Thinking Inside the Box
The exhibition
PR + image from Frazer Hay: Interior Architecture, Napier University 20.02.07
There is huge gap between how Interior Designers see themselves and how
the public see them. The public imagine the Interior
Designer as the arranger of cushions of curtains, and specifier of
furniture
and products, while Interior Designers imagine themselves as the creators
of environments, using light, material, and space to set a mood or frame
an event.
The long and short of it is, no-one agrees what Interior Design is, what
it should be in the future, and how we get there.
The Interiors Forum Scotland is a new body that is run jointly between
five of the Interiors degree courses in Scotland in order to address these
issues: to speculate on the Interiors
of the future.
IFS will be mounting an exhibition at the Lighthouse in Glasgow, opening
on 24th February that is quite simply entitled: ‘What is Interior
design?’
The show opens with a short slideshow of new students, who are just starting
out on their education in Interior design, answering that very question,
and it ends with the graduates who are now practicing Interiors answering
it as well. The answers range from: ‘a profession not to tell your
footie mates about!’ to ‘exhibitions, installation, to ‘Interior
design encompasses everything from initial client briefings, concept brainstorming,
detailing and liaising with the contractors.’
Framed by the many different answers to the question: What is Interior
Design?’ a series of wall boxes will inhabit the Young Designers
Gallery at the Lighthouse, enclosing an interior within an interior. This
installation will guide visitors through the different stages of the education
of the Interior designer, showing how the five different courses introduce
the subject to newcomers, how they ground students in basic skills, and
the final projects with which they equip their students to leave college
and enter the world of the profession.
This installation of wall boxes will allow visitors to follow students
through an individual course, or to compare the same level across different
courses. Work on display takes the form of design projects ranging from
rooms students have found in medieval paintings, a sound installation
on the East Lothian Coast, bars, exhibitions, offices and hotels, that
all display novel and unexpected approaches to the potential of Interior
Design.
Please find below a brief statement from each of the colleges:
Interior Architecture, Napier University
Interior Architecture is the art of re-using existing buildings. This
involves the reading of the structural ‘DNA’ -in other words
the existing order of a building- and the proposal of appropriate interventions
or spatial manipulations to allow it live a new life. Students develop
architectural interior design work to a high degree of technical resolution
using virtual and physical models. This exhibition will be composed primarily
of the former.
Projects on display include Graham Dunn’s conversion of the Old Student
union in Potterow, Edinburgh into a restaurant/bar, and Francesca Apollinari’s
retail building within the shell of the Old Post Office Building, Prince’s
Street, Edinburgh.
Images on their way
Edinburgh College of Art
At Edinburgh College of Art, students learn that interior design is the
art of designing rooms, of using space, light and tectures to generate
places with a strong sense of atmposphere. Students regularly work with
physical models, and the show on display at the lighthouse will be a series
of modelled rooms, recessed into the wall, that range from the construction
of medieval painted interiors (Matilda Kirkwood) to a a design for a new
bar for Heriot Watt students in central edinburgh (Chris Aiken). The course
culminates in Lynne Semple’s challenging insertion of a gigantic
pink screen into a Buchanan Street office building, converting it into
a new Glasgow headquarters of the Royal Institituion of Architects in
Scotland.
Matilda Kirkwood, St Joseph’s workshop, constructed painting
Chris Aiken, student union bar, Edinburgh
Lynne Semple: New headquarters for the RIAS, Glasgow
Glasgow School of Art
It is comparatively simple to deal with the physical expectations and
limitations of the human body. It is more difficult, and ultimately more
significant, to satisfy the aesthetic expectations of those who use interior
spaces. This does not necessarily require extravagant gestures. Colour
will transform a space as effectively as flamboyant spatial remodeling.
At Glasgow School of Art we do not presume to teach students to be creative.
They bring instinctive creativity to the course and we help them express
it through cultivation of appropriate intellectual and practical skills
in preparation for the demands of an increasingly specialized and competitive
professional world in which creative vision must be complemented by practical
capability and precisely tuned and balanced skills are the only reliable
means of survival. Comparatively small year groups are cohesive, dynamic
communities that allow students to see themselves as individuals and staff
to form a clear perception of individual abilities and aspirations.
Images:
Only one seems to be opening
Credit:
Olga Reid, Gallery of Digital Art, 4th Year, Glasgow School of Art
Duncan of Jordanstone
Interior and Environmental design goes beyond traditional expectations
if Interior Design, in that it, quite literally explodes the notion of
the Interior, bridging between landscape, architecture, the insides of
buildings, and fine art installation. The work on display in this exhibition
celebrates this diversity, showing, through digital projections and images
how students learn about design by making things, as well as theorizing
them.
Smaller scale Designs for a house for a poet (Alanna Cochrane), ‘Illuminated
Objects’ (Anna Langmaak) contrast with a highly conceptual design
for a sound installation on the Scottish coast (Kristen Blaikie).
Image Credit:
Kristen Blaikie, “Silent Architecture”, Interior & Environmental
Design, 4th Year, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University
of Dundee
Anna Langmaak, “Illuminated Object”, Interior & Environmental
Design, 1st Year, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University
of Dundee
Alanna Cochrane, “House for a Poet”, Interior & Environmental
Design, 2nd Year, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University
of Dundee
Glasgow Metropolitan (on its way)
The symposium
At the same time that the exhibition opens, IFS will be holding a symposium
of Interior design educators, in order address the same problem of ‘What
is Interior Design?’. This is the first time that such a conference
has been held in the UK.
A new body, Interiors Forum Scotland, exists in order to promote such
speculation about the future (and therefore the past and the present)
of Interiors in Scotland and beyond. Interiors Forum Scotland is a body
run jointly between five of the six Interiors programmes at University
level in Scotland at:
The symposium will consist of keynote addresses by three leading thinkers
in the world of Interior design. Shashi Caan of the Shahi Caan Collective
in New York City will be addressing the theme of: Interior Design: Confusion
or Consensus? Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone of Manchester Metropolitan
University will be addressing issues of the relationship between practice
and theory in Interior Design.
These keynote addresses will frame a series of submissions by theorists
and practitioners from all over the world, who will be offering submissions
under the headlines:
What is Interior Design?
How do we Teach Interior Design?
Why do we do Interior design?
What is the History of Interior Design?
Please find below a list of speakers and the titles of their submissions.
How do we teach Interior Design?
Ro Spankie, Oxford Brookes, r.spankie@brookes.ac.uk,
Drawing and Making: digital and analogue: space/object, examples of good
practice
Julia Dwyer, University of Brighton, Julia.dwyer@virgin.net; j.m.dwyer@brighton.ac.uk
Art and Design
Jose Bernardi, Arizona State University, jose.bernardi@asu.edu
Teaching Interior Design Studio based on a collaborative process, social
embeddedness and sustainable design
What is Interior Design?
C. Thomas Mitchell and Stephen M. Rudner (streetview group, inc.), Indiana
University, tmdesign@indiana.edu, rudetao@comcast.net
Interior Design; Identity Crisis, rebranding the profession
Tara Roscoe, studios architecture, NYC, troscoe@studiosarch.com
Immaterial Culture: the interior environment repositioned
Lois Weinthal, Parsons The New School for Design, NYC weinthal@mail.utexas.edu
Towards a New Interior
Patrick Hannay, Cardiff School of Art and Design UWIC, phannay@uwic.ac.uk
A regulated irregularity
Teresa Hoskyns, University of Brighton, UK
Not Cushions and Curtains
Suzie Attiwill, School of Architecture + Design, RMIT University, Melbourne,
Australia,
What's in a Canon?
Professor Lynn Chalmers and Assistant Professor Susan Close, University
of Manitoba, Canada
But is it Interior Design?
Why do we do Interior Design?
Andrew Stone, Middlesex University a.stone@mdx.ac.uk
The Interior, Why do we underestimate what we do?
Nilgün Olgentürk, Halime Demirkan Bilkent Univeristy, Ankara
Teaching Universal Design
Gennaro Postiglione, Eleanora Lupo, Politechnico di Milano, gennaro.postiglione@polimi.it,
eleanora.lupo@polimi.it
Interiors as space rewriting: the centrality of gesture
Gini Lee, Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Design, University
of South Australia, Australia
Curatorial Thinking: the performance space and the interior
Mark Burry, RMIT University, Australia and Mark Taylor, Victoria University
Wellington, New Zealand
Hertzian Space: Surface and Substrate
Saltuk Özemir
?stanbul Technical University, Turkey
The Mask Outside the Machine
Lorraine Farrelly, University of Portsmouth School of Architecture
Translation and representation of Interior Space
When? Histories and Herstories of Interior Design
Luis Diaz, University of Brighton
Towards a participatory History
Charles Rice, University of technology, Sydney charles.rice@uts.edu.au
For a Concept of the Domestic Interior: theoretical and historical challenges
Terry Meade, University of Brighton
The enclave and the Interior
John Brown, University of Calgary, john.brown@housebrand,ca
The Tailored Home
Professor Jon Daniel Davey and Assistant Professor Michael Brazley
Southern Illinois University
The Other Sister
Saltuk Özemir, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
The Mask Outside the Machine
Information on keynote speakers:
Graeme Brooker. Programme Leader BA&MA Interior Design
Manchester Metropolitan University.
E: g.j.brooker@mmu.ac.uk
TEL: 0161 247 1014.
Graeme Brooker is Programme Leader in BA (Hons) Interior Design at Manchester
Metropolitan University and the Director of the MA Spatial Design in MIRIAD
(Manchester Institute of Research and Innovation in Art & Design).
His research interests are focused upon the cultural, social and philosophical
effects of remodeling existing buildings and interior spaces. Teaching
interests include studio projects at both undergraduate and postgraduate
levels, remodeling building processes and principles, and the history
and philosophies of 20th century Interior Design.
After receiving an MA from Manchester Metropolitan University (with distinction)
in 1995, Graeme worked in Cardiff (UWIC) for seven years teaching interior
architecture. He has lectured in various institutions in the UK and abroad,
recently lecturing and teaching in places as far afield as the U.S (N.J.I.T),
and Taiwan (International Conference of co-operation).
He is co-author of Re-readings: Interior Architecture and the Design Principles
of Remodelling Existing Buildings (RIBA Enterprises 2004) and has recently
presented or published papers in Philadelphia (EAAE), Barcelona (GRACMON),
Shanghai (D2B) and Venice (IMCL).
He is currently preparing an exhibition on Rereadings to be shown in Manchester
in 2007, and is planning two new books, one a reader for Interior Design
and the other a book about the design of the modern room.
Shashi Caan: Biography
scaan@sccollective.com
www.sccollective.com
Shashi Caan is a talented and creative designer with an international
reputation.
Prolific and equally facile with architecture, interior, textile and product
design, she is convinced in the power of design to aid and improve the
human condition and has cultivated a keen awareness of the forces shaping
our habitable future.
Her unique sensitivity to human centered design and solution search is
further amplified by the fact that she is highly educated (with masters
in Architecture, master of Industrial Design and a BFA (hons) in Interior
Design) and develops her thought and design process through a balance
of research, analysis and creative exploration.
She bridges cultures and disciplines and seeks to integrate progressive
design capability with science and traditional knowledge pools toward
a better whole. She is the founder of her innovatively structured design
business (The Collective founded in 2001) prior to which, she was Design
Director and Associate Partner with Skidmore Owings and Merrill in NYC.
In the last five years, she has simultaneously chaired the prestigious
Interior Design Department at Parsons the New School of Design.
She is passionate about habitable design and generously contributes her
time, talent and expertise by actively working to cultivate vision and
excellence in the design of the built world. Along with designing projects
for multi-disciplinary and prestigious clients, Shashi and The Collective
regularly conduct design research in collaboration with scientists, psychologists,
technologists and business experts. Shashi makes it her business to be
informed about major and global influences shaping our future and the
resultant physical manifestation in our environments, communities and
cities. She believes that, today, the creative designer is a fundamental
partner in shaping a world which effectively and optimally address population
growth, urban expansion and an optimal quality of life which will help
to create a better tomorrow.
Because of her singular voice and strength in bringing depth to an otherwise
predominantly aesthetic and style focused profession, she was recognized
with the honor of being named Interiors National Designer of Year in 2004
in the US and Educator of Year by the International Facilities Management
Association of NY in 2006. She sits on numerous advisory and industry
regulatory boards and is a highly published, sought after and stimulating
speaker. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and accolades for
design innovation and excellence.
Glasgow
Events
Scottish Architecture
World Architecture : e-architect
- a guide to key buildings across the globe
Contemporary Interiors
Comments / photos for the Interior Architecture page welcome:
info@e-architect.co.uk
Thinking Inside the Box
: page - adrian welch / isabelle lomholt
Thinking Inside the Box symposium: www.interiorsforumscotland.com