Introduction
In this essay, the main focus will be on the effects of media cultures on the design concepts and material implementations in the practice of interior design. How the mainstream media has changed our outlook towards design and how we perceive it. The basic principle of design has been blemished with objectification, it has become a collection of scenes set on a stage that is homogeneous and inert. Every surface is being wrapped up and sold as a commodity to create an interior that is deemed perfect before the organism can even interact with it and there is no room for individuality. Drawing on the idea of Ingold (2015:45) about hard surfacing and built environment he argues “Hard surfacing, I contend, is the definitive characteristic of the built environment. In such an environment, life is truly lived on or above the ground and not in it. Plants grow in pots, people in apartments, fed and watered from remote sources. Life and habitation are contained.” The purpose of this topic is to show how media presence of design started as revolution in 20th century to educate people about design and engage their sense but now it has become a stage to attain status and praise. “The built environment, as Gibson said of environments in general, is cluttered with manifold objects whose only connection with any piece on the ground is that they happen to have been set up on it. Were all the clutter removed, we would indeed be confronted with a sense of desolation” Ingold (2015:45). I will focus on the residential/domestic interior as it is the most intimate form of interior that can be designed, it acts like a biography of the person living in it, the emergence of residential interior and how it was influenced with photography. I will analyse the relationship between interior design and photography to depict how there is a concept of double ness that dictates the space and image of the interior.
“No particular skill or effort is required to turn something into an object. Preventing a thing from becoming an object is a far more difficult task” Kengo Kuma, Anti-Object, 2008.
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I want to criticize the new design environment that is governed by the object and not the individuality of the subject. I propose a reorientation in the usage of media cultures in the mainstream interior design to the process and ideas behind the development of design rather than a final image. My suggestion is to consider image as state of events rather than a frozen event, so as to create it as a medium between humans and the design world.
Domestic Interior: Emergence and Doublness
“Are we walling in or walling out”, Robert Frost.
The home is a medium of perception for humans. It is our first contact with surfaces, materials and environment, it plays an important part in how we create and respond to other surfaces later in our lives. There was an apparent professional struggle between the architects and upholsters regarding the design and control of the interior. So, Interior design emerged as a newly articulated entity in this war, never belonging fully to either. Interior emerged as a spatial experience as well as a representational image. There was a doubleness present in the relationship of the spatial design of the interior and its image representation from the beginning, neither of them emerging as the primary sense.
Humans throughout our history have conceived development and growth as a means to confine and control their environment as they imagined it should have been conceived for their purposes. They try to alter the surfaces and materials that would be tailored to their perfect notion of the built environment, but environment is not what we imagine it should be it is constantly changing and evolving. It is not coherent and cannot be contained. In an attempt to control the overwhelming uncertainty in our environment we have created a bubble of surfaces around us. The domestic interior became an important part of the industrialized society in the western world to compensate for the lack of any individuality in the big cities, because interiors are conceived as environments specific to specific people and they should develop with them, act as their biography. They are a bubble of surfaces that contains the traces of his everyday life, a declaration of self to the world.
In the early societies the drawing on the body was a declaration of expression and self, a biography in a sense of the world. They brought the environment inside the interior to represent their place among the community, there was a sense of individuality in their expression. The expression was not guided by the object but by the subject, its experiences and memories.
The focus on the interior in the early 20th century also created domesticity in its modern form. The theorists of modernity always wanted a level, homogeneous and inert surface to create a stable and timeless aspect of living, so interior emerged as a solution to it caught between the timeless and essential features and in the end becoming a mechanism of modernity in itself.
The objectification in the field of design that emerged with the 20th century and its technological advances that deliberately created and separated objects from their environment, found its way to architecture and interior design as well.
The interior was a three-dimensional space as well as a two-dimensional frame. The doublness between the image and space in interior became evident with the modern architectural photography, where the interior captured by the architects were bare walls and interiors captured by the interior designers were staged furnishings. This difference was first evident in the works of modern architects Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos.
These rapid changes in the society and its image representation somehow created an idea that the collection of objects and experience were related. The culture of commodity exchange makes this evident that interior surfaces were being created to enclose the subject and his commodities. The value of the objects was more important that their usefulness.
Humans were becoming frightened by their own reflection or true self, we want the world to perceive us in a certain way and we project that view in our most intimate environments as well, the one we should have designed for our self but became a stage.
The last defence against this inexorable infiltration of the commodity was established through an
The modern architecture was made majorly as an object, something that was dominated by the excess circulation of the images.
The interior was expressed as a thorough design and decoration of the architectural shell.
Image of the interior
Interior is a mass-produced commodity now; we can see the influence that images and social media culture has on its development. It is not a reflection of the organism, nor his biography it is a mere stage. The stage that is guided and controlled by the image. The conception of design and the usage of materials in its surfaces is guided by its nature as an object not an environment. Beauty has more influence on the design process than the comfort. Designers are creating pieces of art where every space, surface and function is created conforms to the vision of the designer and not the person it is designed for. There are many concepts that were introduced in the late 19th and early 20th century that tried to preordained and mass produce interior design, I will focus on the Jugendstil interior (1895-1910) and Bauhaus Interior (1919-1930) and the imprints they left on the current interior design styles.
Bauhaus Interior Less is more.
Bauhaus was an architectural and interior design movement started in Germany by Walter Gropius in 1919. He founded an art school that combined architects, artists and carpenters working together on projects. The main philosophy behind the development of this collective was to systemize the design and make it harmonious to the environment. They wanted to change the image of domestic design and furniture from objects that were too particular to objects deprived of individual characteristics. They wanted to standardize and anonymize the designs so that they may be mass produced with the new technologies that were being made available. The influence of Bauhaus and its design forms can still be seen in the interior design in the form of minimalistic design form that is quite prevalent now. The less is more philosophy restricted itself to a basic color palette and basic geometric forms. Minimalism in itself has created more problems, the image of these interiors is more important than their function. The more they tried to blend with the environment the more obsolete they become in function.
Jugendstil Interior Interior as image
Images create a magical world that is eternal without any cause or consequence. It captures the history but it is nothing like it. It is a constant yet the world is ever changing.Flusser
Somehow images represent a logical permanent idea that gives them their magical significance.Flusser
What was suppose to be a mediator has in itself become a world and has restructured the reality. We are worshipping the image rather than use it. Flusser.
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