Projective Interiors!
Dear Editor,!
! !
!
Architecture has been trying to predict the forms life takes rather than looking at the forms of inhabitation. Both the interior and the city have become secondary even though these are the environments that we mostly inhabit. The everyday life has been ignored and encapsulated by architects in unfamiliar shapes, forms that don't follow any political structure but rather follow the economical power. The isolated object has been populating the urban environment. In order to address this condition I would like to make a book proposal for you. !
!
This book will go into the interior to use it as a projective device. The interior is the site in which everyday life is experienced and performed, this has become our canvas. The interior has the potential of extending outwards and this is a quality that architects need to further explore, qualitative aspects intrinsic to inhabitation that can be magnified and projected into the city . !
!
Within the interior, one uses objects and fragments of a larger entity so then the interior becomes the city. The interior should not be only defining the identity of the inhabitant -or the who I am- but the geography- or the where I am. The interior is not an object in isolation but part of the topography of the city if not the city itself.!
!
The book will be bringing theory and “practice” into one. It will operate against what is misunderstood by most people as the Architectural Practice, against those who think that practicing it is about the building of buildings and not the building of arguments. To address this aspect I am proposing a book in where this “type” of architect becomes the audience. Precisely because we will be critiquing this audience, they need to become the market we target.!
!
What I propose to you is to “reformat” Life A User’s Manual by Georges Perec into what is nowadays understood as an “architectural publication”. This will be a series of 99 volumes on “architectural specifications” each chapter or room within the book will become a separate volume, the text will remain the same and the title of each volume will be the title of the chapter. What this new book is going to be doing is modifying its audience by simply changing the format of the book. This edition of the book will not longer be a “manual for users” but a “manual for architects”. Each volume’s appendix will take you to a series of drawings. These drawings will map intrinsically the words of Perec into an architectural detail. As you can suspect many of these drawings will be an “absurdity” which is an aspect that I find fascinating for further exploration.!
!
This way we will force contemporary architects to project from the interior, to look at the everyday life within the “architectural language of practice” and bring back inhabitation or and the interior as a projective device. The architectural drawing and detail will not only map the envelop of the interior but it will detail the objects within. The objects become crucial in the interior as they define the identity of both the city and it inhabitants as well as the inhabitant defines the identity of these objects.!
!
I believe this book will become for us an interesting challenge. By drawing the interior we will understand a different topography, one that is built out of inhabitation. I am sure this book will give us the experience and knowledge on the subject to argue for the same within a broader audience and with the use of a more “universal language”!
! ! ! ! ! ! !
Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood around 1900.! Loos, Adolf. On architecture.! Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime.! Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories! Perec, Georges. Life A User’s Manual.! Rice, Charles. The Emergence of the Interior.! Steadman, Philip. Vermeer’s Camera.! Max! Tafuri, Manfredo, Le Corbusier, Machine et Memoire “The city in the work of Le Corbusier”! • • • • • • • •
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !