Interior Design as the making of metaphors

By Barie Fez-Barringten

www.bariefez-barringten.com

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1,110 words

Architecture as the making of metaphors

is the way                       we think and                                            the process by which   we think

One of the basics of urban sociology and motivation for populating a city is the city’s sense of significant place or spirituality and importance. (In addition to its commercial and security reasons).

As a building’s meaning is rooted in its culture so is its interior.

                    Different and often subtle conceptual constructs have emerged as conditional parameters to differentiate interior architecture from interior design. This involves architecture as being concerned with more than a mere building of practical and economical needs, and more than a mere structure of enclosure systems.  Architecture as a discipline has always been engaged in the struggle to raise human and spiritual meaning to a higher purpose and a meaningful focus for at least three millenniums. An architectural structure is an expression of cultural principles and deliberate design choices based on current technology and understandings—its meaning. This is the essence of all architecture. These ideals are accomplished in the design process through a language of reduction. It is achieved through narrowing abstract notions of ideas and symbols or program to compose a unity of form, space, detail, materials, etc. in order to achieve a Vitruviius’ dicta of firmness, commodity, and delight. Interior architecture is never removed from the architectural condition, and this reductionist ideal or a reductionism conceptual base. An interior architecture manifests itself as the meaning imbedded within the building inside as well as out, and as such must be housed within the practice of architecture and professional architectural services.

                 This presumes a decision to have a conversation with that shell. However there are tenant change or remodeling of ancient buildings where ht e shell is preserved but a totally pristine and futuristic and contemporary interior is inserted quite articulated from its surround thus pronouncing g the shell and its interior distinct and unrelate

In Schinkel’s Schoss Charlottenhof (1824 –29), the Tent Room (after 1830) was set up originally as a kind of stage set for ladies-in-waiting and appears as a seemingly decorative approach to finishing an interior space. However, as Schinkel would have it, the Tent Room is an individually designed space structurally tied to 18th-century Prussian austerity and high culture but removed from the formal neo-classical compositional language imbedded within both the architectural shell, landscaping, and the interior architecture of the plan and the furnishing in other adjacent spaces. Schinkel’s Charlottenhof represents a masterfully unified composition, shifting from a coherent formal language between landscape, architecture, and interior architecture to the finite interior design solution of the Tent Room. The Tent Room conceptually and in application denies the existence of the building and the interior architecture of the adjacent spaces.

 Interior architecture is the collaborative art of spatial investigations and interventions. Sustainability, interaction design, user-centered design, and immersive environments are all expanded practices of interior architecture. The faculty challenges students to explore, experience, and engage with architecture, fashion, fiber, theatrical design, exhibit design, lighting design, interactive design, and furniture design in their work. Interior architecture at the School integrates the creative, cultural, and critical abilities required of designers with the visionary, exploratory, and conceptual abilities of the artist.
              The connection between Loos and Schinkel is important in considering the conflict for Loos given his Please see next page polemic stance between adding interior elements to the inside of architecture as an appliqué without a formal connection to the exterior. But while the Tent Room at Charlottenhof is an interior design approach in additive assemblies—the ‘tent’ structures over the beds for example—Loos understood (and we should) Schinkel’s ability to distilled neo-Classical geometry, pattern, and detail equally on the exterior and on the interior and yet independently add elements free from the building shell. Thus, one can witness in Charlottenhof the unity between the inside and the outside while keeping the architectural language separate from the interior of the Tent Room. Charlottenhof represents a duality; interior architecture at one level acknowledging the interior program and a highly articulated interior design solution with the design treatment of the Tent Room.

Articulating the conceptual relationship of interior architecture and interior design idea may appear overly complex as a reduction/additive thought process , but it is this foundational or conceptual relationship of using the architectural language of reduction to define interior architectural ideals and the additive assembling concepts to distinguish interior design. The point is that from a conceptual position through the completed project, interior architecture requires the architecture to be acknowledged, embraced and used. An interior design work is free to subvert the architecture and the architectural condition. Interior design may or may not acknowledge the architecture that provides the enclosure system; it is a process that operates on several levels and in collaboration with many disciplines. The legitimacy of interior design as a profession or discipline is not in question when understanding the broad and specific needs of facilitating our contemporary society in the built environment, inside and out”.
—Henry Hildebrandt

Making the familiar strange and even question walls, floors, and all that bounds and limits space. What is space and do I want this room or building to be part of the exterior context or cut off from the contexts. Or is a part of hierarchy of spaces going from out to tin and where is this room or building in that context. As the sitting of a building so is the sitting of a room

Should this room have a personality of its own, of the rest f the building, or of its occupants and user?

Hierarchy of increasing private spaces set apart in time and distance from the urban context verses the abrupt connection of interior space to the cities populated context. Like having a building with a bed with a door directly facing a busy public pedestrian street.

Two dimensional design tools affords a designer to transcend the reality of time and space by visualizing horizontal and vertical connections.;  The geometry of design itself affects the outcome. For example designing with a model verses designing on paper verses designing on site will produce three  different kinds of outcomes. 

It is only an art when you create something for the first time while if you just design a room it is a craft.

I became a new man when I became an interior designer. I gained life. I was dead before then. I became alive. I was on a mission My mission was to design interiors. I wanted to continue what I began in our  Faile Street sun parlor. On my side of the room , with orange craits for walls,structure and shelves I made rooms which I roofed over with blankets. I was able to build my world, take control of my life and give it order.

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