The interior offers a unique opportunity to inhabit an encapsulated world, containing within it distilled ideas, fever dreams, hidden desires, mechanisms of control, dissonances, harmonies…a whole world that has been touched (and in turn touches us) through design in almost every way. 

But what is design? Is it something that we make or does it make us? Perhaps both at once? Perhaps we are “suspended in a complex and continuous back and forth between [ourselves] and artifacts” (B. Colomina, are we human? 2018).  

Designers are often tasked with solving problems. We tend to believe in a clean causality: intentions are materialized into things by way of design. In this course, rather than design solutions, we are going to ask questions that point to a more unstable relationship between the things and environments we make and our sense of self within them. The questions will emerge from an interrogation of the interior.  

The work of this class is to produce a ‘little drama’, an architectural document that attempts to represent interior space taking into account not only physical reality but also a greater web of contingencies.

“The mark of a building which is truly established is that it remains ineffective in two dimensions.” (Adolf Loos in “Architecture” 1910)

Loos believed that architectural space, particularly the theater of the interior, the place of intramural human life, could not be captured in drawing or photography. Our dramas will require more than mere drawing. They will unfold through an interaction with critical texts, a plastic approach to architectural representation, and observations through lived experiences in interior worlds.

Examination for this course is firmly based on 1) attendance and 2) participation (this requires doing the readings and being prepared to talk about them, but also in group work more generally) and 3) the completion of the assigned document

Formal Registration (for validation, marking, and credits) is on a first come first serve basis (or to pre-diploma students with credit requirements).

The course is open to students from other departments!