The Society of Interiors

By Rochus Hinkel, Tatjana Schneider, Tor Lindstrand and 2 more

The Society of Interiors discusses a variety of spatial practices which critique, reveal, and resist the economical logic of a neo-liberal market. A market that caters for exclusiveness and individualities, where public space becomes an interior, that is highly controlled and privatized. The different essays unpack, develop and expand a diversity of interior and spatial practices in urban contexts that allow for a diverse public, express differences, and create other experiences and situations.
Authors include the architect and researcher Tatjana Schneider, editor of the publication Spatial Agency (Routledge 2011); the activist architect Petra Pferdmenges from alive architecture in Brussels, the architectural theorist Peter Lang; the architect and artist Tor Lindstrand; as well as Rochus Hinkel, whose research focuses on the intersections between interior, architecture and urban environments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AADR – Art Architecture Design Research
• Release date: Nov 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9783887789046

Book preview

HINKEL

Introduction

Rochus Hinkel

The Society of Interiors is a collection of essays that offer a theoretical, historical and practice-based analysis of the inexorable privatization of public life in the context of global urbanization. Experimental samples of alternative practices are explored that critically and creatively respond to the increasing commercialisation and privatisation of urban space. The essays investigate the role of the architect, artist, and designer in this era of financialisation and credit crisis, as futures are foreclosed by the infinite debt of repaying one’s loans. To counter the oppressions of the society of interiors, the design thinkers and practitioners here reflect upon and critique the contemporary condition, and propose alternative spatial, inter-relational, social and political adventures that potentialise ‘other’, alternative situations. Rather than being subsumed by our contemporary plight (which we sometimes mistake for comfort), and rather than giving way to a generalised melancholly, the practices discussed in this book aim to highlight how we can remain actively engaged in the production of a shared, common, and greater societal composition.

For more than a decade we have seen the emergence of alternative, often marginal, practices that operate at the periphery of what is commonly understood as an architect, artist or designer’s discipline and profession. The ability to work at the limits of one’s own professional capacities has seen the rise of ‘other’ hybrid and productively messy practices. While some practitioners operate primarily as individuals, others form temporary collectives and establish networks, building partnerships and relationships with local communities, establishing ‘new’ agencies in and for the production of public space. These practitioners are able to sustain their engagement in a complex environment defined by conflicting interests. However, their impact on the mechanisms of power at play are marginal compared to the vast majority of built production, the dominant spatial politics and the influence of financial players, including profit driven investment funds and the co-option of state responsibilities by private enterprise. While many alternative practices vociferously point toward pressing issues, and raise difficult questions, the ability and the power to create effective change would appear frustratingly minor and peripheral. Alternatives are only offered in homeopathic doses, while practices accept their marginal role and retreat into the murmuring complaints of discourse, often shared within small circles that are frequently lodged in the sheltered workshop of academia.

There is a growing sense of frustration and struggle, or else out and out exhaustion.

At a symposium on ‘Interiors and Cities’ hosted at one such institutional setting, Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design the discussion was concerned with the question of how the critical and creative practitioner could resist the sell out of public spaces. Where Tatjana Schneider addressed the London context and addressed questions of private ownership, Tor Lindstrand reflected on the infinite and empty reflections produced in the recently opened Mall of Scandinavia, leaving the panel and audience near the brink of an abyss of resignation, with just a remainder of frustration to keep them motivated. Much as we bear witness to the fallout of climate change, images of disaster fed to us through our televisual media, we have also come to realise that the death knell of public space has already sounded, and that we are powerless as a profession, and certainly as individuals, to reverse the development.

Must we surrender so easily?

No, I don’t think so. Peter Lang reminds us of Superstudio’s radical architectures and utopian megastructures that overcome the dominant bourgeois model of ownership and society. Practices such as Petra Pferdmenges’ alive architecture have responded creatively to the challenges of the evacuation of public space by establishing a critical and inclusive design practice, engaging with local communities, but at the same time making efforts to change the political framework at a larger scale.

The complexity of the questions around the politics of urbanisation and the evacuation of public space requires a common effort in order to be able to achieve any change or improvement. The economic, social, and political situation of the world around us is a messy, entangled superimposition of a multitude of strata, composed of conflicting interests and contradictory meanings. While it might seem close to impossible to disentangle what is at stake, we need to be able to deploy designerly ways of mapping and knowing our urban environments if we hope to have a chance of addressing the issues we are confronting. The question remains as to whether a systemic change can be achieved and alternatives sketched out without being able to quite grasp what is confronting us. Who must we band together with? It seems obvious that small changes and experiments in and around public spaces that resist the plight of seemingly inexorable urbanisation can test and hopefully establish new strategies and tactics and offer inside knowledge that will enable us to respond to the imminent future in experimentally productive and life enhancing ways. They prepare the ground for a common effort that will enable us to achieve change or improvement, but we must also acknowledge that such work is necessarily undertaken collaboratively with a diversity of urban actors.

In my own work, within the broad array of practices related to the urban sphere, I have explored public space within both the educational as well as the research environment. In collaboration with students, and by challenging assumptions about the institution being a sheltered workshop, we have developed projects that explore the potential of unbuilt and immaterial architectures orientated around the intimacies of experiencing bodies in ephemerally produced interior and urban spaces. These explorations offer object lessons for how we habitually practice space, and how easily we fall prey to daily habits, the grinding circuit of consumption and production. From these earlier explorative projects I have shifted toward the exploration of relational urban actions, and subsequently toward a politically engaged practice that is responsive to encounters, that sometimes releases or even relinquishes control, and that ventures toward an expanded spatial and critical practice. Each experimental adventure aims to learn something, to carve out spaces of public expression that otherwise seem to be shrinking, or receding. In other words, the investigations I have ventured develop from discipline related questions of collective experience, to more socially and politically related questions of social interaction and socio-political acts, with the aim of challenging assumptions about ownership, resources and finances and how, instead, we can reinvest in the vibrant spatialities of a public sphere.

Because built form and civic architecture is not always the response to the pressing need of creating a space for a variable public this publication dispenses with the habitual emphasis on built outcome and end product. The emphasis shared by the collected essays is on the endurance of critical and creative practice, on open-ended investigations into the spatial production of public situations. Critical reflection across these essays is immersive and embodied and creative resistance is always urgent. Experiments in critical practice both challenge fixed disciplinary boundaries, while acknowledging the disciplinary capacity of a designer. In response to the specific and identifiable socio-political constraints of urbanization and its evacuation of a public sphere, novel collaborative and creative methods are presented as stories of embedded urban research.

If post-war social life was progressively overwhelmed by the consumption of spectacles, what Guy Debord once deplored under the rubric