InsideOpen :

Work by Mark Croft, a graduate from Interior Architecture & Design at the University for the Creative Arts Canterbury exhibited at Free Range 2009, London

‘Interior-Loci’, instigates the question; ‘where is the interior?’

With this exhibition, 5 graduates/practitioners negotiate implicit concepts on the notion of interiority and seem, through this exercise, not only engaged with the question ‘where is the interior’ yet simultaneously seem to question the location of Interior Architecture & Design, as a discipline, within an academic and professional setting.

Too often the notion of interior architecture and design is captured within the confines of pre existing physical containers as details to architectural and urban structures. Within this physical confinement seems to lay (not always but often) the reason for conceptual and critical imprisonment nurturing an attitude towards the non-relational, the inherent, singular and absolute.

The confinement of the interior as a phenomenological entity wants to be broken, setting up a supporting structure for designers to use their discipline not only to identify but question their actions or their position, or indeed their existence, within a professional environment where clear titles seem to be provided opium nurturing the illusion of clarity and singularity.

With this exhibition the questioning of the discipline of interior architecture and design resonates through the exhibition-space where space is used for experimentation. In doing so, the work considers tactics employed in tools for reflection and critical discourse, distinct from more dominant Cartesian tools of representation we often see in authorative architectural drawing vocabularies, shifting the focus from drawings used as spatial representations to using the drawing to engage with the experience of designing, making and thinking.

These types of drawings/installations announce an attitude towards interior architecture and design where the discipline is used as a platform for questioning spatial practice. It does what architectural education can not do; act as a radical entity; not focused on defining its discipline yet focused on perpetually shifting the boundaries of its own disciplinary province to appropriate new and more engaging relational conditions with neighboring disciplines.

Interior-Loci, in its search for location, does suggest a notion of in-between-ness, conceptual space that is inevitably unstable. Through this instability the concept of the interior shifts towards the process of interiorisation; an act within space with an emphasis to time and the performance of design rather than the use of phenomenological space as a composing force.

Article by Ephraim Joris

Interior-Loci was exhibited at the 9th annual Free Range at The Old Truman Brewery, London, Europe’s largest graduate art and design show.

Opening Night: Thurs 9 July/ Show: Fri 10 July - Mon 13 July 2009

PREVIOUS EDITORIAL ARTICLES 

·          Design, Reuse, Team work; September 19th, 2008

·          Challenging the space(s) we live in; November 19th, 2008

·          Altermodernism; January 28th 2009