Interior Controversy

To envisage the definition of interior space as a subject of study raises a number of semantic, historical and epistemological issues. Architecture, decoration, design, domestic arts–what are we talking about and how should we name this disciplinary field? Does it have a specific history? Can conceptual tools be iden­tified that are particular to an “interior project”? Finally, is the interior an autonomous subject, or subordinate to architecture?

In 1880 Eugene Viollet-le-Duc¹ deplored the split effec­tive in his day between art and applied arts, leading to the loss of a culture of decoration among architects and, consequently, the loss of unity between architecture and interior decoration. In the second half of the twentieth century, Carlo Mollino at the Politecnico, Turin, in 1949, Reyner Banham with “The Missing Motel” in 1965 and Andrea Branzi with La casa calda in 1985 all felt moved to lament the ignorance of contemporary architects in matters of interior decoration and ambience.² It is certainly true that while, since La filosofia dell’arredamento by Mario Praz³ in 1964, interiors from the twelfth to the twentieth century have been the subject of in-depth study, notably in the work of George Savage, Edward Lucie-Smith, Peter Thornton, Anne Massey, Yvonne Brunhammer, Bruno Pons and, more recently, Stefan Muthesius, these studies have had little impact on the field of architectural theory and research, especially in France.⁴ Regarding design, although in 1968 Nikolaus Pevsner⁵ positioned the ideo­logical foundations of the discipline on the side of archi­tecture, he did not identify interiors as a specific subject of study. Other histories of design, like the ones by Jocelyn de Noblet, Raymond Guidot and Alexandra Midal, confirm the distinction between object and space and focus on the history of the object while distancing themselves from architecture itself.⁶ More sociological in nature, the work done by Monique Eleb⁷ in France since the 1980s has helped establish interiors as the architecture of the private life and one of the products of the invention of the modern dwelling. More recently, English and American researchers have studied the specificity of interior space with regard to architecture. Charles Rice⁸ describes the emergence of a domestic interior in the nineteenth century as a polysemous and psychoanalytic, architectural and pictorial space, one that contributed to the evolution of architects’ plans. Mark Pimlott⁹ examines the notion of the public interior on an urban and territorial scale, ques­tioning the ideology underlying the establishing of a limit­less interior. Penny Sparke¹⁰ proposes a subtle interpretation of the complex artistic, intellectual and cultural but also social and economic construction that led to the invention of the modern interior at the turn of the twentieth century. Finally, interior architecture, which is by definition a trans­versal discipline, has recently been the subject of specialist MAS in several European countries and is starting here and there to generate a certain amount of specific research.¹¹

Whatever else happens, to set out to define the spec­ificity of the interior always means positioning this “inversion of space”¹² in relation to the architecture that seems to be the necessary and sufficient condition for its emergence. For the affirmation of a synthesis of the arts, with architecture as both the horizon and the great organizer, has for some centuries now prompted architects to assert a form of continuity in the overall archi­tectural project, including mastery of the interior space. The vision of decorators, interior architects and design­ers amends this mono-focal idea and points to the possibility of conceiving the interior outside such a continuity, possibly in a dialogue with architecture, but also independently of it. This is in fact the subject of a latent controversy which breaks out sporadically, one initiated by architects, fanned by decorators and reactivated by designers.

To understand what is at stake in this discussion, whose subject would be the legitimacy of the interior as a project possibly independent of architecture, let us first try to contextualise and clarify the terms in which it is posited. Starting with the initial postulate that the interior is that whereby and in which we inhabit architecture–and here we should understand “inhabit” in the broad sense, meaning the creation of habits in a given place for a given time, individu­ally or collectively–it can easily be allowed that a building delivered at the end of the construction process, with roof and walls, still represents only a potential for dwelling, much like a thermally stable, well ventilated, accessible and protect­ed cave. And it will also be observed without difficulty that such a built envelope is capable of housing several successive forms of habitability. The definition of the interior, therefore, would not necessarily induce the meaning of a privileged relation to architecture. The nature of this relation would tend, rather, to evolve in keeping with the situation and there is nothing to stop us imagining it as neutralising, contrary or abolitionist. The ontological unity of architecture, far from being obvious, is in the first instance ideological, and for archi­tects it is of value above all as a self-fulfilling prophecy, designed to avert the defeat of their work by the interior.

The person who conceives dwelling¹³ after the construction is exempt from the act of building. With regard to the Vitru­vian trilogy defining architecture in terms of the triple alli­ance of strength, functionality and beauty–firmitas, utilitas, venustas–the interior comes more under the last two terms, the functionality and beauty, use and aesthetics. This is brought to mind by Elsie de Wolfe’s statement in 1913 that decoration is the only way of making an architect’s house a habitable home,¹⁴ by the distinction established by Reyner Banham in 1965 between the constructed house and the vital hearth, when he stated that “A home is not a house”,¹⁵ and by the "softer elements […] colour, light, micro-climate, decoration, odour and background music", which Andrea Branzi defines in opposition to the architectural structure.¹⁶ The ambientazione described by Carlo Mollino¹⁷ and the Gemutlichkeit of a house¹⁸ owe as much to the comfort they offer as they do to the beauty of things, to the pleasure of use as much as to the pleasure of the senses. The interi­or can thus be envisaged as the software to architecture’s hardware, software in the form of an operating system completed by programmes, dwelling programmes that could be installed and uninstalled on demand.

To effect this transition from hard to soft, from the built to the habitable inside, implies the installation of a certain number of devices, fittings and additions of different natures and on different scales. The fixed parts, those attached to the building such as door frames and casing, panelling, cornices, floor, assemblies, coffered ceilings, extra staircases, mezzanines, partitions, cupboards, work surfaces and tip-up surfaces, pivoting, sliding or retractable woodwork such as mobile surfaces; articulated screens, doors, shojis, shutters and louvers; technical installations for lighting, heating, ventilation and connection to networks–water, gas, strong and weak currents, the fittings for bath­rooms and toilets and kitchen, decorative elements like stucco, low reliefs, frescoes, paintings, mirrors, wallpaper, hangings, curtains, carpets; integrated furniture, frames and casements, occasional furniture, artworks and objects for everyday use: this is a non-exhaustive list of the plug-ins, or extensions, of every housing programme.

If the interior is located at the uncrossable intersection of other well-identified histories, it is nevertheless possible, by passing through all these with an analytical filter dedicated to the subject, to draw together the threads of a long history specific to the inhabited interior.¹⁹ Over the five hundred or so years stretching up to the mid-twentieth century, it can be summed up as the slow construction of a theoretical subservience that was trig­gered by the intense production of treatises taking the form of a rereading of Vitruvius, beginning at the end of the Quattrocento. With De re aedificatoria libri decem, Alberti was the first to raise architecture up to the status of a liberal art by providing a theoretical formulation of the artist’s activity.²⁰ This effort at intellectual emanci­pation, which was leveraged on a reinterpretation of the rules of composition exhumed from Antiquity, was in its early days little concerned with interiors. However, with the architect’s emancipation as a thinking artist came the claim to paternity of a work now envisaged as a whole.

Hence the slow but ineluctable construction of the rule ordaining the subordination of dwelling to construction. The felicitous nomadic bricolage of medieval interiors, in which only the furniture and the decoration indicated the function of the space, since this had no precise attri­bution, was but a distant memory by the mid-eighteenth century when Jacques-Francois Blonde! theorised an art of distribution that fixed the use of rooms in a plan.²¹ The inventor of “subservient furniture”, or “architectural furniture”, Fig. 1 Blondel believed so strongly that the interior typology should obey the rule of the facades that he set about drawing in detail the integration of the water system into the walls, Fig. 2 the better to assign basin, bath and other washing objects, which had previously been freely moveable, to their proper place. While, in the mid-seventeenth century, it was still common practice to call in an artist or a craftsman to design the staircase or the fireplace of a Parisian townhouse built by a mason-master builder, the plans of the architect-builder became progressively more precise throughout the eight­eenth century. By indicating an increasing number of furnishing items, he defined an increasingly greater part of the habitability, which went hand in hand with a growing fear of the competition that might threaten the harmony of his project–from joiners, upholsterers, interior designers or decorators, who were gaining in status as suppliers to a rising bourgeoisie for whom the interior was becoming the place of social representation. Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, the great architects and interior decorators of post-Revolutionary France, also promoted a form of stylistic supra-coherence in order to avoid “perverting” or, worse, making the “essential forms of the edifice” actually “disappear.”²²

Paradoxically, it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, at a time when light work, the second-oeuvre, was beginning to come into its own and decoration companies were starting to develop–two factors in the break between building and dwelling, that architectural Gesamtkunstwerke began to be created, involving the highest conceivable fusion between the built envelope and the interior spaces.²³

Independently of their form, which, as we know, goes from floral and organic to functional geometry, what characterises these buildings is that they are the fruit of a continuous design, from the foundations to the curtains, from the form of the roof to that of the door handles, in which nothing can be removed from the ensemble without impairing the integrity of the work. Arising from singular commissions and contexts, total artworks are, however, an exception in the long history of architecture and interiors. And their very perfection is problematic, for it embodies a frozen form of inhabited space, incapable of evolving. However, the interior reversibility of the building does, in the same way as the permanence of the envelope, represent a positive and age-old characteristic of architecture. The advent of the Gesamtkunstwerk in architecture, corresponding to the culmination of a long process, clearly shows, for one thing, the demiurgic position acquired by the architect and, for another, the difficulty of enduring over the years when the operations required for the building’s complete habitability are becoming more and more complex, leading to ever greater numbers of intervening parties. Both engineers and upholsterers are direct competitors of the demiurge architect. Frank Lloyd Wright, the father of organic architecture, who stated that he wanted to “make of a building [...] a complete work of art”, wrote in 1908 that “Heating apparatus, lighting fixtures, the very chairs and tables, cabinets and musical instruments, where practicable, are of the building itself”.²⁴

Reinterpreted by the Moderns through the prism of the industrialisation of building, the integration of interiors continued on both the theoretical and practical levels through to the 1960s, in close collaboration with equip­ment specialists and interior architects, won over to the cause of this new synthesis of the arts. The reversal of the paradigm, which moved the conception of dwelling from the architect’s side to the designer’s, occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, at the instigation of the avant-garde movements of the 1960s, which iconoclastically revisited the relation of dwelling to architecture. By overturning the hierarchy wherein urbanism determines architecture which itself determines interiors, Italian architect-designers theorised the possibility of refounding man’s environment, starting from furniture (Ettore Sottsass), the house (Andrea Branzi), a microcosm in the form of attrezzatura (Joe Colombo), or even a “renewal of the language, alphabet included” (Enzo Mari).²⁵ In 1972 the MoMA exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape²⁶ offered a first survey in New York of the Italian perspectives of the previous decade, clearly showing that the material and conceptual conditions for the autonomy of this domestic landscape had at last been met, in the form of a dwelling project that was independent of the built frame.

And, so having originally been free, then slowly made subordinate to the building by architectural doctrine, the interior was finally emancipated from the walls via design. Five hundred years after architects, designers engaged in the same slow process of legitimation of their discipline, by constructing the autonomy of its concepts and projects.

This historic and progressivist reading of the status of the interior is not enough, however, to embrace its possible modes of relation with architecture. How are these to be characterised and described? How do they enable us to understand these notions of subordination and auton­omy which we are discussing here? Being part of the furniture, blending into the scenery, hugging the walls, knocking them down, getting rid of them, appearing as a solitary object in a discordant environment... are so many metaphors which may characterise the way the components of dwelling relate to the walls they inhabit. An attentive exploration of the history of interiors can bring to light three systems of relation to architecture which I propose to call “Decor”, “Bespoke” and “Composi­tional.” Quite apart from their historical period and the aesthetic forms to which they may lead, these three terms represent recurring procedures in the installation of dwell­ing, whose workings, and possible dependence on the building that may result from them, need to be identified.

The definition of the interior by means of Decor consists in the intervention of covering surfaces, which does not physically transform either the structure of the place or its volumetry, or its interfaces with the exterior, but which can give the illusion of this transformation by changing perception. Paintings, frescoes, patinas, stuccos, panels, textiles and light are the tools of Decor. The Gallery of Mirrors in Versailles and the Moorish Room in the catalogue of “Maincent, tapissier decorateur”, in 1886 Fig. 3 both belong in this category. Decor is an added layer which usually sings in unison with the interior volumes. We can distinguish fixed decor, that of the painters­-sculptors-stucco makers, from the mobile decor of the upholsterers and decorators. The application of decoration by adhesion can go as far as to visually obliterate the walls, whereas the effect of illusion created by moveable decor is visually more obvious and easier to retract. The characteristic of decor is to create a universe which offers its own aesthetic coherence in a Whole that is capable of aggregating elements that are diverse in nature. It dissolves the heterogeneity of objects in a kind of supra-coherence.

To conceive a Bespoke interior space recalls the clothing metaphor favoured by Adolf Loos. The Bespoke implies a redefinition of the inner void by a meticulous adjustment of the living space. Cutting, incising, inserting, adjusting, grafting, transforming and equipping are the operations involved in its implementation. The Rietveld-Schroder House Fig. 4 Fig. 5 conceived by Gerrit Rietvald and Truus Schröder-Schräder and Vila Müller, Fig. 6 Fig. 7 conceived by Adolf Loos, belong to this type. Acting as a kind of endlessly variable lining, the Bespoke creates the thick-nesses required for pratical use between the outer skin and the inner skin. Displaying an overt break with the mute façade, the inner lining of Villa Müller ensures the transition between the roughness of rendered walls to the suppleness of a banquette inserted into a bookcase, itself conceived as the dilation of the inner wall. Embodying, in contrast, the De Stijl conception of spatial continuity, the Bespoke of the Schröder House produces spaces and practical devices in the same formal register as the façade, in order to obtain the required non-distinction between this and the interior of the house/furniture. The Bespoke space is also, like Decor, coherent by definition.

To project a dwelling by means of the Compositional means investing an inner void by installing there a certain number of aesthetic, technical, practical, affective objects on different scales, capable of producing the required habitability. A layer of apparent networks, a machine that purveys warmth, a set of mobile furniture, a few macro-objects or micro-architectures, with no apparent overall coherence, can produce the required result. The furniture and tapestry that followed the itinerant courts of the Renaissance, as well as the Cabriolet-Bed Fig. 8 and Rotoliving Fig. 9 by Joe Colombo are compositional creator s of dwelling. Exogenous and autonomous, they occupy architecture without adhering to it. If there are points of anchorage on the building, as in the case of frame furniture, they are accessible and reversible. Decor and Compositional represent timeless forms of dwelling, whereas the invention of the Bespoke is concomitant with the emergence of a holistic vision of architecture. These three categories are obviously not watertight and their basic typology becomes more complex when we see how they overlap. Thus, for example, the Decor of the Moorish Room, fragmented into elevations, is completed on the plan by an addition of Compositional elements that are visually merged into the ensemble.

With this typology in mind, the question of subordination or autonomy can be discussed from three viewpoints: constructive, aesthetic and conceptual. Structurally, Decor of course depends on the built, but instrumentalises it for its own ends. Aesthetically, its internal coherence can just as well harmonise with architecture as be in dissonance with it. On the conceptual level, if it is difficult to find the bases of a theory of Decor that claims its autonomy, it is also true that to affirm the status of the decorator is always to assert his independence, to break free of the authority of architecture.

The Compositional is by nature structurally independent from the building it inhabits in passing. Aesthetically, it can just as easily suggest a continuity or mark a rupture. Just as it can, conceptually, follow or not follow the theoretical line indicated by the architecture. Thus, the apartments of the Weissenhofsiedlung designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and furnished by the Swiss Werkbund in 1927 show a perfect continuity with the building,²⁷ for the structural and productive independence of mass-produced furniture does not prevent conceptual and formal adhesion to the dogma of Modernity. It is the theorisation of its autonomy by designers that founds the possibility of envisaging–against dominant thought–a system of dwelling based on compositional elements, independent of architecture. Historically, design does indeed represent the main vector of the conceptual emancipation of interiors, but only with regard to this "articular typology of the Compositional.

The Bespoke implies, on the contrary, a close interdependence on the constructive level. But this dependency can work in both directions, going from the exterior to the interior (as affirmed by Jacques-François Blondel) or from the interior to the exterior (as William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, Adlof Loos, Charlotte Perriand and many others suggest). Like any installation of dwelling, the Bespoke can also be envisaged a posteriori, in relation to a given envelope-from the interior towards the interior, we might say. Constructive interdependence does not, then, indicate a de facto subordination, but a capacity to integrate or counter that is particularly powerful because it is intimately adapted. The same goes for the aesthetic, which can be mimetic or dissonant. On the semantic and theoretical level, the literal expression of the Bespoke is interior architecture. This term interior architecture emerged in the United States in 1897 in the writing of Edith Wharton, where it was opposed to interior decoration,²⁸ and the expression architecture d’intérieur was identified in France in 1949 as one of the fields of competence of members of the UAM.²⁹ There the neologism seemed capable of uniting the positive terms of équipeur and architecte-décorateur, as affirmed in the UAM manifesto of 1934 in opposition to the ferociously criticized décorateur-ensemblier.³⁰ Interior architecture therefore appears on the professional stage by turning its back on décor, the better to affirm its allegiance to architecture. However, this expression of a dwelling that is contextual by definition, and intimately linked to the building, leads to a form of maturity in the interior project, which should secure it a greater power of influence than a simple system of a nomadic objects. By closely examining the workings of the interior’s dependence on the architecture, we will note that they are primarily conceptual in nature, or even ideological, much more than they are material and constructive.

The question of vocabulary is essential to any effort of intellectual emancipation on the part of a discipline. Throughout the twentieth century, the invention, appropriation, reversal or rejection of certain words was the sign of muted ideological or corporate struggles between architects, interior architects and designers.

The slow reduction of meaning affecting the word “decoration” is over the centuries, leading in the end to its banishment from the vocabulary of modern architecture, is indicative of this semantic battle–as, in France, is the unending history of the legitimation of the interior architect as a professional category, which has been going on for seventy years. And as is the emergence in the 1960s of a new set of emancipatory terms to designate the interior and the dwelling projects relating to it : Arredamento senza muri (Ettore Sottsas, 1955), Lanscaped Interior (Verner Panton, 1966), Interior Landscape (Archizoom, 1969), Espace polyvalent spatio-temporel (Romuald Witwicki, 1969), Sistem programmabil per arbitare and Total Furnishing Unit (Joe Colombo, 1968-71), Habitat évolutif à surfaces libres and Meccano libre (Olivier Mourgue, 1969-72), Système d’habitations sans murs (Pierre Paulin, 1969-72).

The contrasting use of the equivalent terms équipement in French and attrezzatura in Italian, between 1950 and 1970, represents a fine case of lexical subtlety and lability. Already, in 1946, Francis Jourdain, a founder member of UAM, noted that the word équipement was increasingly being used in the place of ameublement, as a positive sign of modernity. ³¹ Publishing “L’art d’habiter” in Techniques & Architecture in 1950, Charlotte Perriand confirmed this positive vision by asserting her own status as an équipeur, at a time when the term designer was not yet being used in France. She emphasized the role of equipment as the natural extension of architecture:

Harmony is a dwelling cannot be achieved independent of architecture and urban planning. It would be useless to try to realize it throught equipment alone, for its results from an ambiance produced equally by such external factors as the site, the orientation and the amount of available light.³²

Twenty years later, using the Italian term of equipment, attrezzatura, and emphasizing its positive value, Joe Colombo radically reversed its meaning. Conceiving of dwelling as a microcosmo on the basis of which one could then define the macrocosmo³³–namely, the architectural and urban environment–he shifted the conception of the microcosm towards design and asserted its independence with regard to architecture:

The problem now is to provide equipment that will at last be autonomous, independent of its architectural container, and that can be coordinated and programmed in order to adapt to any spatial situation, in the present or the future.³⁴

Despite their opposing theoretical positions, one arguing for an accepted dependency, the other for a radical autonomy, the factual reality of their respective practices and the status of their creations are more ambiguous than they seem. Wen Perriand worked as an architect at Les arcs (1967-88), the precision of her equipment, like the wooden blanquette used as an apron under the windows, required an adjustment of the design of the façades, and the bathroom unit, industrially produced and formally integrated into the walls, was in reality conceptually and materially autonomous. In 1958, when she conceived the Maison du Sahara in collaboration with Jean Prouvé, she invented a new device with “equipment away from the walls” which she later remembered as “revelation”.³⁵ Another remarkable example of equipment, the bookcase conceived in 1952 to be integrated into the students’ rooms of the Maison de la Tunisie built by Jean Sebag, has become a design icon, sought after by collectors and reissued in various forms, quite independently of the context for which it was first designed. If Perriand’s integrated equipment affirms an ideological and tangible belonging to the walls of Modernity, the conceptual independence of many of the pieces, including the Bibliothèque Tunisie, is no less patent.³⁶

Travelling in the opposite direction, when Joe Colombo installed the prototypes of his Rotoliving and Cabriolet-Bed in his own apartment in Milan in 1971, the plan Fig. 10 attested the precision with which he worked to ensure their perfect insertion in the space: verification of the cones of vision and of the possible circulation and movment; installation of a supple, sliding panel to ensure the privacy of the bed; integration into the walls of a few indispensable storage spaces; installation of louvers; precise positioning of the lighting, etc. The integration of the two attrezzature into the interior space and the choregraphy of movements are regulated down to the nearest centimetre. Fig. 11 In, in theory, Colombo’s autonomous equipment was not expected to have anything to do with architecture, the installation of the Cabriolet-Bed and the Rotoliving in the apartment on Via Argelati still assigned them to residence, in an impeccable made-to-measure jewel box. For habitable macro-objects, however clearly determined they may be, don’t have the power to define the space outside themselves. It is the definition of the empty spaces between these objects and the habitable envelope that gives rise to the real effectiveness of a dwelling based on Compositional elements.³⁷

Thus, subordinate equipment and liberated attrezzature, while seemingly contradictory, nevertheless come together along a common but tacit line of conduct with regard to the relation between architecture and habitability. A relation that, in the end, must always be questioned without ideological presuppositions. For the interior, as a habitable territory, can be conceived positively only but finely articulating, on a case-by-case basis, the relations between the elements in play, from hard to soft and from soft to hard. This is something that Charlotte Perriand and Joe Colombo, as interior architects, or designers of space in the literal sense, had both clearly understood.

As Andrea Branzi observed in 1991, the “revolution” that has replaced with objects the surrounding presence once constituted by architecture"³⁸ has certainly taken place, but dos not the emancipation of the interior with regards to its walls by the installation of a system of compositional elements lead to another kind of subordination of dwelling? Branzi, again, prophesied that if our houses did not become likeable our cities would be permanently uninhabitable.³⁹ In the end, are Colombo’s dwelling machines more likeable than Le Corbusier’s? Has not the holistic power once developed to architecture now passed over to design? And, where the dweller is concerned, dos this escape from architecture, the better to model another form of dwelling by means of design–one that remains ideal from the designer’s viewpoint but that still imposes a model on the person living in it–result in a more effective emancipation of dwelling?