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) 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.  

LINK TO SYLLABUS:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qFMyqhvnI8Z7HPGpQPUFO_oclbUM1cBv/view?usp=sharing

Students will be evaluated on 1) attendance 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 documents.

The course is taught over 2 semesters. Each semester is an autonomous teaching unit and is not meant to be taken by the same students. 

Part 1 Third Places:

The winter semester focuses on third places, small urban rooms connected to the street that, although transactional in nature, function as a middle realm between the home and the workplace. In their aggregate they add up to an alternative public sphere: the café, the record store, the arthouse cinema, the bar.

Part 2 Domestic Theater: 

The summer semester focuses on urban domestic space, primarily as apartments or housing units, featuring a range of habitation scenarios: the single occupant, the nuclear family, the Wohngemeinschaft.  

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.

Our ‘little dramas’ will require more than mere drawing. They will unfold through an interaction with critical texts, an interrogation of a place and the individuals that populate it, a study of the available archive, a  plastic approach to architectural representation, and observations through lived experiences in these interior worlds.