A Taxonomy of Interiors

Summary

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. Hankone Prince Hotel, Tōgō Murano House for Mr. G, kurosawa kawara-ten Casa Malaparte, Ada...