Emily priest

Furnitures or the choreography of the interior

Emily Priest

A series of short essays and poems first developed at leisure during the Architecture & Ecriture Visiting School (Tutor: Caroline Rabourdin) in Paris and continued to develop for the History & Theory Studies: Extended Thesis (Tutors: Mark Campbell, Emmanouil Stavrakakis) at the Architectural Association in London.

Contents

Foreword Interior

4 14

Layers 26 Built-in

55

Loose

62

Desk 72 Replica

83

Aura

88

Bibliography

95

Figures 100

Furnitures

Foreword

One of the collages from La Femme 100 têtes (The 100 Headed Woman), by Max Ernst (1.1) depicts a man sitting in an upholstered armchair in a bourgeoisie suit, while “all around him technology has turned everything upside down”1. The chair is at sea, with an obscure monument rising from the waters in the background, while a mechanistic rod and a human-looking arm swims in the fore. Chaos is stirring, yet the man remains comfortable and at ease within his chair.

This image encompasses two particularly important notions of furniture - or rather two gestures towards the potential of the furniture-object2, where the furniture-object becomes a compositional figure that performs in space. It is this concept that became the preliminary basis and ultimate curiosity for Furnitures3.

To begin, the image encourages us to perceive a view of disarray; our minds innately understand that a chair does not belong in the sea – an obvious point perhaps; but this essentially proves that our perception already anticipates the composition of the interior and the expected choreography of the chair. It is through countless exposures of the interior; in image and in experience, that our minds have a perceived order of the interior, without us ever really being aware of it. Secondly, whether the man is asleep or simply unaware of the absurdities around him, Ernst suggests that the chair; in which he comfortably sits, is providing him with some sort of relief from the surrounds.

Furnishing has often been defined as the ‘comforting’ layer to the interior and therefore we might assume that ‘to furnish’ is to construct ‘comfort’4. So that the chair in the image seems to some extent, remove the figure from the discomfort of his vicinity, suggesting that ‘comfort’ and therefore, ‘furnishing’ has a physical and phenomenological capacity to alter the spatial condition beyond that of the physical object. In this particular case, the potential of the furniture-object lies within Ernst’s chair.

4

1.1 Max Ernst, collage from La Femme 100 tĂŞtes (The 100 Headed Woman), 1929.

5

Such that:

A figure is in a chair on the

ocean.

The figure closes his eyes and remains comfortable in the chair.

The figure begins to think his own thoughts

In mind,

in the chair. in thought;

the figure is in a chair, in the ocean.5

Furnitures

As a hypothesis, we might say that it is through the furniture-object that the consciousness of the figure is able to shift from the oceanic scene, towards their own thoughts without physically moving.

If we are able to read such implications as those discussed above, from Ernst’s drawing, we must also believe in the physical and phenomenological capacity of choreographed space.

Furniture; which seems to be often overlooked and placed alongside the term ‘appliance’ and ‘sofa’, has a definition reading, “The movable articles that are used to make a room or building suitable for living or working in, such as tables, chairs, or desks.”6 What becomes most alluring in this definition, is the word “movable”. In a single word, we assume that furniture becomes furniture when it becomes more mobile than the room. Then further, the notion that the presence of furniture allows for a space to be “suitable for living or working in”, ascertains that a room is only really inhabitable, with the introduction to furniture or furnishing. These assumptions - and there must be many more - actually become a little (positively) disturbing when combined with an amount of spatial imagination, or at the very least, they suggest that there is something quite mysterious about furniture; the way we situate it, the types we choose and their effects on the space in question: does the chair become the room or does the room become the chair?

The writing, imagery and poetry contained within Furnitures endeavours to capture and ruminate on the allure of the furniture-object and the perceived spatial logic of the interior. As such, consider the relationship between the palpable and the sensed order of the interior, we should acknowledge the ‘room’ or ‘building’ as the envelope7. Where for the purpose of this study, the interior is a space different and separate to the exterior and the ‘movable articles’ within that space is the furniture.

Furnitures has limited its referential focus to the domestic or private interior, as this seems to be the most intimate, controlled and therefore contrived space in which we exist. It is arguably within the private interior, that furniture becomes most sedated with our social and cultural tendencies and by limiting itself to analysing interior space, Furnitures concerns itself with composed space and constructed atmosphere.

In order to analyse interior space, the term ‘layers’8 has been used to stratify the interior, in an attempt to determine the spatial definition of the envelope and then question the moment where envelope becomes furniture. Is this the moment when an object has spatial presence?

8

Foreword

1.2 A partial application of the principles of art furnishing. Sitting Room, ‘Glen Roy’ Wake Green Road, Moseley, Birmingham, 1890.

9

Furnitures

If so, how is spatial presence perceived; - physically or phenomenologically? If an object is termed as furniture, does this mean it is autonomous to the interior? And ultimately, what is precisely meant by the choreography of space?9 In order to answer these questions, it is not necessarily the interior being interrogated, but rather the psychological and actual relationship that can be perceived, between the interior and the furniture.

This process has been studied through writing, and through images taken of real interiors.

With this in mind, there was a relentless awareness when reading the images, that what was being seen was a flattened version of an actual space. In such a way that the images seemed to suggest an amount of theatricality to the furnished interior and the process of analysis. This made the duality of the interior; as discussed extensively by Charles Rice in The Emergence of the Interior, ever more apparent10. A similar notion was found in the writings of Georges Perec who; in Things: A Story of the Sixties, writes through the perspective of the eye. By doing this, Perec encourages the reader to experience an interior through its subsequent layers; when in fact, they are only reading about an interior through words on a page.

By working in this way it seemed that a distinct tension was formed with the subsequent presence and removal of the image and the actual, as well as the written and the visual, when considering desired space. By reading the interior through image and text it became clear that the interior acts as the first layer of actual contrived space, then the written and visual acts secondary. So that there is a planned recording of a planned space. This suggests that there is not only a desire to compose interior space in reality, there is also a desire to record it and describe it. Proving that there is a sensual ambition for the interior to be experienced and to be seen.

In accordance to Rice, reading the interior through imagery, is a constant reminder of the interior’s duality. Such tension can also be extended to the dualism found in the perception of the interior; where, as discussed in the case of Ernst and the man at sea, we have an inate understanding of the language of objects and also the feel of those objects. With this in mind, Furnitures intends to align itself with Rice’s depiction of the interior and argue further that the interior also has both, a physical and psychological presence and that there is a relationship between these two realms of experience and spatial understanding. How do these two realms operate? Do they only exist in our perception? Are they autonomous to the other? Does this mean there is an innate hierarchy to interior space?

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Foreword

1.3 ‘In a much smaller house, the interior shows some of the changes in taste characteristic of the 1920s. With plain painted walls, the most minimal joinery, and little upholstery, the room is not ‘decorated’ in the sense apparent in the earlier interiors, apart from the grate and mantelpiece’, C.H. James & F.R. Yerbury, Modern English Houses & Interiors, London, 1925, plate V. Dining room of a house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, designed by Robert Atkinson, early 1920s.

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Furnitures

1.4 Eileen Grey, Studio for Jacques Doucet, Paul Ruaud (architect) and Paul Iribe (decorator), Neuilly, 1926-29, incorporating Eileen Gray’s guéridon table (inset), c. 1914-15.

1.5 Eileen Gray, Guéridon table, c. 1914-15.

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Foreword Notes 1. Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari, The furniture of Carlo Mollino (London: Phaidon Press, 2006) 35.

2. The ‘furniture-object’ is a phrase that has presented itself through the writing as a means to refine the furniture piece as a pure object in itself, regardless of whether it is a table, a chair, etc. and to also remove it from its style. In doing this, we are able to understand the furniture-object as an unassuming object in interior space. This also enables us to take the furniture-object in isolation, whilst it simultaneously rests in present space, and define its position within the composition of the interior, as well as to consider the possibility that the furniture-object can represent something other than it’s physical self. Where, ‘furniture’ locates the subject in the space as something that is not the envelope and at the same time, ‘object’ removes or distinguishes the subject from the space. For instance, when paired, (1.4-5) we see Eileen Gray’s Guéridon table as a furniture in the studio of Doucet and Ruaud and also as an object or character when removed from context. The relational moment that could happen between these two images, through the understanding of the physical object, is what the term ‘furniture-object’ hopes to acheive.

3. The term, Furnitures is not necessarily limited to the title, nor the actual furniture as we know it (for example; the chair, the table); it is more concerned with the conceptual potential of the ‘furniture-object’ (what the chair means to the table, what the table means to the chair, what both of these objects mean to us). When considering the ‘furniture’ in this particular case; both the physical and phenomenological capacity of object are being referred to, as well as the relationship between the interior - as contained space - and the furniture-object (the table in the room, the chair under the table, the table over the chair).

4. By determining this, it is also being suggested that everything that is not functional or integral to the structure and is therefore decorative, is furniture. In a room; this is where the origin of furniture can be found, or where the act of furnishing begins. See (Fig. 1.2), which shows a rather elaborate act of ‘furnishing’ from the late 19th century. The particular ordering or layers to an interior will be explored later, in Layers but for now it is interesting to read the image through its numerous surface finishes; the multiple kinds of wallpapers, the rug on top of the carpet, the peiord mouldings over the window and fireplace; through its numerous objects; there are three chairs, of different styles and uses, there are several plants, picture frames and ceramics. The interior is physically and phenomenologically fibrous, soft and cushioned. Both in terms of materiality as well as the abundance of choice and options of navigating the room. At the same time, this could be described as claustrophobic or busy, but ultimately the objects and surface finishes that have been added to the envelope of the room/ building, furnish it. Such that, they alter the use and feel of the room.

5. These passages will be noticed throughout the text and they have been used as a means to deconstruct the image or space in question through a series of relational layers, where each aforementioned subject is used to place the following object in space.

6. “Furniture: Definition of furniture in English by Oxford Dictionaries.” Oxford Dictionaries. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/furniture. (accessed October 22, 2017).

7. ‘Envelope’ signifies the shell of the interior or the building fabric; so that when we are discussing the interior, the envelope is the anti-space or the outside layer to the inside space, both in conceptual terms and that of the physical.

8. The term, ‘layers’ has been used to signify that the interior is constructed through layers, which progressively move from envelope to furniture, from static to mobile. For instance, in (23) the tile and painted wall might be the first layer to follow the envelope, then the carpet on the tile, then the shelving unit on the painted wall, then the writing paper and pen on the writing surface that folds out from the shelving unit that is on the painted wall. Or, in (1.3) there is the wall, the picture frames hanging from the wall, the chairs and table alongside the wall, the wooden floor, the two carpets on the wooden floor, the table that is on the carpet that is also alongside the wall.

9. The question or interest in trying to attempt to locate the moment where the envelope becomes the furniture, is the reason for this particular fascination with the term ‘layers’.

10. Further discussed in Interior.

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Furnitures

Interior

The late fifteenth century meaning of the term ‘interior’, was the “inside as divided from outside”1. Meaning that what differentiates the interior from its counterpart, is a division.

This division is purely a boundary between something that is inside and something that is outside and this boundary could also be considered as the ‘envelope’. From this, we might start to question the need for the ‘envelope’ or indeed, why should the inside be divided from its outside?

And in response, it might be argued that these two atmospheres provide us with two essential experiences; both physically and phenomenologically; creating a balance or simultaneous relief from the other2. This means that spatially, the exterior is outside, it is elemental or spontaneous and completely uncontained. Whilst the inside; or the interior, is more civilised.

It is definite, it can be tamed, fashioned, and refashioned according to our desires3.

That said, such a description should not render our impression of the interior to be devoid of deception or illusion. In fact, it is quite the contrary; such that, the very containment and control of the interior allows our experience of the same space to be altered time and time again4.

In The Emergence of the Interior, Rice explains that the interior has historically been, “articulated through decoration, the literal covering of the inside of an architectural ‘shell’ with the soft ‘stuff ’ of furnishing”5. In describing the interior under these terms, we start to recognise this type of atmosphere as a space which is, to some degree, more inhabitable – more comfortable – than what is to be considered as exterior. Rice’s particular use of the word “stuff ” seems to imply a sense of cultivation; such that, the interior is a collection of objects that soften the physical environment, when compared to the outside. It is the precise act of “furnishing” it seems, that forms the distinction between how we feel when we are inside and when we are outside.

Actual architectural recordings of the interior did not occur until later in the mid-eighteenth century, when the decoration of the interior and furniture seemed to become fashionable.

According to the architect and historian; Robin Evans, the earliest beginnings of such architectural information began with the section of a building6. One of the first of these being in England, for York House by William Chambers in 1759 (2.1).

14

2.1 William Chambers, Section of York House, Pall Mall, 1759.

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Furnitures

Evans claims that until this drawing, “the exterior (of the building) would be more fully described than the interior.”7 Evans suggests that the movement towards the section and more specifically the developed surface; first developed by Thomas Lightoler, meant that the interior was beginning to find its place within the realm of architectural drawing and consequently, society. Evans tells us that “The developed surface… offered the opportunity for an unexampled unification of the one interior.” Not only this, the developed surface, also meant that the “Drapes, furnishings, fittings, wall coverings, plasterwork, floor and carpet”8, were drawn together in space, so that an order to these objects and a language to the style of the interior, began to be considered, recorded and more specifically, planned.

Though if we actually look at the section by Chambers and Lightholer’s first developed surface drawing (2.2), none of the furniture that Evans is describing is present in either drawing.

In the case of Lightholer, the drawing focuses on the section of the stair and the stair’s relationship to the wall – or more specifically, the wall panelling. Similarly, Chamber’s drawing only shows wall finishing and moulding and the design of the fireplaces in each room behind the section line. So that, in both drawings the only furnishing present, is a secondary layering to the envelope. This seems to suggest that here, the act of furnishing was not necessarily concerned with the furniture-object, but more so the furnishing or covering of the wall and therefore the surfaces rather than the objects9.

The arrangement of Lightoler’s developed surface drawing technique, aligns the plan and interior section, so that the interior elevations can be unfolded precisely around the plan, at the point where elevation would meet ground in reality.

This type of drawing, seems to align itself with Rice’s concept of the dual interior by taking on a slight paradox between the image and the actual. On the one hand, the developed surface was invented to draw the interior precisely and in such a way that we are able to survey the interior and plan its composition. Though at the same time, the way that the developed surface is drawn removes it from the actual, as the interior would never exist in this arrangement in reality and we would never experience the interior in this way.

This departure from the actual, through representation and the decision to draw the interior in this way, might be explained through the way the developed surface asks us to read the interior. It seems that through this mode of drawing, the interior is understood as a series of relational planes or surfaces. Both the objects and the interior become flattened into layers

16

Interior

2.2 Thomas Lightoler, ‘Section’ of a stair hall, The Modern Builder’s Assistant, 1757.

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Furnitures

2.3 Gillows and Co., Furnishings for a small drawing room, 1822.

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Interior

that sit in relation to each other on the page in order to represent space; where, the developed surface is simultaneously an imagined or desired interior, as well as a precise measurement of space.

In accordance to this, Rice explains that the “interior thus emerged with a significance as a physical, three-dimensional space as well as an image.”10 So that not only is there a duality of the interior being both physical and phenomenological, there is also a dualism of real-space (experience) and flattened-space (image). The former, clearly existing in the realm of the actual and living interior, whilst the latter exists only through a two-dimensional recording of the former. So that the way we compose the interior is not only conscious of the way it will be lived-in, but also the way it will be looked-at11.

This notion of duality, and particularly that of the two-dimensional recording, seems to also extend itself towards writing.

Where, in Things: A Story of the Sixties; Perec describes the interior by walking us through the space; “Your eye, first of all, would glide over the grey fitted carpet in the narrow, long and high-ceiling corridor.”12 He seems to be implying towards the notion of the Flâneur, where the particular use of “Your eye” tells us the interior is being experienced through the human, and the verb “glide” suggests an informal, non-supposing, yet progressive movement through the contained space. By using dimensions and situational lexicon such as “fitted”, “narrow” and “long”, the reader infers a sense of proportion and positioning, so that we are able to grasp the spatial characteristics of these objects and these objects are used to describe space.

These descriptions are then placed with more human readings, where “there would be tall and narrow sets of shelves holding a few books, to be read and read again,”13. So that first, there is the “sets of shelves”; the furniture-object and then secondly, they are to be “read and read again,” almost as though there is another sequential layering to the objects of the interior, with regards to their use, temporality and mobility.

2.4 Bedroom furniture plotted on the plans of rooms, The Gentleman’s House, Robert Karr, 3rd revised edn., London: John Murray, 1871 (1864), pg. 133.

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Or

in other words:

There would be shelves; these shelves would be

tall and narrow.

They would h o l d a few books and the books should be read and r e a d again.14

Such that, Perec might be telling us that as well as the image of the interior, the narrative of the object can act as a secondary apparatus for the interior.

Furnitures

2.5 Satellite mirror, Eileen Gray, E. 1027, Roquebrune-Cap Martin, 1926-29.

2.6 (opposite) The bedroom of the house for Giorgio Devalle, The combinations of mirrors that, through the door, open up views of the Surrealist-inspired sofa (the “Mae West Lips Sofa� by Salvador Dali), Via Alpi 5. Carlo Mollino, Devalle House, 1940.

2.7 (next page) Unique piece, Large bookcase with suspended shelves in varnished natural Fibrosil and sliding doors in sky-blue tinted glass with brass trim; the lining is in red plastic Resinflex, Casa Editrice Lattes publishing house, Carlo Mollino, 1952.

22

Interior

23

Furnitures

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Interior Notes 1. Charles Rice, The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity (London: Routledge, 2008) 2.

2. Those existing outside will eventually need to be inside and vice versa 3. Even in a simple plan, we determine something as being inside from the presence of walls that contain space, as in (2.4). Meanwhile, the outside is left as residual, unknown and therefore spontaneous or elemental space.

4. This statment might best be reasoned with, in reference to imagery. Where, for instance, (2.6); shows a bedroom by Carlo Mollino found in the house of Giorgio Devalle, uses mirrors to compose illusionary space, where space is reflected and therefore perceived as to continue further than it does in actuality. This is only possible because of the presence of surfaces that contain the interior.

5. The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity, 2.

6. Robin Evans, Translations from drawing to buildings and other essays (London: AA Publications, 2011) 201.

7. Ibid., 201.

8. Ibid., 209.

9. By comparing the absence of mobile furniture in these two drawings and the presence of furniture in another example of the developed surface drawing, (2.3); a drawing for the furniture for a small drawing room from Gillow’s and Co. 1822. This drawing came almost a century following Chambers and Lightholer and only draws the loose fittings or furniture’s for the drawing room – such as the curtains, chairs and table - it also implies that the drawing room is already in existence and the design or choice of furniture is preceding the room, whereas Chambers and Lightholer seem to be drawing the furnishing details that would become permanent to the wall. On another note, it is also interesting to analyse the arrangement of the furniture in this drawing, where the object seem to have been placed in a desired position, yet the rules of the developed surface drawing have left the objects looking awkward and distorted in relation to each other.

10. The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity, 2.

11. The meeting of these two verbs, ‘lived’ and ‘looked’ as well as the prepositions, ‘-in’ and ‘-at’ suppose an intriguing apparatus that we can use to fully describe the interior. This sentence; while in line with Rice’s examination of the interior, seems to offer a further insight into the role of the interior for its occupier (the occupier being both the ‘live’ body and the ‘looking’ body - and this body can both exist and also be intended for or desired, such as the desired view of the interior, or the anticipated arrangement for the interior; whereby we compose the objects in the interior for the efficiency of living, just as much as we want it to look desirable to the voyeur and this additional insight is actually introduced with that of the ‘voyeur’. Pieces such as Carlo Mollino’s large bookcase in (6.6) are evidential of the voyeur, simply with the integration of artwork into the furniture-object, as well as that of colour and texture. In sum, the furniture-object in itself is a composition and in turn, negates with the composition of the interior. Whereby, the awareness of composition, proves an awareness to the desired gaze.

12. Georges Perec, Things: a story of the Sixties (London: Harvill Press, 1999) 21.

13. Ibid., 23.

14. See footnote 4, p. 10.

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Layers1

There are many layers to a room. Some layers are more anchored than other layers and some layers are anchored in relation to other layers. Learning from Evans, when describing Woman and Child from Designs for Modern Costume, 1812 (3.2) it is explained that “the furniture occupies the room and then the figures inhabit the furniture.”2 Perhaps we should therefore understand the interior as a system of layers between the room (the envelope), the furniture and the figure; where each is in relation to that before it.

At some point these layers metamorphose from envelope to furniture or furnishing and through this metamorphosis the objects remain in relation and in equilibrium with each other within a contained space.

3.1 Théodor Weil, reception room, Munich Werkstätten exhibition, Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1910.

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3.2 Woman and Child, Henry Moses, from Designs for Modern Costume, 1812.

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With this in mind, I want you to picture an image:

Picture a floor;

on the floor there is a carpet and on the carpet there is a stool.

The stool is relatively more often moved than the carpet; for the carpet to move,

so does the stool.

And for the floor to move, the carpet must move

- but only before the stool.

The stool could become a table; a table for a plant. * The plant sits on the stool.

For the floor to move, so must the carpet;

but only before the plant is removed from the stool and the stool is taken away.

Furnitures

In this passage, the floor might be considered as the first layer. It is fixed and might even be understood as an envelope rather than a furniture. In terms of its relation to the other objects or layers within the passage, the floor represents what is most static within the room – it is the room. The next, might be the carpet: the reader does not know whether the carpet is fixed or loose and therefore it is questionable whether the act of ‘furnishing’ begins with the carpet or the stool, or perhaps even the plant.3 Everything else in the passage is variably more movable, transitory and more present in the room than the floor. In other words, objects or furnishings within an interior might be categorised according to the degree of presence or mobility they have within that space. For instance, there is firstly the floor and then the carpet fixed to the floor. The carpet is undeniably more static than it is mobile when it is compared to the stool. This suggests that the carpet presents a larger promise to the room than that of the stool. Meanwhile, the stool can now be termed mobile and light in relation to the carpet, perhaps even a flirtation to the interior.4 The stool is loose, it is easy.5 It can go here or there or even further. It could be a chair, or a table, or a doorstop. It is ultimately more mobile than the carpet simply through interaction and the carpet is only perceived as mobile when compared to the room, proving that our relationship with objects in the interior is devised through relational layers; whose character is only relative to that which surrounds it. * In a similar vein to Evans, the architect Adolf Loos ascertains the importance of comfort and its relation to ‘beauty’, through the term ‘soft 6’ in Ornament and Crime, where Loos writes: “Are, for example, the chairs in the Otto Wagner Room beautiful?

Not for me, since I don’t find them comfortable to sit on.”7

This statement seems to give reason to the concept of furnishing in its entirety, as though the act of ‘furnishing’ is also an act or attempt to bring comfort to the interior. Loos’s comparison to ‘beauty’ seems a little more subjective in this case.

That said, these two terms do seem to resonate with the more obvious or perhaps substantial reasons as to why we change our furniture’s or even choose them in the first place; such that we either find them comfortable or desirable.8

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Layers

Therefore, we might consider the carpet: the carpet is peculiar, because it is perhaps closer to a surface condition than a furniture-object, but it still seems to retain the same ability to furnish, or to ‘comfort’. You cannot really use carpet or inhabit it as you would a chair or a desk. The carpet is perhaps there to cover rather than fill space, as a means to soften and therefore alter the internal condition.9 The carpet can either be fixed to the floor and tailored to the footprint of the room or the carpet can be laid onto the floor and is held by its own weight, as in the image of the studio/ living room from the Tempe à Pailla by Eileen Gray (3.4). Where a carpet has been used to signify how the user should move back and forth from the mattress, through the material juxtaposition of tile and carpet; where we are more likely to walk on the carpet, as it is warmer and softer and therefore more comfortable than the tile.

3.3 Hufeisensiedlung, Bruno Taut, Berlin, Germany, 1925-1933.

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If we are to understand the interior layering to this particular space we will come to realise that:

Fourth for sleeping or resting or living A mattress Third before the carpet. a timber frame sits on the plinth, covered with tiles, Second (or atleast comfier than the tiles) WARM a carpet has been placed before the plinth.10 First to touch

which would be COLD

this has been covered with CERAMIC tiles, there is likely to be a concrete floor slab;

Furnitures

3.4 Studio/living room, Eileen Gray, Temple Ă Pailla, Castellar, 193234. From: Constant, Caroline. Eileen Gray. Berlin: Phaidon, 2007, pg.

154.

3.5 The sitting room, one arrives by stair, and must climb another eight steps to the dining room, from which one overlooks the sitting room. Loos often used a difference in level as the sole method of spatial differentiation. Adolf Loos, Villa MĂźller, Prague, Czech Republic, 1930.

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Layers

Similarly, in the sitting room by Loos in Villa Müller (3.5) we see that large, loose carpets have been used to divide areas within an open space: In the far right of the image we can just see a fireplace surrounded by chairs that fully occupy one carpet. Then next to it, another carpet has been placed with a single chair against the wall with a sideboard, so that the area actually on the carpet is open. Then on the far left-bottom corner we can see another carpet. It seems Loos is using the carpet to create separate, yet joined atmospheres within one room. Where the first is for sitting and gazing towards the fire and the second has been left as decentralised open space; perhaps for standing and gathering or simply moving towards the furthest carpet-space. As there is no physical barrier between these areas, we must therefore assume that it is our perception of the carpet and also the physical and experiential quality between floor and carpet that allows us to understand them as separate areas. There is of course the furniture, which also differentiates the atmosphere of each area, but it is the ultimate act of using the carpet as a surface tool to divide interior space. In fact, the existence of a finite area of fabric that is softer and more mobile than the floor, which we term as ‘carpet’ is pure evidence towards the desire for comfort in the act of furnishing.

The thought of the carpet being a lighter, slightly more moveable and above all, a comfortable addition to the composition of the floor, begins to suggest that as the interior’s layers move from envelope to furnishing, these layers become more human or inhabitable, more sensibly designed for use, touch, appearance and feeling. As a layer or object becomes more present in the room it simultaneously becomes more sensorial to our experience of the interior, in this instance the carpet is, in short, a layer of comfort or warmth. It has the potential to change the feel of the room entirely as well as altering the way we will move within the room, by marking out a territory.

The carpet also seems capable of blurring territories as well as outlining them. A strong example of this, would be the bedroom of Loos’s wife, Lina in the Loos Apartment from 1903 (3.6). In the image, there is an island bed of lighter and smoother fabric when compared to the carpet. The bed is also framed by draped curtains which set back to form a bed-side shelf unit either side of the bed. Loos seems to be encouraging us to read the bed as sitting within the curtains. In this room, everything is covered and everything is softened, both object and surface and the extent of these objects and surfaces.

We can see that the carpet covers the floor and beyond this, it has been fitted against the bed frame, as well as extending itself to the full extent of the room. The bed seems to sit on the

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carpet-island that Loos has made for the mattress, which suggests ultimate comfort through the layering of surfaces. Furthermore, the particularly fibrous characteristic of the carpet means that visually, there is less distinction between the horizontal and vertical. The carpet seems to curve up and into the bed, so that it moves from surface to object. In reality, this blurriness is likely to have extended itself to the actual experience or feel of the room. We might even imagine the carpet as a blurring of the horizon between the two adjacent planes of the interior and consequently, an applied softening to the room’s dimension. * By categorising the interior through a system of layers, we are able to contemplate the relationship between furnishing and envelope and perhaps where one ends and the other begins.

Through history, it seems the relevance of these layers has shifted according to their counterparts. In Furniture 700-1700, Eric Mercer describes how “beds were distinguished by the textiles upon them”11 during the late fourteenth and fifteenth-century, in both literature and art. In addition to this, Chaucer wrote:

3.6 Loos Apartment, bedroom of Loos’s wife, Lina. Adolf Loos, 1903.

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Layers

3.7 Nicosia, Richard Wentworth, photograph, 2006.

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Furnitures

3.8 Wall mirror (two pieces), shelf in thick, shaped marble projecting from a wall mirror, Carlo Mollino, F & G Minola House, 1945.

38

Layers

3.9 Photograph of a running Saluki dog, Carlo Mollino, c.1970. From: Ferrari, Fulvio, and Napoleone Ferrari. The furniture of Carlo Mollino. London: Phaidon, 2006, pg. 134.

3.10 Radio gramophone (unique piece), Radio gramophone in shaped and polished natural maple and black lacquered maple finishes with a record player in a sliding drawer. The trestle support is composed of two crossed pairs of V-shaped legs with two wheels for mobility, Carlo Mollino, C. Piccolis, c.1948.

39

Furnitures

…a fether-bed, Rayed with gold, and right well cled In fyn black satyn doutremer12

Chaucer’s writing firstly presents us with the bed as a furniture-object, the reader is then informed of the upholstery covering it. Without the initial image of the bed, the description of the “gold” and “fyn black satyn” would have much less form in our perception and this therefore, seems to prove not only the relevance of the layering system, but also our reliance on our mind’s ability to structure perceived interiors by using layers in both text and image.

It is through these stratified relationships that we begin to understand how furniture’s hang in resolution and in relation to each other. We would not put a stool on top of a plant – that would be absurd - and we probably wouldn’t put a carpet around the stool. Indeed, there is a hierarchy or a system of living without pursuing an aesthetic style at all; there is a ritual to furnishing and there is a relational ordering to our furniture.

Just as these layers exist in relation to each other; they exist in relation to the room.

In the photograph taken of Théodor Weil’s reception room (3.1), there is a vase of flowers on top of the table which is on top of a carpet in the foreground. Surrounding the table; rather informally, are three chairs. Behind these, we see a larger chair and a side board with two matching cabinets either side. There is also a lamp on the wall above the larger chair and a picture hanging above the side board, between the two matching cabinets either side.

In the image, everything apart from those objects in the foreground seems to ‘fit’ or resonate with the interior. Such that, it seems there is an order to the objects within the room: they have been arranged in a certain way. In contrast, the chairs surrounding the table with the vase of flowers have been left. They seem to break the formal composition of the interior between the objects. Indeed, their placement appears more random; suggesting a spontaneous or unplanned arrangement after use, rather than a choreographed layout. It is this moment, the image of the interior that Rice describes, blurs with its actual use and the duality of the interior becomes marginalised.

40

Layers

3.11 Curiosity, Gerard ter Borch, c. 1660.

41

Furnitures Notes 1. For a more specific description, see footnote 8, p.14.

2. Translations from drawing to buildings and other essays, 219.

3. At this point, it seems essential to note that the perceived image being described should be understood as a concept or even a spatial equation, rather than a particular case of the interior. As in the drawing (2.4); which seems to suggest an explanatory depiction of the interior, to be used as a qualatative or logistic reference rather than a specific moment in time of the interior, in other words the image being displayed is moreso a symbolism of the ‘layer’ to describe the semantics of the term.

4. Notice, how everything described in this paragraph is always in relation to something else or another object. These apparent spatial relationships that are being explored through the writing can also be seen in the photographic work of Richard Wentworth, (3.7) where banal yet quietly absurd relationships are made through the fitting or touching of otherwise unrelated objects. Our perceptual understanding of objects fitting and sitting against eachother allows us to understand these tensions. Because of this, we are also able to read absurdities in the spatial system, or intentional juxtapositions within the choreography of the interior, such as Mollino’s tray-shaped shelf in the Orengo House, (3.8) where it is difficult for the eye to understand the relation between the mirror and the shelf.

5. See (3.3), where the stool in front of the fireplace is of such a style and position that it appears to be an after-thought.

6. The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity, 2.

7. Adolf Loos and Adolf Opel, Ornament and crime selected essays (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998) 64.

8. The imposition of style and therefore desire, is discussed in Adolf Loos’s Creating your Home with Style: Taste is Timeless, Vienna: Metroverlag, 2013. In The Apartment, Loos describes a meeting between a couple and a furniture-maker where they discuss the design, style and dimensions of the built-in wardrobe the couple are requesting. Loos continues to tell the reader, “As you can see, nothing was said about style. The style of October 1903 was tacitly implied – for one would never dare order a tailcoat in a renaissance style. And why then, should the object in which such an item is stored, be treated any differently than the item itself ?” Loos seems fustrated by the prospect of furniture needing to embody an imposed style or decorative design and the cultural expectation of this is purely fuelled by that of desire; through fashions or trends.

9. Here, the carpet is being understood as a fixed covering of the floor, rather than a movable rug that could arguably still be ‘inhabited’.

10. Notice in this passage, the balance between the structural characters and the furniture characters that have been employed to make the space more ‘livable’.

11. Eric Mercer, Furniture 700-1700 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969) 28.

12. Geoffrey Chaucer, Quoted in: Furniture 700-1700, 28.

42

Layers

3.12 The Annunciation, notice the textile canopy above the bed and the covering of the Virgin’s seat, Roger van der Wayden, probably before 1440.

43

Furnitures

3.13 The Linen Cupboard, the provision of a cupboard for one purpose alone, and that to hold linen, reveals the profusion of furniture of all kinds by the mid-17th century, Pieter de Hooch, 1663.

44

3.14 St. Jerome in His Study, Antonello da Messina 1460–1475 45

Furnitures

3.15 Natura morta, Giorgio Morandi, 1939.

46

3.16 Villa E-1027, Eileen Grey, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, 1926-1929 47

The ground is covered

and unknown.

Ceramic tiles dress the floor.

On top of the tiles are carpets.

You count five.

The carpets furnish the tiles.

They

touch the floor, but they are not fixed, they kiss or rest upon it.

Positioned;

though not exactly parallel or perpendicular to each other, the carpets present another sensation

than the tiles.

In living;

There is a certain promise,

a rhythm to the carpet-rooms.

The tables and chairs assume the carpets as less mobile.

The tables and chairs

speak to the carpets.

Neither are fixed,

but are they both equally mobile? do you move the chairs more

or less often than the carpets,

or just the same?

Furnitures

Built-in

This passage is predominantly concerned with the historical progression between two states of the furniture-object; the built-in or fixed and the loose and mobile. When an object is fixed, it must remain static in the room. Though when considering our understanding of the system of layers of the interior, we must remember that the fixed furniture still holds more presence1 when compared to the envelope. However fixed the furniture-object might be, it is more interactive and therefore more mobile, than the envelope. Even so, the concept of the ‘built-in’ object does, even in its linguistics, begin to blur the boundary between envelope and furniture.

With this in mind, it is therefore interesting to consider that in ancient times, the “aula” in Latin, also known as the “hall”, was the main room and most likely the only room of the house.

It had to perform as a living room, parlour, kitchen, dining room and bedroom as well as a working space for all of the household. Having only one room in which to reside, “affected furniture in one very obvious way: they tended to restrict the amount of it to a minimum.”2 And very often, furniture either remained against the wall or it was used to “divide space into rooms”3. So that there was clearly a cultural structure or understanding to the interior, that physically affects that of the furniture-object.

Mercer tells us that in the sixteenth century, keeping furniture alongside the wall was a means of keeping “as much as possible of the floor space clear”4 and “if planned from the beginning they (built-in furniture’s) were cheaper than a separate piece of wooden furniture.”5 At this time, furniture tended to be “heavy and massive”6, it was likely that we would find “a bench fixed to the wall, and the table in front of it…supported upon poles let into the ground”7, so that furniture actually wasn’t so dissimilar to its envelope, see (4.1-2).

In the instance of the fixed table that Mercer describes, it seems that the etymology of a fixed furniture is one that has a much closer resemblance to the envelope. To compare, Antonello da Messina’s painting of St Jerome in his Study, 1460-1475, (3.14) shows a figure reading at a desk, in his studio which appears to be a room without walls or a ceiling, within a larger space.

The building surrounding the studio is made of stone, it is solid and monastic in its form, whilst the study appears to be more temporary and of a lighter material, with no apparent

50

4.1 Swedish peasant house with a wide bench serving both as a seat and a bedstead, c. 15th century.

4.2 Interior of a Swedish peasant house with an open hearth in the middle of the room, c. 15th century.

51

Furnitures

texture and thin profiles. It is not explicitly shown that the studio is fixed or built-in to the larger space and as such, one might understand it as a room, rather than a furniture. Yet the view through the arch, into another arch to the left made by the studio unit does suggest that this object has been made specifically for the larger space and the absence of walls and a ceiling seems to propose a platform or writing apparatus, more so than a room. Through Messina’s painting, we might infer that a ‘built-in’ furniture must capacitate a dialogue with its respective interior; such that, the built-in furniture has been customised to a particular location and it would be incomplete without the room. * In a photograph taken of the dining room inside the Moller House by Loos, completed between 1927-28 (4.3), we see that the dining room area is on a platform raised from the room in which the photograph has been taken. The wall between the two areas allows the space to remain open and the height difference between the two areas has been managed by the implementation of a built-in set of stairs.

This is of course, a much later example of built-in furniture, but the planar approach or the composition of surfaces to the ‘built-in’ intellection by Loos, is highly similar to the view we see from Messina and also from Mercer, such as (4.4), a fifteenth century illustration, where the double window-seat appears to have been carved out of the stone wall, much like how Loos seems to want us to perceive the Moller House stairs.

From the photograph showing the stairs, we see that the plinth has been clad with a dark timber – mahogany, perhaps - while the set of stairs central to the plinth appear lighter and could be made out of a different timber. This contrast in colour implies that the stairs have been cut into the plinth, suggesting a more so structural relationship with the envelope that resonates with the fifteenth to sixteenth century approach to furniture, as described by Mercer. Here, the stair is homogeneous to the envelope; it has been cut-out rather than built-in, resulting in a slight ambiguity to the stairs that is enhanced further with the absence of a handrail.

This architectural move suggests two thoughts towards the notion of the ‘built-in’. Firstly, Loos seems to want us to perceive the stairs as having been sculpted out or uncovered from the envelope as already mentioned and this encourages us to discern the plinth as solid or as envelope. Secondly, the ambiguity of the ‘cut-away’ stair serves a certain freedom for the

52

Built-in

4.3 View into the dining room, Adolf Loos, Moller House, Vienna, Austria, 1927-28.

53

Furnitures

user. It seems the stair is no longer a stair, but a sculpted piece of alternating vertical and horizontal planes that happen to resemble a stair. Suddenly the interior is less concerned with typified objects in order to define the room and it is more to do with the composition of directions and surfaces. * The transition from fixed to loose is explained through the transfiguration of the bookcase Nikolaus Pevsner describes, in a passage called Libraries from A History of Building Types. Pevsner describes the evolution of the bookcase from a carrel (niche or alcove) towards a stall system. Where, in late fourteenth century churches, the bookcase didn’t exist as we know it today. Instead, it would normally be found within “a niche in the west wall of the east cloister…of the church…If there were more books than the niche could hold, a small vaulted room could take its place.”8 This was also known as a armarium. The bookcase would be understood and treated as an architectural element, or rather part of the wall system within the church, whereas now we would more likely understand the bookcase as a furnishing element to the room or a room divider; in sum, a differing element to the wall.

In the image, The Scribe Ezra (4.5) we see a figure writing independently from any other object where the figure appears to be using their knees as a writing surface. Behind, is an opened casement within the wall: there are shelves, with scribes placed regularly on the shelves. We might suppose that once the doors of the casement are closed, the built-in furniture becomes part of the wall, with its doors acting as a wall decoration. This supposes that here, the bookcase is blurring our understanding of furniture and envelope; such that, this bookcase could also be described as a niche9. This term assumes the casement to be part of the wall therefore, we might argue that the bookcase is not a room, simply because the figure cannot inhabit the bookcase and that it is a fixed (or built-in) object, holding more mobile objects10. With this in mind, we might therefore begin to understand the studio in Messina’s painting as an enlarged bookcase, built to hold domestic human life within a larger, public building.

Pevsner states that “the earliest bound books were stored in shelved closets, and the architectural bookcase was the only type known until the 17th century.”11 After this point in time, shelving began to move away from the wall into extrusions of stalls with built-in seating.

He claims that, “It was adding the shelves, usually two, above the lectern. Thus, spaces like alcoves were formed, and so the system goes under the name stall system.”12 Here it seems,

54

Built-in

4.4 A double window-seat contrived in the thickness of the wall, from a French manuscript, 15th century.

55

Furnitures

alcoves became ever so slightly static, where it is the protrusion of the bookshelf creating the wall, rather than the wall itself encasing the bookshelf. Such reading rooms began to form a relational system from the envelope to the furniture piece; “with the books chained to lecterns and with one window corresponding to one pair of lecterns,�13 so that we begin to see a separation happening between wall and furniture.

4.5 The Scribe Ezra, detail from the Codex Amiatinus, late 16th c., Florence, Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana.

56

Built-in

The figure in The Scribe Ezra has a limited interaction with the casement, when compared to the more immersive stall system at the Corpus Christi College Library in Oxford (4.6). The image shows a typical example of the stall system that Pevsner is describing, with particular attention given to the stall and window alignment.Â

4.6 Stall system, Corpus Christi College library, c. 1604 and c. 1700.

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Furnitures

Here, the figure would inhabit the book casement, rather than sitting alongside it or outside of it as depicted in The Scribe Ezra. So that the bookshelf, or furniture-object become inhabitable yet distinguished from the room, much like Saint Jerome is inhabiting the study in Messina’s painting. In the case of The Scribe Ezra, the envelope appears to have been fitted around and tailored to the casement, whilst here the furniture-object instantaneously takes our attention from the room and towards the secondary enclosure made through the stall system. The furniture and the room become independent to each other as soon as the furniture loosens or moves away from the wall, to become wholly inhabitable. The furniture moves away from being an alcove - within the wall - and becomes autonomous to the room, yet the furniture is still spatially fixed or anchored to architectural elements, such as the window. Â

4.7 A settle used as a bed, an illustration of the Story of Tobit, Bible Historiale, late 15th century.

58

Built-in Notes 1. The concept of presence when determining the moment between furniture and envelope is only something that the eye can perceive.

However, when looking at (3.16), an interior view looking outwards in Villa E-1027, Eileen Gray, we see two rising platforms acting as stairs for access onto the terrace. The two stairs do not allign in profile, and the first stair sits slightly proud of the other. It has, what looks like, a metal rod rising from it. This metal rod seems to be supporting a concrete surface which, as it protrudes out of space, seems to suggest a use - be it a table, seat or ballustrade - this sculpted perogrative of the object suggests that it is more furniture than building, as it isn’t constructive, it is decorative and it is serving some kind of purpose or inhabitable use. The same articulation makes the surface more present in the image.

2. Furniture 700-1700, 18-19.

3. Ibid., 62.

4. This is why the typical peasant dwelling tended to have furnitures, built alongside the walls in the same or similar grade of building materials as the home, see (4.1-2).

5. Ibid., 58.

6. Ibid., 78.

7. Ibid., 57.

8. Nikolaus Pevsner, A History of Building Types (Princeton: The University Press, 1997) 92.

9. ‘Niche’; A shallow recess, especially one in a wall to display a statue or other ornament (definition from the Oxford English Dictionary).

10. This might need more classification. In order: the image depicts a wall; within the wall, there is a recess; within the recess, there is a casement; within the casement there are scribes. In order, again: The wall is most solid and static; the casement is variably more mobile than the wall, because it can be open and closed; the scribes are most mobile because they can be removed from the casement, they are most free.

The wall has been built to accommodate the casement, the casement has been built for the scribes.

11. Joseph Aronson, The encyclopedia of furniture (New York: Crown Publishers, 1938) 20.

12. A History of Building Types, 94.

13. Ibid., 93.

59

First comes the envelope

the static shell.

Somewhere

between the envelope and the internalised residual space, furniture begins.

You ask:

if two solid stairs protrude outwards from a doorway to the garden,

are these furnitures

or are they envelope?

If these stairs are hollow, are the stairs any less of an envelope?

The stairs are fixed and of the same material as the envelope.

They do not move;

they cannot

be reconfigured.

They can only be added on to;

or furnished;-

like an envelope.

There is a drawer underneath the top stair;this drawer can be pulled out and

pushed back in

maybe several times a day

or every hour or just once a week; whenever.

The drawer is softer;

a more mobile addition to the stair:

or, it furnishes the stair.

The drawer is not fixed, but it appears to fit within the stair.

From the stair there is a thin profile leading upwards from the top plane to a solid ledge.

It forms an open barrier between the raised level to the garden and the interior;

perhaps a balustrade, or a shallow table; a surface.

This ledge is fixed;

a purposeful negotiation.

A negotiation between inside and out;

the top stair and the floor.

To you, this might suppose that an object that is capable of utilisation, is a furniture-object.

It Softens space; a bosom to the envelope, a warmth to the surface. where there are verticals and verticals where there are horizontals.

Encompassing a temporary style, or embodying a temporary use.

A composition of singularity

in living

or through a negotiation of elements that all remain still, though they come with the charged ability

to move every day, any while

or rarely.

or always or sometimes

Furnitures

Loose

The moment where the autonomy of the object occurs is predominantly due to the progression of the ‘room’1. The singular internal living space has now become a series of rooms and these rooms have also become much more diverse in terms of furniture composition. Or as Baudrillard describes, “furniture now comprises movable elements in a decentralised space,”2. This decentralised space suggests a loss of fixed composition to the room, unlike that of the singular ‘hall’ from the sixteenth century.

According to Mercer, the ‘hall’ began to divide into multiple spaces once there was a shifted focus towards the ‘Dyning Parlour’, as a space of leisure and by the middle of the century, the ‘Great Chamber’ or ‘Saloon’ tended to be where guests were entertained and the household leisured. This transition meant that there was more room to accommodate the notion of the ‘event’, rather than being limited to routine domestic living: “instead of the occupants having to go to what little furniture there was because it was fixed and served several purposes, the furniture could now come to its users in the form of lightly-made pieces each with its own specialised use.”3

In time, each furniture piece became detached from its multiple uses and was therefore, able to indulge in one particular use4. Where “It (the interior) is no longer an edge and a centre…It is now a topography of varied elements distributed picturesquely across the floor,”5. Where perhaps now the interior can be understood as a landscape of composed objects, where the notion of the picturesque becomes apparent in our desire to make presentable space in actuality and in representation.

These physical shifts of the interior seem to mirror the cultural shifts of understanding the home, or what was expected of the domestic environment and each room within it. This seems to again, make evident that the interior has the capacity to represent both physical and anticipated or perceptual space.

62

5.1 The Last Supper, although most of the diners still sit on benches, three of them are given light chairs, and of three different kinds. engraving by Wendel von Olmutz, 16th century.

63

Furnitures

5.2 Bed with canopy from the Swyn ‘Pesel’ in Lehe, Renaissance, Ditmarsh, North Germany, 1568.

64

Loose

* Referring back to the notion of the ‘built-in’, the sixteenth-century bed tended to be a simple platform or bench anchored to the wall. However, when homes began to contain chambers which were separate and more private sleeping areas from the ‘hall’, the bed seemed to turn into a room within a room. Where, “the bed-space (was turned) into a separate room, or at least into an area physically distinct in some way from the room it is in.”6 This seems to resonate with the notion of the alcove in such a way that the bed formed a secondary space to the room, made from secondary building materials to the envelope. Or, in other words, one layer down from the envelope in the hierarchy of levels7.

Perhaps the alcove could be termed as a piece of furniture within itself or a furniture that contains more furniture, a cabinet to the room, just like a drawer to a wardrobe or the stall system that Pevsner describes. An alcove is a spatial furniture; a smaller ensemble to the room that is more human, more accommodating than it is structural and is therefore closer to furniture than envelope: a bed could be an alcove in itself, but it could not be a room.

If we refer to the duality of the interior described in the Interior passage of this study, we might hasten to question the duality of the alcove. Such that, in physical terms it is sufficed to say that we have learnt that the alcove becomes an alcove when a room within a room is formed. But what does this mean for the phenomenological case of the interior? When do we begin to experience the alcove?

After looking at the Built-in through the physical properties of the niche or the alcove, perhaps we should consider the phenomenological qualities of these terms and whether there is a potential for the feeling of an alcove or a ‘room within a room’ to be achieved through a more mobile, less physically enclosed furniture piece. Where you are able to feel as though you have partially left the room, whilst still remaining in the room.

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Furnitures

5.3 Sleeping alcove. Eileen Gray, E. 1027.

66

Loose

The adjustable bedside table designed by Eileen Gray for the house, E 1027 (5.3) is not necessarily an alcove by traditional definition, but it does seem to resonate with that of the ‘recess’ without formerly being a recess at all. The metal lever built into the bed unit allows a table to be pulled out around the bed area, which in turn holds another mechanism for holding a book up at an angle to use while reading in bed. Whilst the mechanism doesn’t form a recess physically, it does provide a departure from the room on a more subtle or experiential level. It allows for an activity to be fully supported and mechanised from an otherwise static element within the room that is also autonomous to the envelope. When fully extended, the bedside table provides a framework to encase the user of the bed in an activity or temporary mode of being, meaning that there is an intended shift of focus whilst using the table – they are no longer in the bedroom, instead they are in bed reading, using the bedside table.

Similarly, an example of a typical canopied bed (5.2); though ornate, from the sixteenth century also reaffirms this desire to use furniture to create a departure or transfer of perceived foci within the room. The bed frame design not only employs a curtained canopy, it also encompasses a stepped access into the sleeping area8, to imply a transition of spaces that is in line with Mercer’s description of the bed, as an alternate space to the chamber. To achieve these interior moves, it seems built-in furniture design was used, as this provides the most discrete transition from envelope to object and larger scale to smaller. In addition, as we saw in the Loos dining room photograph, the built-in suggests a sense of solidity, or even sculpture that has both the capacity to narrow the use of the object or broaden it towards ambiguity.

However, as we have already established it is the relationships between the objects in space, that distinguishes their nature, in relation with the other objects, i.e. a stool is only perceived as mobile, when compared to a built-in wardrobe. So that, when understanding Mercer’s account of the canopy beds from the sixteenth century, we must also align this with the introduction of lighter, more transient objects that also came with the chamber. In (5.4), an engraving by Abraham Bosse, we are witnessing the birth of a child. The mother has been visited by her friends

67

Furnitures

5.4 L’ AccouchÊe, the recently delivered mother is visited in bed by her friends, whi sit upon light and easily moveable chairs, engraving by Abraham Bosse, n.d.

68

Loose

which sit around her bed, upon chairs that are of a different style to the room.

They have probably been brought to the room, particularly for this event and will be removed once it is over.

Now knowing this, we could say that these chairs are breaking the intended image of the chamber, through a temporary and actual event by their style and irregular, only momentary composition.

Notes 1. The editorial separation between ‘built-in’ and ‘loose’ should not be perceived as separate in historic conception, but as a gradually and blurry progression through spatial construct and living ritual.

2. Jean Baudrillard, The system of objects (London: Verso, 2005) 40.

3. Furniture 700-1700, 107.

4. So that furniture was initially anchored to the wall and designed througb ultimate efficiency and for multiple use, such as a seat also acting as a bed, as in. Then it divided and moved outwards into decentralised space, with less organisation and much more mobility - it was now normal for furniture to move around according to use. This progression towards individual objects also encouraged a progression and diversification in styles and types.

5. Translations from drawing to buildings and other essays, 219.

6. Furniture 700-1700, 72.

7. The Oxford English Dictionary definition for ‘alcove’ reads as, “a recess in the wall of a room or garden.” And the term ‘recess’ can be described as, “a small space created by building part of a wall further back from the rest.” Or “a hollow space inside something.”

8. The bed shown in (5.2) is likely to have been of bespoke design, specifically for that room in that position, as was the general approach to furniture design between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Because of this, there is a congruence of its solidity and permanence between this and Loos’s stair and perhaps even its use is disguised through the curtains and stepped access.

69

You look at a blue wall The stove is close,

but it does not touch the wall.

On the floor there is a wooden stool

and therefore much more mobile than yet both of these furnish The stool waits in front of the stove.

Of a different kind as the stool and perhaps a little less light, and so perhaps more fixed and a little less furniture-like; Two metal bars move into the side drawers.

These hold the working surface; In front of the desk is a desk chair; visually, of the same kind as the desk,

The lamp is of a similar style to the desk

and the desk chair.

Perhaps the lamp reconfigures The stove grows out of the floor It sits;though it cannot move.

and in a corner there is a stove.

The stove is covered with red brick tile;

glazed. and this is completely loose the stove; the room.

is the desk.

which is lacquered timber.

is a lamp. as rarely or more often as its companions.

and the floor shares the red tile.

It is fixed to the ground not to the ceiling or the walls.

It sits within the corner of the room.

Furnitures

Desk

The desk; or at least as far as Perec is concerned, is an example of the furniture-object being made relevant through the everyday. Such that the desk becomes a tabula rasa in which we can work, position objects and orient our thoughts upon a physical surface freely and without concern.

The act of using a chair, sitting at a desk and placing particular things on that desk; in order to compose a surface that allows thoughts to materialise, seems to provide us with a moment of semblance between the psychological and the physical. Perec tells us that, “There are many objects on the table at which I work,”1 and that “I spend many hours sitting at my desk every day. Sometimes I would like it to be as clear as possible. But usually I like it cluttered, almost to excess.”2 From this, we might determine a relationship between the figure and the desk. The figure can freely and innately inhabit the desk both physically (through objects) and psychologically (through thought). This relationship is further exemplified through Perec’s surveying of his work space in Thoughts of Sorts, in a passage titled Notes on the Objects to be Found on my Desk, written in 1976: “Later on, as my work progresses or stalls, my desk gets cluttered with objects brought there sometimes by chance (secateurs, folding ruler) or by temporary needs (coffee-cup). Some of these things will stay on my table for a few minutes, others for a few days, and yet others, which got there for no obviously necessary reason, will settle there permanently.”3 Through the recording of his things; Perec justifies their position and how long they have been there by reasoning that he ‘likes it’ or ‘wants’ it that way. The repeated term ‘my’ reminds us of a personal relation to the desk, as though the desk becomes a raised surface in which one can immerse themselves in one’s own thoughts4 - “I could say that the objects on my desk are there because I want them to be there.”5 – for either production; “the work of writing” or procrastination; “nothing in particular”6.

Indeed, it seems the desk should be understood as a mediating surface between psychological thought and physical realisation. This transgression seems to resonate with the “interiorised scene of his (Freud’s) analytical technique” described by Rice when assessing the psychological relationship with the spatiality of the interior in Sigmund Freud’s consultation rooms

72

6.1 Plan of Freud’s workrooms within his family home, (left) consulting room, (right) study at Berggass 19, Vienna.

6.2 Freud’s study, showing part of his antique collection arranged on his writing desk, 1938. Photograph by Edmund Engelman.

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(6.1). Rice continues to align this interior to psychology through, “a relation between subjects mediated by objects,”7 where the objects or ‘Things’8, are said to have been a relational tool, intentionally or unintentionally, used in Freud’s practice to stimulate a state of mind within his patients.

As well as this, Rice suggests a relationship between Freud’s sequential technique of psychoanalysis and the spatiality of Freud’s consultation rooms within his family apartment at Berggasse 19, Vienna. To do this, Rice references the detailed accounts of Diana Fuss: ‘They (the patient) were seated in front of a table adjacent to Freud’s writing desk, a position at the very centre of the study and its collected objects. A small mirror positioned in the plane of the window adjacent to Freud’s desk would reflect the patient. In assuming his position at his desk, Freud’s own head would come between the patient and the mirror.’9 The details which Fuss is describing seem to extend the relationship also discussed through Perec and his desk, into the interior, where there was clearly a relationship between the psychological state of the patient and their physical position within the consultation rooms.

Moreover, both Rice and Fuss seem to be implying that the nature of Freud’s practice was directly influenced or mirrored by the nature of the interior of these consultation room’s and also the spatial progression between the initial room and the consultation room proper.

In the first passage just noted above, Fuss is describing the first meeting between Freud and a patient; where physically, Freud is sat at his desk (while the patient sits at an adjacent table).

Freud sits between his patient and the mirror attached to the window; a physical condition or interiorisation of the immaterial psychoanalysis about to take place. Fuss then describes the second phase of the psychoanalytical session: ‘“The patient would lie on the couch positioned against the wall, with Freud seated in an armchair next to the head-end of the couch. Freud would look out into the room as the reclining patient looked along the line of the couch towards another vitrine of objects positioned against the adjacent wall”10 Rice tells us that Fuss describes the second phase of the consultation as passive; through “a spatiality of listening,”11 where the foci has shifted from an introduction between figures through a constructed gaze, towards a removal of this gaze, as Freud “chose to tuck himself into the corner”12 and listen, while the patient succumbs to their psychological state alongside 6.3 Plan of Freud’s desk in his study at Bergasse 19, Vienna.

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a wall. The ‘spatiality’ that Fuss is describing is the physical shift from the patient sitting in the centre of the first room, looking at themselves and at Freud, to then being taken to the edge of the room with no directed gaze other than towards a wall of objects. The moment of passivity is intriguing when we hear Freud’s notes on his sessions: “At least once in the course of every analysis, a moment comes when the patient obstinately maintains that just now positively nothing whatsoever comes to mind. His free associations come to a stop and the usual incentives for putting them in motion again fail in their effect... Then one knows at once that he has gone off into the transference…”13

From this, we might assume that the transference Freud is describing is an eventual balanced state found between one’s mind and the interior choreography of the room. We also get the sense that this state is gradual and is therefore not necessarily an instantaneous state, but one that is reached after an amount of time, or progression through an interior or set of interiors.

In relation to the desk, the notion of transference might also explain our ability to concentrate or meet with the physical surface of the desk. Such that, the psychological effects of the spatiality of Freud’s consultation rooms works in a similar way to the way we work at a desk according to the objects surrounding it and its place within the room. As well as this, it is of no coincidence that like Perec, Freud also had a peculiar relationship with the objects on his desk and their arrangement, as well as the arrangement of the desk within the two rooms.

In Freud at the Dining Table, Natalija Subotincic writes that, ‘he (Freud) had to pass through a fairly narrow gap between the back wall and his assemblage of tables in order to reach his writing table, he appears even more confined and enveloped. Behind him and to his right as he worked at his desk were statuettes, vases, display tables and cabinets spilling out into the room;’14 Where the terms ‘confined’ and ‘enveloped’ have been used to describe a spatial arrangement and suggest a removal from the room, with a subsequent acceptance to the desk and a meeting between physical position and psychological state through the orientation of space and the understanding of the desk. Subotincic then describes, “Before him on the desk itself were his favourites; those pieces that he required closest to him as he worked and which he

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would make a point of greeting each morning;� a very similar and intimate relationship with the desk, that is also shared by Freud. Where again, it seems the desk provides us with an apparatus to reach transference. * With this is mind then, it is interesting to consider our understanding of the desk. As Subtoncic writes, ‘as he worked’ we might infer that there is an understanding or expectation of the desk that is instinctive to us and such an instinct can be understood both at the scale of the desk and the interior.

From several centuries, earlier than both Perec and Freud, we see a similar figure writing at their desk in profile. This particular example is from the Romanesque period, between the tenth-thirteenth century (6.4). It shows a man in a gown and in profile crouching over a small desk or surface for writing. Unlike Perec, there is no space for clutter surrounding the book 6.4 Seats and couches, after ivory and stone sculptures, Romanesque, 10th, 12th-13th century.

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in which he is scribing and the desk and chair appear heavy and ornate when compared to Perec’s description of a “sheet of glass 140 centimetres long and 70 centimetres wide lying on metal trestles.”15 Or the plan of Freud’s desk (6.3).

The man in the sculpture is crouching within what appears to be an alcove framed by curtains. From Perec’s writing we do not read anything about the position of the desk; however; as aforementioned, Subtoncic describes Freud’s desk as positioned deeply within the room, where one would need to pass several objects and other furniture before reaching or leaving the desk. This was perhaps a way to form such an alcove as can be seen in the sculpture; where in terms of transference, the physical alcove can also become psychological and therefore alter a state of mind and conscience within the room.

We also should not forget that this is an artefact, whereas Perec and Freud provide us with actual examples of working desks. The sculpture depicts the ‘image’ of the desk, or the ‘image’ of the act of writing at that time and as this remains legible today, it is perhaps this kind of imagery that persists our understanding and therefore our relationship with the writing surface. This relationship extends itself to the position of the desk in the room, the objects on the desk and even the desks proportion, where the posture one must take on in order to write is also symptomatic of the arrangement of the space and objects. This is a choreography that is selflessly systematised in an attempt to stabilise our mind and extend our psychological thought to reach the physical, proving the relationship between both of these realms, within the interior and the furniture-object.

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Desk Notes 1. Georges Perec and David Bellos (ed.), Thoughts of Sorts (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2011) 9.

2. Ibid., 9.

3. Ibid., 11.

4. This intimacy that is also clear between Perec and his desk, seems to also have an amount of contemporary relevance. Today, it is unlikely that we will own our home or building and therefore the closeness found between the human and object through ownership is easier to experience through a furniture-onject than it is with the totality of the home.

5. Thoughts of Sorts, 11.

6. Ibid., 11.

7. The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity, 47.

8. Rice notes, ‘As Reinhard suggests: “Freud’s antiquarian things are less metaphors of the psychoanalytic process or symptoms of his acquisitive personality that they are manifestations of what Lacan called the Freudian ‘Thing’…[T]he Thing, for Lacan, is the traumatic materiality that both give rise to and is sublimely in excess of the symbolic categories of exchange, attribute, and positionality which determine the symbolic structure of the object.’ Reinhard, Kenneth. The Freudian Things: Construction and the Archaeological Metaphor, p.57. in Barker, Stephen. Excavations and their objects: Freuds collection of antiquity. State University of New York Press, 1995.

Quoted in: The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity, 45.

9. Diana Fuss, ‘Freud’s Ear’ in The Sense of an Interior (London: Routledge, 2004) 78. Quoted in: Charles Rice, The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity (London: Routledge, 2008) 44.

10. ‘Freud’s Ear’ in The Sense of an Interior, 92. Quoted in: The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity, 43.

11. The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity, 43.

12. Natalija Subotincic, Never speak with your mouth full (Winnipeg, Manitoba: DoA Press, 2008) 10.

13. Sigmond Frued, ‘Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 18, p. 126. Quoted in: Charles Rice, The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity (London: Routledge, 2008) 45.

14. Never speak with your mouth full, 10.

15. Thoughts of Sorts, 9.

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6.5 Furniture in Adam style, England, c. 1770.

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6.6 Unique piece, Large bookcase with sliding opaline glass doors below and wickerwork doors above with gilded and matt black wood trims. Also features a Loewe radio on the left and a flap-opening desktop decorated with a photograph of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave on the right. Carlo Mollino, Mollino House, 1962.

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6.7 The Disquieting Muses, Giorgio de Chirico, 1916–1918.

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Replica

If the interior is the model or the original, we might say that the furniture-object is the replica. Whilst the furniture-object might not necessarily replicate the interior, there are many cases where the furniture-object is used to replicate or reference an artefact.

The reason for this is most likely to do with our relationship between furniture and style. There are several instances where furniture has been known to represent a momentary fashion or character for the interior, such as Loos’s debate between style and functionality, or Prof. Adrian Forty’s depiction of desire within interior design in his book, Objects of Desire. Indeed, furniture has the capacity to embody exotic and changing modes of taste1, as well as to question that of authenticity when it comes to styles. It also has the ability to replicate exact objects or motifs, whereby even ancient furniture might be called post-modernist in its embodied representation2, through the use of symbolism and icon. On a similar note, more contemporary styles of furniture seem to have made themselves look like buildings, where in (6.5), the drawers of a side board begin to model temples. Furniture’s ability to do this is possibly also linked to the notion of the objet d’art (art object). Whereby a piece of furniture can be viewed as part of an ensemble – an interior composition – or by itself as an object3.

The act of replication through the object is not always a literal translation however, there are also subtleties or abstractions that can be used as a form of referencing.

For instance, the use of colour within the interior composition or of the individual furniture-object is something we should consider when understanding the presence or purposeful removal of authenticity. In the house for Giorgio Devalle, there is a lip-shaped sofa designed by Carlo Mollino, (7.1). The shape of the sofa is important when explaining furniture’s potential to imply nuances, though this is discussed further in Aura. What is more relevant here, is the colour of the sofa. The original sofa was aqua green.

When we compare Mollino’s sofa to the installation of the artist, Salvador Dali titled, The Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment (7.2) from which Mol-

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7.1 Unique piece, Bed with a shaped and tempered green-lit ‘period mirror’ headboard. A lip-shaped couch upholstered in buttoned, aqua-green velvet is placed at the front of the bed on a shaped, topaz wool rug, Carlo Mollino, Devalle House, 1940.

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7.2 Collage for the Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment, Salvador Dali, c.1935.

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lino’s sofa was inspired; we see that Dali’s lips are red and therefore perhaps more of an ode towards Mae West. While Mollino seems to have taken Dali’s emblem and abstracted it further, through the use of another colour.

Dali’s installation seems evidential of the sensuality of furniture, such that he is taking the seductive qualities or nuances of May West’s appearance and spatialising them through the interior, rendering the interior as erotic. Dali then begins to change the form of the sofa, to represent West’s lips; allowing the furniture-object to embody this eroticism. In concurrence, Mollino removes the reality of this sensuality by abstracting the colour of the sofa, as though to prove that the furniture can also exist alone, as an object, whilst also maintaining the capability to remind us of West’s lips.

This slightly more phenomenological mode of design is perhaps more common in furniture, than that of the interior, as furniture is in many ways more mobile or transient than the interior. There is also more mobility in the furniture’s possible forms, colours, textures. The furniture does not have to admit itself to functionality if it does not want to, it can exist purely as an object, or a suggestion of a form of furniture. In this sense, the furniture is a smaller, more pliable and more referential object than the interior, it is a replica and therefore has the potential to replicate.

Notes 1. One example of this would be the 18th century style of chinoiserie, which was essentially a Euro-Chinese style, or furniture made in Europe that pretended to represent oriental style.

2. Such as one example of Italo-Byzantine stone furniture (8.1), where elephants appear to be holding the seat on their backs, also doubling as the legs of the throne. The particular use of elephants is on the one hand sculptural and decorative, but is also likely to be referencing mythological tales.

3. When thinking about this, see (6.7); The Disquieting Muses, by Giorgio de Chirico. In this painting, each object assembles to form a composition, similar to that of Giorgio Morandi, (3.13), whilst also acting as an object in itself, where each object does not necessarily relate to the others.

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7.3 Table in the living room of the home-studio; table has a photographic enlargement of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave inserted between two panes of Securit glass, Via Talucchi, Carlo Mollino.

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Aura

In Translations from drawing to building and other essays, Evans states that domestic or private spaces are “distinguished by use: dining rooms, breakfast rooms, parlours, tea rooms, withdrawing rooms, card rooms,”1 He also tells us that “furnishing gives an indication of the way rooms are used.”2 Suggesting again, as discussed in Interior and Desk, there is a distinct relativity between the physical and phenomenological relationship that we have with our living spaces. Such that, it is the way in which furniture is placed, that indicates how a room should be used and how we tend to move around it. This also signifies that there is both a spatial and cultural expectation to the ‘room’ and this affects the composition of the furniture within it. From this, a certain spatial condition is formulated that is perhaps best described by Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects, where he writes: “this systematic cultural connotation at the level of objects is what I am calling ATMOSPHERE.”3

We might describe Baudrillard’s depiction of “atmosphere” through the furniture-object and its potential to have a dual character. Its former and most concrete presence is its physicality, it is undoubtedly an object. The latter conscience of the object is that of its spirit. This spirit might be something projected onto it; for instance, our relationship with it. An example of this is Charles Rice’s description of ‘The Twofold Room’ of Charles Baudelaire, 1862, where “the calendar on which the evils days of reckoning are underlined in pencil.”4 To begin, the calendar is a physical, non-emotive object, however the ‘evil days of reckoning’ imply an emotion that has been projected onto the calendar, hence an emotive-object is born as well as a reasoning for Rice’s definition of the interior as a “context for immaterial, irreal experience.”5 There are several ways in which the aura of the object might be explained. In Furniture 700-1700, where Mercer describes how “early double-pieces (of furniture) indicate a change in social conditions, for they were made to their intended purposes”6, this seems to prove that combined furniture’s represented specific dual-habits of our everyday life, hence a piece of furniture was made for that combined use. Moreover, a similar explanation appears in The System of Objects, where Baudrillard aligns the adaptable seat that can “treat all positions, and hence all human relationships,”7

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8.1 Stone throne, Italo-Byzantine, 10th-11th century.

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– ‘position’ being the physical form and the ‘relationship’, being the spiritual.

According to Jean Baudrillard: “Functionally speaking, the washing machine belongs, therefore, to a relational field utterly different from that of the old-fashioned washboard or washtub – a functional field of associations which is no longer coextensive with other objective operations, with the refrigerator, with the televisions, with the component of interior design,”8

Baudrillard seems to be telling us that furniture-objects belong in groups, or ‘relational fields’ depending on their function and perhaps also what we use them for and where9.

On a slightly different, but nevertheless agreeable tone, it seems essential to discuss the passage found in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, titled Drawers, chests and wardrobes. Within this passage, Bachelard quotes a particularly poignant line from Charles Péguy, when describing our phenomenological understanding of the physical wardrobe: “Aux rayons de mémoire aux temples de l’armoire’ (On the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe)”10

Here, there is a physical and psychological semblance between the terms ‘memory’ and ‘temple’, somehow these two words are linked, as if the ‘memory’ were to become physical, it would take the form of a ‘temple’ to represent the essence of a ‘wardrobe’11.

Bachelard continues to give evidence towards the metaphorical personality of furniture, stating that, “Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life.”12 The language used is highly compelling in this particular case. Bachelard uses the determiner, ‘their’ which seems to infer to the reader that these pieces of furnishing have a persona; as they are able to possess something as ‘theirs’. Furthermore, the noun ‘organ’ that is used to describe the ‘drawers’ to the ‘desks’ suggest connotations of

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8.2 (top) Furniture in the Grecian style, (bottom) Large Grecian salon, Gaetano Landi, Architectural Decorations, 1810.

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anatomy and therefore we begin to compare these otherwise static and inhuman objects as living organisms.

Bachelard then seems to imply that it is the spiritual character of these objects that inform us how to live around them, whereby a “wardrobe’s inner space is also intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody.”13 According to Bachelard, without this level of perception towards the wardrobe, we would struggle to understand its potential; such that, “our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy.” Indicating that such objects “are hybrid objects, subject objects.”14 If we are to acknowledge that the furniture-object has the potential to represent two meanings or hold two characters; the latter being completely independent from the room and reliant on the honesty of the object. From this, we might want to question how far this renders the furniture-object as autonomous from its surrounding.

Gaetano Landi’s paired drawing of the Large Grecian salon and Furniture in the Grecian style from Architectural Decorations, 1810 (8.2), suggest that there is a tension between the interior and its furniture. The image above, shows the interior void of its furniture. It resembles a developed surface drawing (as described in Interior) and seems to have been made in order to describe the style and aesthetic of the decorated structural features of the interior, for example the walls, door and windows.

So that the décor shown, remains static and fixed to the surface, such as the frescos on the walls. The image below shows the furniture standing freely from its interior.

Evans describes the furniture in this image as “individual pieces planted awkwardly as though meant to stand free of architecture, but still hankering for a wall.”15 Suggesting that the objects are simultaneously independent from the interior, yet they also become disoriented when removed from it.

With this in mind, we should remember that at the time of Landi’s drawing, furniture in the nineteenth century would have been made to-order and it would have been designed and crafted for a specific interior, in a specific style. This attitude means that the furniture-object would have probably been crafted and decorated to the same level and articulation as the interior and exact reproductions of each item would have been unlikely and in most cases, impossible. Therefore, we might want to question the relationship between the genuine and the aura. When describing the

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genuineness of the object or art piece, Walter Benjamin claims that, “The genuineness of a thing is the quintessence of everything about it since its creation that can be handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears.”16 and that: “We can encapsulate what stands out here by using the term ‘aura’ We can say: what shrinks in an age where work of art can be reproduced by technological means is its aura.”17 Whether or not this proves that a mechanically produced furniture-object is less autonomous than an original, is not necessarily relevant in this speculation. What is of interest, is that an object should have an ‘aura’ at all; where the presence of an ‘aura’ proves that an object can hold meaning, memory or relations that go beyond that of the object itself.

In the case of Landi, it seems this independence is limited, or at least afforded by an ambiguity given with the removal of the interior. In comparison, the photograph mentioned in Replica, of Mollino’s sofa (7.1) has been described as “a lip-shaped couch upholstered in buttoned aqua-green velvet”. The impression that a sofa can be ‘lip-shaped’ suggests a potentiality of meaning beyond the object. Such that, in order to understand what this term means, we must first understand the form of the ‘lip’ and consequently, our relationship with this word is projected onto the sofa.

During this instantaneous moment, the sofa is no longer part of the room in our perception, nor is it ‘placed at the front of the bed on a shaped, topaz wool rug’ as it is physically. Instead it is allowing us to surpass the sofa’s material-form and position, to reach a second perceived meaning or relation - the lips.

This reaffirms to us that there are two levels of relationship between us and the furniture-object: its physicality and position within the room (material) and then our projected meaning or relationship with it (aura), a combined guise similar to that of the physical interior and its image.

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Furnitures Notes 1. Translations from drawing to building and other essays, 207.

2. Ibid., 213.

3. The system of objects, 49.

4. The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity, 1.

5. Ibid., 1.

6. Furniture 700-1700, 65-66.

7. The system of objects, 46.

8. Ibid., 53.

9. Perhaps these relationships can also converge the physical and the perceived, through what the object reminds us of or what it means to use.

10. Quoted in: Albert Béguin, Eve, 49. Quoted in: Gaston Bachelard and M. Jolas, The poetics of space, (NY, NY: Penguin Books, 2014) 100.

11. This again, relates to the potential of the relational field of objects explained in footnote. 11, p.100.

12. Gaston Bachelard and M. Jolas, The poetics of space, (NY, NY: Penguin Books, 2014) 99.

13. Ibid., 99.

14. Ibid., 99.

15 .Translations from drawing to buildings and other essays, 216-217.

16. Walter Benjamin and J.A Underwood, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2008) 7.

17. Ibid., 7.

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Bibliography

Aronson, Joseph. The encyclopedia of furniture. New York: Crown Publishers, 1938.

Bachelard, Gaston, and M. Jolas. The poetics of space. NY, NY: Penguin Books, 2014.

Barthes, Roland. Elements of semiology. London: Cape, 1967.

Barthes, Roland, Annette Lavers, Siân Reynolds, and Neil Badmington. Mythologies. London: Vintage Books, 2009.

Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. Image, music, text. London: Fontana Press, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2010.

Baudrillard, Jean. The system of objects. London: Verso, 2005.

Benn, R. Davis., and W. C. Baldock. Style in Furniture ... With illustrations by W.C. Baldock. Pl. 102. Longmans & Co.: London, 1904.

Benjamin, Walter, and J.A Underwood. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2008.

Burton, Johanna, Lynne Cooke, Josiah McElheny, Anni Albers, Doug Ashford, Gaston Bachelard, Angelo Bellfatto, Nova Benway, Gregg Bordowitz, Theresa Choi, Beatriz Colomina, Moyra Davey, Tom Eccles, Diana Fuss, Jennifer R. Gross, E. A. Grosz, Roni Horn, Jenny Jaskey, Susanne Küper, Elisabeth Lebovici, Nathan Lee, Zoe Leonard, Dorit Margreiter, Hel-

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en Anne. Molesworth, Georges Perec, Juliane Rebentisch, David Reed, Lisa Robertson, Joel Sanders, Virginia Woolf, and Amy Zion. Interiors. Annandale-on-Hudson: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2012.

Columina, Beatrix. “Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interiors of Adolf Loos.” AA Files 20 (1990): 5-15.

Accessed July 24, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29543700.

Evans, Robin. Translations from drawing to buildings and other essays. London: AA Publications, 2011.

Ferrari, Fulvio, and Napoleone Ferrari. The furniture of Carlo Mollino. London: Phaidon Press, 2006.

Fitted furniture. London: Published for The Architect & Building News by Iliffe, 1967.

Forty, Adrian. Objects of desire: design and society since 1750. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.

Harris, Nathaniel. Chippendale. Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1989.

Hill, Jonathan. Weather architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012.

Lamprecht, Barbara, and Thomas Müller. Richard Neutra. Möbel / furniture. Der Körper und die Sinne / The body and senses. Tübingen: Wasmuth Verlag, 2015.

Long, Christopher. “The Origins and Context of Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime”.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68, no. 2 (June 2009): 200-23. Accessed July 24, 2017.

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http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jsah.2009.68.2.200.

Loos, Adolf, and Adolf Opel. Ornament and crime selected essays. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998.

Lustenberger, Kurt. Adolf Loos. Zurich: Artemis, 1994.

Mercer, Eric. Furniture 700-1700. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969.

Mollino, Carlo, Chris Dercon, Nairy Baghramian, and Wilfried Kuehn. Carlo Mollino: maniera moderna. Köln: Walther König, 2011

Pallasmaa, Juhani. Alvar Aalto furniture Museum of Finnish Architecture, Finnish Society of Crafts and Design, Artek. Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1984.

Perec, Georges, Things: a story of the Sixties. London: Harvill Press, 1999.

Perec, Georges, and David Bellos. Thoughts of sorts. London: Notting Hill Editions, 2011.

Perec, Georges, Simon Morris, and John Sturrock. Species of spaces and other pieces = Pigeon reader. Acklam: Information As Material, 2012.

Pevsner, Nikolaus. A history of building types: the A. W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 1970 the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.Princeton, NJ: Univ. Press, 1997.

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Rice, Charles. The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity. London: Routledge, 2008.

Rosa, Joseph. “End Tables.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 34, no. 2 (2008): 22-23 . Accessed July 24, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20205569.

Rossi, Aldo. “Architecture, Furniture and Some of My Dogs.” Perspecta28 (1997): 94-113. Accessed July 24, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567195.

Safran, Yehuda, Wilfried Wang, The architecture of Adolf Loos: an Arts Council exhibition, Museum of modern art, Oxford, Institute of contemporary arts, London, Mappin art Gallery, Sheffield, Thierd Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1985/1986. London: S. n., 1985.

Schmitz, Hermann. The Encyclopedia of furniture: an outline history of furniture design in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany England, Scandinavia, Spain, Russia, and in the Near and Far East up to the middle of the Nineteenth Century with 659 illustrations arranged on 320 plates. London: A. Zwemmer, Charing Cross Road, 1936.

Semper, Gottfried. The four elements of architecture and other writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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Spalt, Johannes, Adolf Loos and The Anglo Saxons, in The architecture of Adolf Loos: an Arts Council exhibition, Museum of modern art, Oxford, Institute of contemporary arts, London, Mappin art Gallery, Sheffield, Thierd Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1985/1986. London: S. n.,

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Subotincic, Natalija. Never speak with your mouth full. Winnipeg, Manitoba: DoA Press, 2008.

Summerson, Sir John, foreword to The architecture of Adolf Loos: an Arts Council exhibition, Museum of modern art, Oxford, Institute of contemporary arts, London, Mappin art Gallery, Sheffield, Thierd Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1985/1986. London: S. n., 1985, pg. 6-7.

Tournikiotis, Panayotis. Loos. Paris: Macula, 1991.

Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and disjunction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

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Figures

1.1 La Femme 100 têtes (The 100 Headed Woman), Max Ernst, collage, 1929.

From: Ferrari, Fulvio, and Napoleone Ferrari. The furniture of Carlo Mollino. London: Phaidon, 2006, pg. 21.

1.2 A partial application of the principles of art furnishing. Sitting Room, ‘Glen Roy’ Wake Green Road, Moseley, Birmingham, 1890.

From: Forty, Adrian. Objects of desire: design and society since 1750. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, pg. 112.

1.3 In a much smaller house, the interior shows some of the changes in taste characteristic of the 1920s. With plain painted walls, the most minimal joinery, and little upholstery, the room is not ‘decorated’ in the sense apparent in the earlier interiors, apart from the grate and mantelpiece’, C.H. James & F.R. Yerbury, Modern English Houses & Interiors, London, 1925, plate V. Dining room of a house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, designed by Robert Atkinson, early 1920s.

From: Forty, Adrian. Objects of desire: design and society since 1750. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, pg. 114.

1.4 Studio for Jacques Doucet, Paul Ruaud (architect) and Paul Iribe (decorator), Neuilly, 1926-29, incorporating Eileen Gray’s guéridon table (inset), c. 1914-15.

From: Constant, Caroline. Eileen Gray. Berlin: Phaidon, 2007, pg. 30.

1.5 Oriental Cabinet, incorporating Eileen Gray’s Lotus table (inset), c. 1914-15.

From: Constant, Caroline. Eileen Gray. Berlin: Phaidon, 2007, pg. 31.

2.1 Section of York House, Pall Mall, William Chambers, 1759.

From: Evans, Robin. Translations from drawing to buildings and other essays. London: AA Publications, 2011, pg. 201.

2.2 ‘Section’ of a stair hall, Thomas Lightoler, The Modern Builder’s Assistant, 1757.

From: Evans, Robin. Translations from drawing to buildings and other essays. London: AA Publications, 2011, 204.

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2.3 Furnishings for a small drawing room, Gillows and Co., 1822.

From: Evans, Robin. Translations from drawing to buildings and other essays. London: AA Publications, 2011, pg. 221.

2.4 Bedroom furniture plotted on the plans of rooms, The Gentleman’s House, Robert Karr, 3rd revised edn., London: John Murray, 1871 (1864), pg. 133.

From: Rice, Charles. The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity.

London: Routledge, 2008, pg. 60.

2.5 Satellite mirror, Eileen Gray, E. 1027, Roquebrune-Cap Martin, 1926-29.

From: Constant, Caroline. Eileen Gray. Berlin: Phaidon, 2007, pg. 112.

2.6 The bedroom of the house for Giorgio Devalle, The combinations of mirrors that, through the door, open up views of the Surrealist-inspired sofa (the “Mae West Lips Sofa”

by Salvador Dali), Via Alpi 5. Carlo Mollino, Devalle House, 1940.

From: Mollino, Carlo, Chris Dercon, Nairy Baghramian, and Wilfried Kuehn. Carlo Mollino: maniera moderna. Köln: Walther König, 2011, pg 161.

2.7 Unique piece, Tray-shaped shelf in heraldic red marble projecting from a wall mirror, Carlo Mollino, Orengo House, 1949.

From: Ferrari, Fulvio, and Napoleone Ferrari. The furniture of Carlo Mollino. London: Phaidon, 2006, pg. 211.

3.1 Théodor Weil, reception room, Munich Werkstätten exhibition, Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1910.

From: Constant, Caroline. Eileen Gray. Berlin: Phaidon, 2007, 20.

3.2 Woman and Child, Henry Moses, from Designs for Modern Costume, 1812.

From: Evans, Robin. Translations from drawing to buildings and other essays. London: AA Publications, 2011, pg. 218.

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3.3 Hufeisensiedlung, Bruno Taut, Berlin, Germany, 1925-1933.

3.4 Studio/living room, Eileen Gray, Temple à Pailla, Castellar, 1932-34.

From: Constant, Caroline. Eileen Gray. Berlin: Phaidon, 2007, pg. 154.

3.5 The sitting room, one arrives by stair, and must climb another eight steps to the dining room, from which one overlooks the sitting room. Loos often used a difference in level as the sole method of spatial differentiation. Adolf Loos, Villa Müller, Prague, Czech Republic, 1930.

From: Tournikiotis, Panayotis. Loos. Paris: Macula, 1991, pg. 98.

3.6 Loos Apartment, bedroom of Loos’s wife, Lina. Adolf Loos, 1903.

From: Tournikiotis, Panayotis. Loos. Paris: Macula, 1991, pg. 35.

3.7 Nicosia, Richard Wentworth, photograph, 2006.

From: Wentworth, Richard, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Elizabeth Manchester, and Tom Saunders.

Richard Wentworth: making do and getting by. London: Koenig Books, 2015, pg. 17.

3.8 Unique piece, Tray-shaped shelf in heraldic red marble projecting from a wall mirror, Carlo Mollino, Orengo House, 1949.

From: Ferrari, Fulvio, and Napoleone Ferrari. The furniture of Carlo Mollino. London: Phaidon, 2006, pg. 211.

3.9 Photograph of a running Saluki dog, Carlo Mollino, c.1970.

From: Ferrari, Fulvio, and Napoleone Ferrari. The furniture of Carlo Mollino. London: Phaidon, 2006, pg. 134.

3.10 Radio gramophone (unique piece), Radio gramophone in shaped and polished natural maple and black lacquered maple finishes with a record player in a sliding drawer. The trestle support is composed of two crossed pairs of V-shaped legs with two wheels for mobility, Carlo Mollino, C. Piccolis, c.1948.

From: Ferrari, Fulvio, and Napoleone Ferrari. The furniture of Carlo Mollino. London: Phaidon, 2006, pg. 135.

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3.11 Curiosity, Gerard ter Borch, c. 1660.

From: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435714 3.12 The Annunciation, notice the textile canopy above the bed and the covering of the Virgin’s seat, Roger van der Wayden, probably before 1440.

From: Mercer, Eric. Furniture 700-1700. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, 73.

3.13 The Linen Cupboard, the provision of a cupboard for one purpose alone, and that to hold linen, reveals the profusion of furniture of all kinds by the mid-17th century, Pieter de Hooch, 1663.

From: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Pieter_de_Hooch_-_At_ the_Linen_Closet.jpg 3.14 St. Jerome in His Study, Antonello da Messina 1460–1475.

3.15 Natura morta, Giorgio Morandi, 1939.

From: https://news.artnet.com/market/italian-post-war-art-auctions-london-343394.

3.16 Villa E-1027, Eileen Grey, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, 1926-1929.

4.1 Swedish peasant house with a wide bench serving both as a seat and a bedstead, c. 15th century.

From: Mercer, Eric. Furniture 700-1700. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, (Fig. 56).

4.2 Interior of a Swedish peasant house with an open hearth in the middle of the room, c.

15th century.

From: Mercer, Eric. Furniture 700-1700. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, (Fig. 34).

4.3 View into the dining room. Adolf Loos, Moller House, Vienna, Austria, 1927-28.

From: Lustenberger, Kurt. Adolf Loos. Zurich: Artemis, 1994, pg. 157.

4.4 A double window-seat contrived in the thickness of the wall, from a French manuscript, 15th century.

From: Mercer, Eric. Furniture 700-1700. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, (Fig. 48).

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4.5 The scribe Ezra, detail from the Codex Amiatinus, late 16th c., Florence, Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana.

From: Pevsner, Nikolaus. A history of building types: the A. W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 1970 the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.Princeton, NJ: Univ. Press, 1997, 92.

4.6 Oxford, Corpus Christi College library, showing the stall system, c. 1604 and c. 1700.

From: Pevsner, Nikolaus. A history of building types: the A. W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 1970 the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.Princeton, NJ: Univ. Press, 1997, 94.

4.7 A settle used as a bed, an illustration of the Story of Tobit, Bible Historiale, late 15th century.

From: Mercer, Eric. Furniture 700-1700. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, (Fig. 55).

5.1 The Last Supper, although most of the diners still sit on benches, three of them are given light chairs, and of three different kinds. engraving by Wendel von Olmutz, 16th century.

From: Mercer, Eric. Furniture 700-1700. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, (Fig. 111).

5.2 Bed with canopy from the Swyn ‘Pesel’ in Lehe, Renaissance, Ditmarsh, North Germany, 1568.

5.3 Sleeping alcove. Eileen Gray, E. 1027.

From: Constant, Caroline. Eileen Gray. Berlin: Phaidon, 2007, pg. 107.

5.4 L’ Accouchée, the recently delivered mother is visited in bed by her friends, whi sit upon light and easily moveable chairs, engraving by Abraham Bosse, n.d.

From: Mercer, Eric. Furniture 700-1700. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969, (Fig. 112).

6.1 Plan of Freud’s workrooms within his family home, (left) consulting room, (right) study at Berggass 19, Vienna.

From: Subotincic, Natalija. Never speak with your mouth full. Winnipeg, Manitoba: DoA Press, 2008, pg.10.

6.2 Freud’s study, showing part of his antique collection arranged on his writing desk, 1938.

Photograph by Edmund Engelman.

From: Rice, Charles. The emergence of the interior: architecture, modernity, domesticity. London: Rou-

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tledge, 2008, 43.

6.3 Plan of Freud’s desk in his study at Bergasse 19, Vienna.

From: Subotincic, Natalija. Never speak with your mouth full. Winnipeg, Manitoba: DoA Press, 2008, pg.11.

6.4 From: Schmitz, Hermann. The Encyclopedia of furniture: an outline history of furniture design in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany England, Scandinavia, Spain, Russia, and in the Near and Far East up to the middle of the Nineteenth Century with 659 illustrations arranged on 320 plates. London: A. Zwemmer, Charing Cross Road, 1936, pg. 279.

6.5 Furniture in Adam style, England, c. 1770.

From: Schmitz, Hermann. The Encyclopedia of furniture: an outline history of furniture design in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany England, Scandinavia, Spain, Russia, and in the Near and Far East up to the middle of the Nineteenth Century with 659 illustrations arranged on 320 plates. London: A. Zwemmer, Charing Cross Road, 1936, pg. 279.

6.6 Unique piece, Large bookcase with sliding opaline glass doors below and wickerwork doors above with gilded and matt black wood trims. Also features a Loewe radio on the left and a flap-opening desktop decorated with a photograph of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave on the right. Carlo Mollino, Mollino House, 1962.

From: Ferrari, Fulvio, and Napoleone Ferrari. The furniture of Carlo Mollino. London: Phaidon, 2006, pg. 199.

6.7 The Disquieting Muses, Giorgio de Chirico, 1916–1918.

From: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-de-chirico-giorgio-artworks.htm.

7.1 Unique piece, Bed with a shaped and tempered green-lit ‘period mirror’ headboard. A lip-shaped couch upholstered in buttoned, aqua-green velvet is placed at the front of the bed on a shaped, topaz wool rug, Carlo Mollino, Devalle House, 1940.

From: Ferrari, Fulvio, and Napoleone Ferrari. The furniture of Carlo Mollino. London: Phaidon, 2006, pg. 191.

7.2 Collage for the Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment, Salvador Dali, c.1935.

From: https://divisare.com/projects/304130-salvador-dali-oscar-tusquets-blanca-sala-mae-

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west-room-at-teatre-museu-dali.

7.3 Table in living room; features a Loewe radio on the left and a flap-opening desktop decorated with a photograph of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave on the right. Carlo Mollino, Mollino House, 1962.

From: Ferrari, Fulvio, and Napoleone Ferrari. The furniture of Carlo Mollino. London: Phaidon, 2006, pg. 199.

8.1 Stone throne, Italo-Byzantine, 10th-11th century.

From: Schmitz, Hermann. The Encyclopedia of furniture: an outline history of furniture design in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany England, Scandinavia, Spain, Russia, and in the Near and Far East up to the middle of the Nineteenth Century with 659 illustrations arranged on 320 plates. London: A. Zwemmer, Charing Cross Road, 1936, pg. 25.

8.2 (top) Furniture in the Grecian style, (bottom) Large Grecian salon, Gaetano Landi, Architectural Decorations, 1810.

From: Evans, Robin. Translations from drawing to buildings and other essays. London: AA Publications, 2011, pg. 216.