di Milano. In 2008 Visiting Researcher and Lecturer at the School of Design Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests are focused on the innovative role of design as a strategic and community centred approach in the enhancement of tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage. In particular where design processes, strategies and techniques improve sustainable cultural heritage awareness and development towards implementing local knowledge and creative and artistic activities. She teaches at the School of Design of Milano Politecnico and has participated in many national and international research programs and attended several International Conferences. Lubomir Popov is an Associate Professor in the Interior Design Program, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, U.S.A. He holds Ph.D. degrees in Sociology and Architecture. His research examines sociocultural aspects of built environment for the purpose of applying such knowledge in facilities programming. Currently he is exploring a wide range of related areas that include the philosophy of sociospatial interactions, sociospatial structures of human
activity, user needs, user culture, and organisational design. Dr. Popov has published three related monographs: Facility Programming as Sociospatial Planning (1999), The Culture of Facility Programming Clients (2001) and The Architecture Student Culture (2003). Janine Randerson is an Auckland based artist who works with a range of time-based media including 16mm film, digital audio and video and computer programmed interaction design. Her art practice includes both site-specific work and single channel video. She has exhibited in galleries in New Zealand, Australia, Holland, Germany and Thailand as well as site specific locations. An interest in the effects of technologies of observation on aural and visual perception is a recurrent theme in her work: from remote satellite imaging to the sonification of micro-meteorological data. In 2005 Janine received a fellowship to work with postgraduate computer science students at the University of Canterbury to examine the intersection of video installation and interactive technology. Recently she has also collaborated with climatologists as the digital artist in residence at the University of Waikato. Janine is currently a Lecturer in Art and Design at UNITEC, where she teaches art and design history, theory and research practice. Chiara Rubessi is PhD student of Universit Stendhal - Grenoble 3, UFR Lettres et arts. She obtained her Masters Degree in Modern Literature from the University of Pavia in History and criticism of cinema, and a further Masters Degree Specializing in Exhibition Design from the Politecnico di Milano. She currently works as exhibit designer and collaborate with IDEA, Italian Association for Exhibition Designer. She then collaborated with Department of Progettazione dellArchitettura (DPA), Politecnico di Milano. Among other initiatives, she is designer for art exhibition Edward Hopper at Foundation Rome Museum (February-June, 2010). Research interests concern museum and exhibition design, museography, cinema and architecture, spatial practices, social and cultural antropology, contemporary art and aesthetics. She was editor of www. interiorsforumworld.net, a web platform for Interior studies. Leon van Schaik AO LFRAIA,RIBA, PhD, is Professor of Architecture (Innovation Chair) at RMIT, from which base he has promoted local and international architectural culture through design practice research and through advising on the commission of architects. Writings include monographs compiled on Edmond and Corrigan, Ushida Findlay, Guilford Bell, Tom Kovac, Poetics in Architecture, The Practice of Practice, Sean Godsell (Electa 2004), John Wardle (T&H 2008) and Denton Corker Marshall: Non-fictional Narratives (Birkhauser 2008). Recent books Mastering Architecture and Design City Melbourne are published by Wiley Academy, as is Spatial Intelligence (2008). His latest book is Procuring Innovative Architecture, co-authored with Geoffrey London and Beth George (Routledge 2010). Susan Sherringham has worked as an interior and spatial designer in cross-disciplinary practices for over 20 years. Currently she is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She is the Project Leader on an Australian
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Learning and Teaching Council Priority Project concerning the design and evaluation of learning spaces. Her current postgraduate research focuses on adaptive expertise, systems thinking, organizational learning, life-long learning and design culture. Igor Siddiqui is a designer and educator whose current research, teaching, and practice consider the contemporary interior as a framework for negotiating issues in industrial design with those of architecture. His work investigates the role of digital media in the design process from visual representation to material fabrication. He has lectured, exhibited and published internationally. Prior to his appointment as Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, he taught at the California College of the Arts, Parsons the New School for Design, New York Institute of Technology, Transart Institute at Danube University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from Tulane University, followed by a post-professional Master of Architecture degree from Yale University. Susan C Stewart is a theorist and academic in the Design School of the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building, at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research interests include design theory, embedding theory in practice, spatial and material culture, design history, practice theory, design for sustainable everyday practices, ethics and the cultivation of judgment. Susan practiced architecture for six years before returning to the academy to gain a doctorate and pursue her passion for design within critical and educational contexts. Mark Taylor is Associate Professor, Interior Design at Queensland University of Technology and is completing his PhD on Mary Haweis at University of Queensland. He trained as an architect and has published widely on design and the interior, including nineteenth-century perceptions of the interior and contemporary use of digital technologies and surface effects. He recently coedited with Julieanna Preston, Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (John Wiley, 2006) and is currently editing Interior Design & Architecture: Critical & Primary Sources, 4 vols, (Berg 2012). Other publications include Diagramming the Interior in Diagrams of Architecture (John Wiley 2010), Frederic Leightons Narcissus Room in Performance Fashion and the Modern Interior (Berg 2011) and Literary Interiors in The Handbook of Interior Design (Berg 2012). He has coconvened with Gini Lee two international symposiums, Interior Spaces in Other Places (Brisbane 2010) and FLOW 2 (Melbourne 2012). Kirsty Volz is a graduate of the Masters of Architecture program at the Queensland University of Technology. While having worked in both architecture and interior design for a number of years, Kirsty has also worked with theatre companies in set and production design. Having experienced the tension that often exists between the designer and the dramatist she developed an interest in the relationship between architecture and the theatre. Kirsty currently works as a tutor in theory, architecture and interior design studios as well as running a collaborative studio in theatre production design.
Lois Weinthal is an Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor for the Master of Interior Design Program in the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin. From 2007 2009 she was Director of the BFA and MFA Interior Design Programs at Parsons The New School for Design. Her practice, Weinthal Works, focuses on the relationships between architecture, interiors, clothing and objects, resulting in works that take on an experimental nature. Weinthal is editor of an interior design theory reader, Toward a New Interior: An Anthology of Interior Design Theory (2011) and co-editor of After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design (2011) with Kent Kleinman and Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, both published by Princeton Architectural Press. Weinthal received her B.Arch and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and M.Arch from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
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Idea jouRnal 2010 InteRioR EcologieS : EXPOSING THE EVOLUTIONARY INTERIOR IDEA JouRnal AccePtS DESIGN RESEARCH PAPERS that demonstrate development and engagement with interior design/interior architecture history, theory, education and practice through critique and synthesis. The focus is on the documentation and critical review of both speculative research and practice-based research Design Research Paper: 4,000 to 6,000 words plus images as appropriate; and Visual Essay: 1,000 to 2,000 words plus up to 4 image pages depending upon format required by author. REFEREED STUDIOS that represent the nature and outcomes of refereed design studios which have either been previously peer reviewed in situ and/or critically discussed through text and imagery for the IDEA JOURNAL. Refereed Studios: 2,000 to 3,000 words plus up to 3 image pages depending upon format required by author. PROJECT REVIEWS that critically evaluate design-based works which seek to expand the nature of spatial and theoretical practice in interior design/interior architecture and associated disciplines. Project Reviews: 2,000 to 3,000 words plus up to 3 image pages depending upon format required by author. PROPOSALS FOR BOOK AND PUBLICATION REVIEWS to encourage debate into the emerging literature dedicated to the expression and expansion of the theory and practice of interior design/interior architecture Book Reviews: 1,000 to 2,000 words RefeReeing PRoceSS Each IDEA member university publicises the Call for Papers widely and encourages submissions from its academic staff, postgraduate students and the wider national and international multi-disciplinary academic design community. Expressions of Interest are initially called for and an abstract outlining title, a concise summary of the project or paper and a brief biography is required. Abstracts are acknowledged but not peer reviewed. Following receipt of the completed paper, the Executive Editor arranges for its anonymous assessment by at least two peer referees. Referees are selected for their acknowledged expertise and experience in scholarly and design academic review. The anonymity of author and referee are maintained at all times throughout the double-blind process. Referees submit confidential reports directly to the Executive Editor by a required date. The Editorial Advisory Committee meets to review final paper selection and accepts the submissions that receive majority support from referees and/or are of critical value to the Journal theme in the majority of the Committees expert opinion. Referees reports are made available to applicants. The decision of the IDEA JOURNAL Editorial Advisory Committee is final, with no correspondence entered into regarding the awarded status of the submissions. The Executive Editor received 45 Expressions of Interest, which resulted in 24 submissions with 9 full papers and one visual essay subject to double blind refereeing finally accepted. The PROVOCATIONS by Andrea Branzi, Leon van Schaik, Lois Weinthal, Suzie Attiwill and Janine Randerson are contributions invited to expand the critical perspective on Interior Ecologies : Exposing the Evolutionary Interior CRITERIA FOR ACCEPTANCE OF FULL PAPER Does the work address and expand the IDEA JOURNAL 2010 provocation, Interior Ecologies: Exposing the Evolutionary Interior? Does the work contribute to the discipline of interior design/interior architecture? Does the work present critical selection of precedent and provide contextual rationale? Is there is scholarly reflection leading to the exposure of new findings and arguments? Does the work meet high standards of scholarship through substantiated and critically discussed content? Is the work professionally structured and presented: well written; free of grammatical and spelling errors; work of other authors have been cited appropriately; relevant literature is cited; references are well explained in relation to context and images appropriate to content?
CITATION The documentary-note (humanities) system of the Chicago Manual of Style Edition 15 is the adopted citation style. The Chicago-Style Citation Guide is available at http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html COPYRIGHT Author/s or their nominated university retain copyright ownership in the works submitted to the IDEA JOURNAL, and provide the IDEA JOURNAL of the Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association with a non-exclusive licence to use the work for the purposes listed below: Made available/published electronically on the IDEA JOURNAL web site. Published as part of the IDEA JOURNAL publication to be distributed both locally and internationally Stored in an electronic database, website, CD/DVD, which comprises post print journal articles to be used for publishing of the Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association.
Reproduction is prohibited without written permission of the publisher, the authors or their nominated university.The work submitted for review should not have been published or be in the process of being reviewed by another publisher. Authors are to ensure that any images used in the paper have copyright clearance. RefeReeS Associate Professor Suzie Attiwill, RMIT University, Australia Dr Rachel Carley, UNITEC, New Zealand Associate Professor Lynn Chalmers, University of Manitoba, Canada Dr Lynn Churchill, Curtin University, Australia Associate Professor Joanne Cys, University of South Australia, Australia Professor Jill Franz, Queensland University of Technology, Australia Susan Hedges, UNITEC, New Zealand Ed Hollis, Edinburgh College of Art, UK Rachel Hurst, University of South Australia, Australia Professor Kay Lawrence, University of South Australia, Australia Marissa Lindquist, Queensland University of Technology, Australia Professor Stephen Loo, University of Tasmania, Australia Terry Meade, University of Brighton, United Kingdom Christina Mackay, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Gill Matthewson, WelTec, New Zealand Associate Professor Julieanna Preston, Massey University, New Zealand Associate Professor Dianne Smith, Curtin University, Australia Ro Spankie, University of Westminster, United Kingdom Associate Professor Mark Taylor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia Associate Professor Laurene Vaughan, RMIT University, Australia

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Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 INTERIOR ECOLOGIES : EXPOSING THE EVOLUTIONARY INTERIOR

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

Interior Ecologies: exposing the evolutionary interior

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

Spatial culture, learning and design: shifting ecologies of practice

. . man is an animal, suspended in webs of significance he has spun . . .1

THe dynamicS of SPatial exPeRience

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

DeSign and ecological cHange

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

Silent Witness: Rachel Whitereads Nameless Library

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

OBjectionS to tHe MemoRial

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

Reading NameleSS LiBRaRy

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

THe CoRneR PRoBlem

THe BunkeR and MemoRial aS SuRvival MacHineS

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

Leon van Schaik

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

Tessellated Floorscape (2010-): interior acts of production, siting and participation

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

Above Figure 9: Student participant assembling portions of the rug

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies

THe TeRRitoRial ImPeRative