A Taxonomy of Interiors

A Taxonomy of Interiors

What’s an interior? is a question that’s been nagging me on and off for oh almost 50 years. When I recently enquired at the library of the former Tokyo Institute of Technology, a librarian told me they don’t keep copies of master’s theses. Mine had the clunky title of Research Into Interior Design from the Perspective of the Form and Disposition of Objects (物のフォームと配列からみた室内意匠の研究). It’s no less clunky in Japanese. I’ve gone into details elsewhere on this blog but, I tried to logically deduce the number of types of visual relationship a single object could have with a single space.

For example, a white chair in a white room would be a unifying relationship of Colour. A single table in the middle of a square room would a unifying relationship of Position. A single round table anywhere in a circular room would be a unifying relationship of Shape. Anyway, that number turned out to be 16,777,216 but, in the end, I arrived it not through interiors but through the number of ways a building could relate to its physical context in a similar figure-ground kind of way. I’m confident the framework can describe the types of aesthetic relationship that objects have with the spaces around them (for what difference is there really?)1 but this time I’d like to approach the interior from a different angle.

Inside vs. Outside

As you know, I’ve never understood the 20th century urgency to blur the distinction between inside and outside, although I suspect the degree of fetishization is proportional to the actual impossibility of ever achieving it. In that sense it’s like those other unachievable qualities such as weightlessness or transparency that serve as indicators of wealth by allowing the display of huge amounts of money spent on creating only slightly more convincing representations. Below are three of my favourite projects that let the indoors be the indoors and the outdoors be the outdoors.

None are interiors. They’re more rightly called exteriors because, however pleasant the outdoors, there’s still an awareness of being outside of something and this awareness is part of the pleasure. I venture that the pleasure of being indoors comes from the awareness of being inside of something. It’s an awareness of enclosure. Spaces such as these are what I had in mind in my previous post2 when I wrote, Why should the boundary between inside and outside be blurred? Is it even a good thing? Isn’t it better to have two different places to be rather than only one that is fully neither? Since we’re unlikely to ever have air curtains up to the task, we’re left with glazing to do the job of letting us look at things outside while letting us stay enclosed. Cruise liner mentality.

This idea of enclosure is important in garden design in many cultures because the very idea of a garden is to isolate some corner of the world and make it a safe and relaxing place to be. The garden below has three different levels of enclosure but is not an interior.

Japanese people may choose to just lie down on the tatami and take a nap but for serious sleeping they’ll take a mat or futon out of the closet and spread it. A space with nothing in it can’t be used for very much so, given an enclosing space, how objects relate to that space seems a logical place to begin. Books on interior design come in two types. The most common taxonomy is a chronology of historical styles and I’ll call Pile, Drew & Plunkett’s History of Inteior Design3 as one of these, ranging as it does from Chapter 1: Prehistory to Early Civilizations to Chapter 23: Computers, Conservation and Moral Concerns. Another is Anne Massey’s Interior Design Since 19004 takes you from Chapter 1: Reforming Victorian Taste to Chapter 10: Transnational Interiors.

An alternate taxonomy is, as far as I know, a minority of one. Graeme Brooker’s The Story of the Interior is divided into three sections, the first of which has the following chapter headings: The Unified and the Autonomous Interior, Enclosures, Atmospheres, Passages, Objects and Technologies.

I’ve already said something about enclosures, and have an idea what a unified interior might look like. For me, a unified interior takes basic visual attributes such as colour, pattern and shape (that are often collectively known as Style) and applies them to both the surfaces of the space and the objects within it and, in doing so, unifies them. This has a long history. We can cover walls, windows and furniture with matching wallpapers and fabrics. Or a colour. I see these four rooms below as having similar relationships of colour and pattern between the space and the things inside it. This approach cuts across taxonomies of style. Associations can be created by similarity or by contrast or, in the case of colour, by that unifying device known as a colour scheme, of which there are many.

Non-visual associations can add intangible unifications. The two interiors both have objects in a space. Those in the interior on the left share Pattern, Shape, Position and Alignment with the space but not Colour. It’s easy to think that both space and objects are there because one person intended them to be seen as a single composition. We’d have to open some draws and cupboards to find out whether the scope of that composition extends as far as crockery, cutlery and clothing. In the case of the interior on the right, we know that space and objects are there because of a single person and are intended to be seen as embodying a new type of beauty said to arise when objects and spaces look as if they are designed according to their intended purpose. If we understand this, then we see this as a coherent interior. It’s an important example because the objects are visually diverse. It’s not as simple as just putting Mid-Century Modern furniture in a Mid-Century Modern house.

These non-visual associations (that we nonetheless arrive at from visual information) don’t have to be academic or intellectual. It’s not uncommon for visually diverse objects to have a unity just because we might know that a single person was responsible for their choice and placement within a space but it’s comparatively rare for the shape of the space to have been designed by the same person, even if its colour or pattern are part of some composition. It’s easier when there are fewer objects to think about. Both images below have many objects in a space that wasn’t designed by the inhabitant. We look at the image on the left and we see many objects in a room and we imagine an eccentric aunt, but we look at the image on the right and see an example of professional interior design. One doesn’t look compositional but the other does (because the lamp balances the chair, the table balances the door in the distance, etc.) In both, the space is merely the container for the display of objects. I don’t want to start quibbling over words so early, but I’d call both cases assertive subjugation rather than mutual autonomy of space and object.

Assertive subjugation is the hallmark of a certain kind of designer but, to be fair, it’s what certain people expect and will pay for if they have the means and inclination. If not, they will aspire to “do something with the space”. I could stop here and ask what would happen with a space (or architecture, if you will) that didn’t seem empty or degraded if the paraphernalia of living isn’t suitably compositioned? Can we even conceive of what such a space would be like? In architecture-speak, is it possible for an architectural space to be conceptually autonomous (as opposed to physically hostile) re. inhabitants and their paraphernalia of living? What happens when one doesn’t, doesn’t want to, or doesn’t need to force visual and conceptual associations? Is the autonomous interior one that simply doesn’t need an indoor space for anything other than access.