INTERIORITY: DESIGN AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF SPACE

Interior designing is both an art and a science. Designing a space is more like writing a poetry. It enlivens a space, and tells a story about those inhabiting that space. In this brief article, Mr. Ankur Singh, CAD Engineer and Interior Specialist at FGS Engineers & Innovators, jots down how the ideas of interior and exterior are intertwined and together how they give life to a space.

Interiority, or the quality of interior space, is a concept of boundedness and openness, both physically and culturally.

Physically, interiority is the product of boundaries; culturally, it implies the presence of the other, or the exterior, to create the conditions that render it inside. The presence of the exterior demands a relationship between that which is outside and that which is inside. On one hand, design professionals work with interiority as a space created and conditioned by the exterior—by a building’s walls, its shape, or its skin. In Complexity and Contradiction, Robert Venturi writes that "designing from the outside in, as well as the inside out, creates necessary tensions, which help make architecture. Since the inside is different from the outside, the wall—the point of change—becomes an architectural event." On the other hand, designers work with interiority as a space that itself can condition a building’s shape.

For interiors, the wall is not only an event; it is the beginning of a double-sided boundary. Martin Heidegger writes, “A boundary is not that at which something stops, but as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presenting.” For many designers, the inside has been integral with the outside. Frank Lloyd Wright considered them to be integrated. “In Organic Architecture, then, it is quite impossible to consider the building as one thing, its furnishings another and its setting and environment still another. The Spirit in which these buildings are conceived sees all these together at work as one thing.” Just as an exterior can have an impact upon interiority, interiority can impact exteriority or can exist independently.

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The emergence of interior architecture as a distinct field results in part from the twentieth-century phenomenon of build-outs and renovations, where the design of a building’s skin and core is separated from the design of its habitable space. Linda Pollari and Richard Somol write that interior architecture tends to question the limits of space and relates “the vocabulary of the interior —‘wallpaper,’ ‘carpets,’ excessive ‘material palettes’— to inform diverse projects and practices.”

The relationship between the exterior and the interior, open to such diverse interpretation as design “from the inside out” or design from the “outside in” is changing the breadth of interior design education and the practice of interiors. Olivier Leblois, architect, furniture designer, and professor at L’Ecole Speciale d’Architecture and Camondo in Paris, writes that the main point is that there is no “interior” architecture and no “exterior” architecture; (interior) architecture is a spirit and way of feeling, seeing, living; the question is not the difference between the exterior and the interior, but what resides in all the places that are in between. He cites Foucault, who said that one’s identity is not in status, fact, and knowledge, but in prospect, traject, and perspect.

Others define interior architecture as the “holistic creation, development, and completion of space for human use or humanistic ally conceived space following Vitruvius’s dicta—firmness, commodity, and delight.” Interior architecture is no longer limited in practice by medium or location (the interior), but is now characterized by a more multidisciplinary agenda. John Kurtich and Garret Eakin, in Interior Architecture, set forth a threefold definition of the practice of interior architecture: first, integrated finished interiors completed with a building; second, completion of space in an existing enclosure; and third, the preservation, renovation, or adaptive re-use of buildings with an interior focus. This expanded description identifies emerging areas of expertise with requisite professionals. In practice, the arena between the inside and the outside is being shared by capable transdisciplinary architects and interior architects as its very boundaries become permeated.

“In architecture, concepts can either precede or follow projects or buildings. In other words, a theoretical concept may be either applied to a project or derived from it.”