INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE- AN ARCHITECT'S PERSPECTIVE
Interior architecture is concerned with the design of habitable spaces across a sliding scale, from that of a domestic environment to vast public interiors. At the scale of a building, it deploys the principles of architecture design, where form, structure and enclosure are considered in proximity to materials, objects, human needs and experience in the process of designing from the inside out. The re-orientation challenges architecture as an autonomous object driven solely by its formal language, and reaffirms the centrality of human experience. Designing from the inside out underscores the profound relationship between architectural space, the human senses and the geography of everyday life, which is often overlooked and difficult to grapple with when our relationship to architecture now is limited to fleeting encounters in an architectural rendering, between the pages of a magazine, on a website or a blog.
Depending on where one anchors interior architecture along the scale of spatial engagements, the sensibilities, knowledge, skills and outcomes can vary widely. Even for objects that are mass-produced, a good designer will consider the space where they will eventually be situated. Naoto Fukasawa designed his tear shaped trashcan for it to snuggle into the intersection of the walls and floor of a home- a convivial agreement of two walls, a floor and an object. In the context of the city, a broadened understanding that includes anthropology, urban geography, and urban design is imperative if one were to engage meaningfully with vast interiors that are performing the role of public spaces.
One could argue that a good architect will naturally design with the interior space in mind. Jørn Utzon designed Can Lis, his family house in Mallocra, Spain as a series of framed daily rituals, from which the architectural form is evolved. Not the other way around. In Ornament and Time, Peter Carl described how on the Day of the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin at 10 am, a statue of the Madonna placed in one of the deep- set windows in the wall of the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp designed by Le Corbusier cast a shadow onto the altar rail. For a brief moment, two sacred objects, an interior space and light are brought together in a divine union. In both cases, we are speaking about scale and the typicality of interior spaces. Beyond a certain scale, the architect surrenders judgment and control as construed by Rem Koolhaas. In Bigness- The Problem of Large, Koolhaas gave an account of the rise of tall and deep buildings, and the inability of architects to come to grasp with the phenomenon of Bigness. On the other hand, developers of speculative commercial buildings whose goals are profit driven and to accommodate an array of needs of different tenants erode the typicality of an interior space. Buildings become banal and empty shells devoid of any interior significance. Generic terms such as living room, kitchen and bedroom obscure the rich and diverse possibilities of a situated human existence. Over time, the design of interior spaces is either reduced to efficient space planning, a narrow definition of function or the pursuit of lifestyle design.
As far back as in 1985, John Kurtich and Garret Eakin, professors at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago traced the evolution of interior architecture and offered general design principles for the discipline. Contemporary tall, deep and vast interiors challenge many of these principles and cherished qualities of what constitutes good interior spaces. How do you bring natural light into a 100’ deep interior? How do you configure an interior environment that is bigger than the Vatican City or one that traverses across multiple altitudes? These are real and urgent questions that cannot be addressed by past design strategies that rely purely on architecture as a complete work of art authored by an architect.
In an expanded definition and scale of interiors, the notions of nearness and betweeness are not limited to the confines of four walls of a building and the objects within. It extends into the city, such as when the nearness of two buildings along an alleyway cuts off light and compresses the space in between. An interior experience is palpable despite the absence of a well-defined building enclosure. Or when the interior permits the continuity of the urban landscape into the building. OMA’s competition proposal for the Jussieu Library in France is a case in point. The interior boulevard, as it was called, established the spatial parti that connected the library with the city, and created a new experience for a building typology that was ripe for a disruptive design in 1992.
In present day vast interiors, landscaped courtyards, sky parks and verdant atriums are often intermixed with public amenities, retail, commercial and cultural activities. In these projects, an architect possessing an interior architecture acumen often works with an multidisciplinary team to provide the crucial design inputs on material, spatial, programmatic and building system transitions between different zones. On the other hand, for many urban dwellers living in high dense cities with acute climatic conditions, climatically controlled interior spaces are the new public spaces. Their success and popularity, especially in Asia have given rise to a fascinating form of 21st century interior urbanism. What more remains to be discovered (or invented) for future deep and tall buildings? Bucky Fuller proposed a mile-high dome over Manhattan in 1960 covering a diameter of 1.8 miles. If realized, it would have radically altered our definition and experience of urban interior spaces. The Eden Project in Cornwall, England designed by Grimshaw Architects brings to mind Fuller’s vision of an interiorized Manhattan, albeit one situated in a country setting and for a different purpose. Most recently, Amazon’s proposed new headquarters in Seattle, which consists of 3 biodomes over a cluster of porous, flexible workspaces nestled among a natural landscape carries the concept into the heart of the city. One wonders if Fuller’s vision is so prosperous after all, when cities in China and India are confronting dangerously high levels of pollution? Architects are already considering vast swaths of underground spaces as solutions to the problems of urban congestion and pollution, as emergency shelters, for vehicular and goods traffic, to mitigate unfavorable weather conditions, and for the storage of vast resources, emergency supplies, and military hardware. The City of Helsinki for example, has created the first underground space master plan in order to support a coordinated and consistent approach in the use of spaces below ground. Hong Kong, on the other hand, commissioned Arup to study the strategic use of underground spaces in the land scarce Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China while Singapore is moving rapidly to incentivize building developers to consider the connectivity of their below ground spaces with adjacent buildings in all new commercial and retail developments. The Singapore government is taking the lead by developing a future underground science city that will house research labs, data centers and work spaces for thousands of researchers in biomedical and life sciences. The desire to go underground in the case of Helsinki is also to avoid building upwards as witnessed in many American and Asian cities. By utilizing spaces below, buildings in the above ground city are kept to a human scale while the generous apportion of built to open green spaces is maintained. An architecture education centered on the disciplinary depth and breath of interior architecture at divergent scales therefore offers an interdisciplinary platform for these present and future issues of city building to be responded to intelligently and creatively.
On the opposite spectrum, old buildings are expected to be compliant with new energy standards in the near future. As more and more building data are gathered, analyzed and calibrated to achieve optimum performance, buildings will need to be retrofitted to meet new performance standards. The uncertainty over the current global economy has also cast the existing stock of buildings in a more favorable light. Why demolish and spend millions of dollars on a new building when it could be more cost effective and potentially faster to re-purpose an existing one? Moreover, as was once said, the greenest building is one that is not built. The adaptive re-use of existing buildings challenges the assumption that the only spatial solution to an architectural problem is a new building. In an AIA article on historic buildings and climate change by architect Linda Reeder, it takes about 65 years for an energy efficient new building to save the amount of energy lost in demolishing an existing building1. With a keen knowledge of historic rehabilitation bolstered by know-how in current building systems design, old buildings and defunct infrastructure can be spatially re-configured to house new uses and be made more environmentally sensitive.
The essay sets out to reflect on, and clarify the manifold meanings and state of interior architecture, as well as to anticipate its future opportunities from an architect’s perspective. As cities get denser, more compact and connected in the future, interior environments traversing different degrees of porosity, scale, altitude and use will become a fundamental part of our everyday experience. Choreographing a rich and diverse spatial experience will be a sine qua non for success for any architect practicing interior architecture as a field, which binds the scales of urban design, architecture, interior design and object design.
Thomas Kong
Chicago
2015
1. http://www.aia.org/akr/Resources/Documents/AIAP072833
Interior architecture is concerned with the design of habitable spaces across a sliding scale, from that of a domestic environment to vast public interiors. At the scale of a building, it deploys the principles of architecture design, where form, structure and enclosure are considered in proximity to materials, objects, human needs and experience in the process of designing from the inside out. The re-orientation challenges architecture as an autonomous object driven solely by its formal language, and reaffirms the centrality of human experience. Designing from the inside out underscores the profound relationship between architectural space, the human senses and the geography of everyday life, which is often overlooked and difficult to grapple with when our relationship to architecture now is limited to fleeting encounters in an architectural rendering, between the pages of a magazine, on a website or a blog.
Depending on where one anchors interior architecture along the scale of spatial engagements, the sensibilities, knowledge, skills and outcomes can vary widely. Even for objects that are mass-produced, a good designer will consider the space where they will eventually be situated. Naoto Fukasawa designed his tear shaped trashcan for it to snuggle into the intersection of the walls and floor of a home- a convivial agreement of two walls, a floor and an object. In the context of the city, a broadened understanding that includes anthropology, urban geography, and urban design is imperative if one were to engage meaningfully with vast interiors that are performing the role of public spaces.
One could argue that a good architect will naturally design with the interior space in mind. Jørn Utzon designed Can Lis, his family house in Mallocra, Spain as a series of framed daily rituals, from which the architectural form is evolved. Not the other way around. In Ornament and Time, Peter Carl described how on the Day of the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin at 10 am, a statue of the Madonna placed in one of the deep- set windows in the wall of the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp designed by Le Corbusier cast a shadow onto the altar rail. For a brief moment, two sacred objects, an interior space and light are brought together in a divine union. In both cases, we are speaking about scale and the typicality of interior spaces. Beyond a certain scale, the architect surrenders judgment and control as construed by Rem Koolhaas. In Bigness- The Problem of Large, Koolhaas gave an account of the rise of tall and deep buildings, and the inability of architects to come to grasp with the phenomenon of Bigness. On the other hand, developers of speculative commercial buildings whose goals are profit driven and to accommodate an array of needs of different tenants erode the typicality of an interior space. Buildings become banal and empty shells devoid of any interior significance. Generic terms such as living room, kitchen and bedroom obscure the rich and diverse possibilities of a situated human existence. Over time, the design of interior spaces is either reduced to efficient space planning, a narrow definition of function or the pursuit of lifestyle design.
As far back as in 1985, John Kurtich and Garret Eakin, professors at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago traced the evolution of interior architecture and offered general design principles for the discipline. Contemporary tall, deep and vast interiors challenge many of these principles and cherished qualities of what constitutes good interior spaces. How do you bring natural light into a 100’ deep interior? How do you configure an interior environment that is bigger than the Vatican City or one that traverses across multiple altitudes? These are real and urgent questions that cannot be addressed by past design strategies that rely purely on architecture as a complete work of art authored by an architect.
In an expanded definition and scale of interiors, the notions of nearness and betweeness are not limited to the confines of four walls of a building and the objects within. It extends into the city, such as when the nearness of two buildings along an alleyway cuts off light and compresses the space in between. An interior experience is palpable despite the absence of a well-defined building enclosure. Or when the interior permits the continuity of the urban landscape into the building. OMA’s competition proposal for the Jussieu Library in France is a case in point. The interior boulevard, as it was called, established the spatial parti that connected the library with the city, and created a new experience for a building typology that was ripe for a disruptive design in 1992.
In present day vast interiors, landscaped courtyards, sky parks and verdant atriums are often intermixed with public amenities, retail, commercial and cultural activities. In these projects, an architect possessing an interior architecture acumen often works with an multidisciplinary team to provide the crucial design inputs on material, spatial, programmatic and building system transitions between different zones. On the other hand, for many urban dwellers living in high dense cities with acute climatic conditions, climatically controlled interior spaces are the new public spaces. Their success and popularity, especially in Asia have given rise to a fascinating form of 21st century interior urbanism. What more remains to be discovered (or invented) for future deep and tall buildings? Bucky Fuller proposed a mile-high dome over Manhattan in 1960 covering a diameter of 1.8 miles. If realized, it would have radically altered our definition and experience of urban interior spaces. The Eden Project in Cornwall, England designed by Grimshaw Architects brings to mind Fuller’s vision of an interiorized Manhattan, albeit one situated in a country setting and for a different purpose. Most recently, Amazon’s proposed new headquarters in Seattle, which consists of 3 biodomes over a cluster of porous, flexible workspaces nestled among a natural landscape carries the concept into the heart of the city. One wonders if Fuller’s vision is so prosperous after all, when cities in China and India are confronting dangerously high levels of pollution? Architects are already considering vast swaths of underground spaces as solutions to the problems of urban congestion and pollution, as emergency shelters, for vehicular and goods traffic, to mitigate unfavorable weather conditions, and for the storage of vast resources, emergency supplies, and military hardware. The City of Helsinki for example, has created the first underground space master plan in order to support a coordinated and consistent approach in the use of spaces below ground. Hong Kong, on the other hand, commissioned Arup to study the strategic use of underground spaces in the land scarce Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China while Singapore is moving rapidly to incentivize building developers to consider the connectivity of their below ground spaces with adjacent buildings in all new commercial and retail developments. The Singapore government is taking the lead by developing a future underground science city that will house research labs, data centers and work spaces for thousands of researchers in biomedical and life sciences. The desire to go underground in the case of Helsinki is also to avoid building upwards as witnessed in many American and Asian cities. By utilizing spaces below, buildings in the above ground city are kept to a human scale while the generous apportion of built to open green spaces is maintained. An architecture education centered on the disciplinary depth and breath of interior architecture at divergent scales therefore offers an interdisciplinary platform for these present and future issues of city building to be responded to intelligently and creatively.
On the opposite spectrum, old buildings are expected to be compliant with new energy standards in the near future. As more and more building data are gathered, analyzed and calibrated to achieve optimum performance, buildings will need to be retrofitted to meet new performance standards. The uncertainty over the current global economy has also cast the existing stock of buildings in a more favorable light. Why demolish and spend millions of dollars on a new building when it could be more cost effective and potentially faster to re-purpose an existing one? Moreover, as was once said, the greenest building is one that is not built. The adaptive re-use of existing buildings challenges the assumption that the only spatial solution to an architectural problem is a new building. In an AIA article on historic buildings and climate change by architect Linda Reeder, it takes about 65 years for an energy efficient new building to save the amount of energy lost in demolishing an existing building1. With a keen knowledge of historic rehabilitation bolstered by know-how in current building systems design, old buildings and defunct infrastructure can be spatially re-configured to house new uses and be made more environmentally sensitive.
The essay sets out to reflect on, and clarify the manifold meanings and state of interior architecture, as well as to anticipate its future opportunities from an architect’s perspective. As cities get denser, more compact and connected in the future, interior environments traversing different degrees of porosity, scale, altitude and use will become a fundamental part of our everyday experience. Choreographing a rich and diverse spatial experience will be a sine qua non for success for any architect practicing interior architecture as a field, which binds the scales of urban design, architecture, interior design and object design.
Thomas Kong
Chicago
2015
1. http://www.aia.org/akr/Resources/Documents/AIAP072833