#markpimlott

System for architecture and agriculture and idea of occupation 

Thomas Jefferson’s Land Ordinance 1785, established a system of measure, and the legislated idea of possession of territory, sight unseen; a system of tools and dimensions and organization and materials, that was parallel in every way to the Roman system and its equipment. In the American system, which begins as a surveying device, the notion of exteriority and otherness is banished. Everything is brought within, and everything is incorporated, including, as was seen, symbols of divine authorization, in the form of Yosemite, the Garden of Eden within the American interior. The other is intolerable, eliminated, replaced by the endlessly projecting Self. The extension and command of the system over the entire territory produces a world of norms and normative effects and a condition of enforced conformity, obeisance; a condition of interiority. Leonardo Benevolo, in The Architecture of the Renaissance described this as an “idea, a projection, and a machine removed from the relation to the body”. 

Effects and figures of a continuous interior 

The Jefferson Plan was realized first as an idea, ratified through photographic representation, claims on confiscated resources and enforced through military aggression, and physically through the township and the homestead and their figures and effects, notably the grid implicit and explicit, and all the buildings and the dimensions and formats of the materials they were made of. The assumption of the Other and Eden provided the interior with its myth of Manifest Destiny, and legitimated the system, which ultimately, came to be realized through an array of figures that constituted the dispersed and diffuse urbanism of the North American landscape: an extensive entity bound together by ideology and represented by its features and effects.

This is the environment in which I was raised, and in my childish perceptions, I understood this as a continuous condition; I also understood it as an idea, but one in which I found rupture and achieved consciousness: all places were one place, and all were connected across space and through time. This was Montreal in the 1960s. The city was in the midst of a radical programme of being re-cast as a territorial urban construct of late Modernism, described by Banham, Blake and others. The city’s utopianism was embodied by its renovations of the central business district (its ‘uptown’), underground and overground infrastructures, and a universal exposition, expo67. Together, these produced a startling effect of coherence, wherein the city was a new order of system, literally interior (la ville intérieure) with subtle hierarchies, almost naturalistic, that followed the character and profile of the local landscape and was imbued with an idea that a future was being realized in the present. The atmosphere was not trapped in this interior or its extensions through the Métro system, or even in the elevated motorways that connected the centre to the regions and territories; rather, it pervaded the atmosphere of the entire city, its other interiors, its streets and its empty lots. One felt indeed in a continuous interior.

The character of the newly built interior realm was not, however, abstract, but varied, atmospheric, physical. One’s visual and haptic senses were engaged. One’s sensitivity to cultural signs was engaged (Métro Bonaventure). The environment contained hierarchies: there were monumental episodes, banal stretches, and tactile (and beautiful) fragments of urbanity. Being in this interior was like living in a redemptive version of No-Stop City. One was somewhere in the midst of an everywhere, and both dimensions, if you will, could be apprehended and experienced by the citizen. One was in the World; furthermore, the interior’s many contiguous and continuous spaces––and its aura––gave one the impression of freedom: that within, one was free to move, pause, associate and act. This, at least, was my experience of the centre from 1964 (my first visit) and 1983 (when I left the city). The interior, extensive and ‘complete’ can now be said to have transformed the entire character of the centre, which is all clearly, interiorized.

The atmosphere of this idea and its space has pervaded my practice, which recognizes that that interior was both in the World and a World in its own right: in short, a realization of a spatial, territorial and ideological model, much in the manner of the Romans, or Jefferson, but in a particular, coherent and discrete (though extensive) form; and complete in its absorption of the other effects of the city, which were part of that interior’s idea: the terrains, the streets, the stations, the vehicles, the houses and their interiors. Hence, my idea of re-seeing this idea and its ‘place’ through photographs of elsewheres; and projects that tried to capture its spirit of complete connectivity with all places and all times: Place Jacques-Cartier, Neckinger Mills, La scala, World.

The public interior and its significance 

I am arguing for a continuing belief or investment in the specificity and specific qualities of the public interior, as significant episodes within our weak and diffuse urbanity of consciousness within which we are ‘captive’ participants; real experience of place, others and ‘nature’ supported by the complex realization of outlook, phenomenon, materiality and representation.

The public interior is the pre-eminent public environment in the contemporary city. It is the space that historically and presently frames and situates the public; it inculcates, manipulates and, potentially, liberates the public. Yet it is a space almost completely ignored or misunderstood by architects, developers and public bodies. Many forces are at play within its contested space that is, in its presentation and representations, habitually surrendered to forces one might describe as corrosive––geared purely, for example, to consumption. It can achieve more: it can be the space, or more precisely, the place in which people can feel free to move, associate and act.

What a public interior should do 

I am interested in what kind of addition to the city a great public interior can be, and what such an interior can do. What makes an exemplary public interior? Public interiors of various kinds, regardless of their form or format, are exemplary because of the work they do in the city and to the city, clarifying and enabling its operations; they provide representative spaces for the city that change both the city and its citizens; they bring others together––visually, physically, socially–– while respecting their individuality and distinctness while ennobling them, dignifying them and encouraging them to feel free; engaging them in experiences for their senses in spaces where they might be aware of their place in the city and the World. These representative spaces must have qualities that engage and stimulate their publics and appeal to their senses, their ideas and their fantasy. From uses as diverse as the city market, the station, hospital, school, town hall or theatre, these spaces must improve the quality of public life through each aspect of their agency; their environments must sustain that life through the relations they make, their spaces, appearances, atmospheres and substance; and through their allusions (whether to the palace, garden or ruin); through their attachment to and representation of the culture of the city. The public interior can be and has shown itself capable of being a stage upon which we citizens regard ourselves and others, and participate in an image of the city’s idea of itself and what it wants itself to be (which can include being like somewhere else).

This is central to my concerns regarding the education of architects. The Chair of The Architecture of the Interior has the ambition of understanding these interiors so that places of real qualities may be proposed and realised. The central focus of study since we began our new Course in 2013 is the public interior: those interior realms connected to public space, health, learning, culture, entertainment, work, movement and transport, shopping, and flânerie. A core principle is that the humane treatment of the city’s public environment is central to making a home in the world for all. It follows that architecture has the capacity and responsibility to act in realising this home. Two frameworks of knowledge––phenomenology and material culture––guide the Chair’s approach to education and research: where we are in the world and how our thoughts or desires are embodied in the material with which we make our environments within it, to make generous infrastructures for possession, association and use. Phenomenology gives priority to the experience of things, spaces, atmospheres, and materials through the senses; while material culture posits that meaning is embedded in things, their substances, appearances and arrangements. The public spaces and interiors of the city are spaces that we share, where we come together as individuals in public and as a public. They have the capacity to be good, generous, civil, and representative of the society in which we want to live. The paucity of real quality in these realms as they are made now demands attention through both research and design. They cannot be addressed as isolated statistical events; rather, interdependent and intertwined, they must be addressed with all the knowledge, skills and attentions that are particular to design and designers.

You will note that as I speak of the interior, I do not refer to the domestic interior; I describe the interior as continuous with the World, rather than as an extension of the body, a layer of clothing or a shell into which one retreats from the World. I wish to challenge the exclusivity or intense personalisation, or psychologising, that has developed around discussions of the Interior. A prevalent notion within literature considering interior design and architecture is that the interior is an extension of our private selves, and by interpolation, of our bodies and their clothing. To an extent, this is true: with our intimately oriented tools, we mediate our relation with the World. Likewise, the interior does not exist in solitude, but in relation to the World; and the scenes that we characterise as private are cluttered with references and connections with that realm we think of as public. The public reaches inside to the private, and even in the space of dreams, while the private reaches toward the public through a vast catalogue of affinities manifest in the imagery, association, and atmosphere of the interior.

So, the interior is very much tied to the world, and in the World. The interior is architectural, and integral to the architectural project. This view runs counter to that often used to explain the discipline of interior architecture, and this difference is what I think distinguishes our Chair from those of interior architecture elsewhere. The significance of context and the connectedness of the interior to larger conditions, structures and territories, is essential to this position.

We desire consciousness and a kind of freedom