{UI } urban interior
Urban Interior Research Group Colloquium Melbourne 2009 4. December 2009 UI members: Suzie Attiwill, Kate Church, Mick Douglas, Michael Fowler, Rochus Urban Hinkel, and Malte Wagenfeld Guests: Claire Hatch, Scott McQuire, Vivian Mitsogianni, Nella Themelios, and Michael Trudgeon Colloquium Organisation and Convenor: Rochus Urban Hinkel Booklet Production: Rochus Urban Hinkel with Ben Landau and Sarah Iacono Research Assistant: Ben Landau and Sarah Iacono Urban Interior is supported by the Design Research Institute (DRI) and the School of Architecture and Design, both RMIT University
Š 2009 Urban Interior Research Group School of Architecture and Design RMIT University Melbourne, Australia www.urbaninterior.net
Urban Interior {UI} research group investigates the relation between people and the urban condition. The acronym UI is also suggestive of the objectives of the research: there is an attention to both the individual and collective nature of the habitation of environments; the research is to have impact in terms of the urban condition understood as composed of both individuals and collectives; and addresses this at the local in the context of the global. As a research group, UI is composed of individuals from a range of disciplines including fashion, sound, interior design, architecture, industrial design and art. As a collective, individual research trajectories cover a breadth of practices, scales and concerns from the intimacy of bodies to events within the public realm. Individual projects have in common a focus on the spatial and temporal dimensions of the inhabited, urban environment through a concern with material, social, psychological, physiological, poetic, aesthetic, experiential, sensory, historical, political relations. This brings a level of complexity to any research project undertaken by UI.
Suzie Attiwill | Kate Church | Mick Douglas Michael Fowler | Robyn Healy Rochus Urban Hinkel | Roger Kemp Mick Peel | Malte Wagenfeld
MELBOURNE COLLOQUIUM 4 DECEMBER
UI members participating in the Melbourne Colloquium: Suzie Attiwill | Kate Church | Mick Douglas Michael Fowler | Rochus Urban Hinkel Malte Wagenfeld Guests: Claire Hatch Director Cultural Value, Melbourne Scott McQuire Associate Professor, School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne Vivian Mitsogianni Program Leader, Customising Space Nella Themelios Coordinating Curator, Craft Victoria Michael Trudgeon, Principal Designer, Crowd Productions
The Urban Interior Research Group, RMIT University, Melbourne invites you to the
UI : COLLOQUIUM 2009 04.12.2009 / 14.00-18.00h Crowd, Level 8, 'Total House', 180 Russell Street The current members of the research group, Suzie Attiwill, Kate Church, Mick Douglas, Michael Fowler, Rochus Urban Hinkel and Malte Wagenfeld will present their research trajectories around the notion of 'urban interior' through projects and practice. The presentations and the discussions can be seen as 'notes' towards an Urban Interior book or reader. External guests include: Claire Hatch, Scott McQuire, Vivian Mitsogianni, Nella Themelios and Michael Trudgeon. The Colloquium is followed by drinks. Urban Interior is supported by the Design Research Institute (DRI) and the School of Architecture and Design, both RMIT University. More information at www.urbaninterior.net
GUESTS CLAIRE HATCH DIRECTOR, CULTURAL VALUE
SCOTT MCQUIRE ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE
Claire Hatch is founding Director of Cultural Value, a values-led consultancy that works with organisations and communities to facilitate strategic decision-making and explore cultural perspectives. She has a history of working in the cultural sector holding senior management positions with State arts funding bodies in WA and Victoria, not for profit organisations and the private sector.
Dr. Scott McQuire is an academic and writer with a strong interest in interdisciplinary research linking social theory, new media, art, and urbanism.
She has provided strategic business advice to over 150 arts and cultural organisations, a number of cultural institutions of State and national significance and artists across art forms during her time in government and now as part of Cultural Value. A Myer Foundation, Cranlana Program Alumni, Claire has a Master of Arts and is actively involved in cultural leadership initiatives that support creative practice and the development of social capital.
He is the author of Crossing the Digital Threshold (1997), Visions of Modernity (1998), Maximum Vision (1999), and most recently The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (2008) which won the Urban Communication Foundation’s 2009 Jane Jacobs Publication Award. He is also co-author with Peter Lyssiotis of the artist’s book The Look of Love (1998), co-editor with Nikos Papastergiadis of Empires Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art (2005) and with Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer of the Urban Screens Reader (2009). Scott is Associate Professor and Reader in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, where he is engaged in a number of research projects on media and public space.
VIVIAN MITSOGIANNI PROGRAM LEADER, CUSTOMISING SPACE
NELLA THEMELIOS COORDINATING CURATOR, CRAFT VICTORIA
Dr Vivian Mitsogianni is a director of M@ STUDIO Architects and Senior Lecturer in Architecture in the School of Architecture + Design, RMIT University where she is the founding Community + Industry Linkage Projects Coordinator and was responsible for the coordination of the Design Studio stream in the Masters of Architecture Program (2001-2008).
Nella Themelios is an arts writer and curator and currently holds the position of Coordinating Curator at Craft Victoria. Recent curatorial projects include Shoe Show (2009); Chicks on Speed, Viva La Craft! (2009)and Give/Take (2009). She has written a number of catalogue essays and has contributed to various non-refereed arts publications including Object Magazine and Eyeline. She has participated on the visual arts judging panel for the Fringe Festival in 2008 and 2009, as well as being a category judge for Fringe Furniture. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Cultural Studies) and a Graduate Certificate (Art History) from the University of Melbourne. She is currently completing a Master’s degree in Curatorship at the same institution and working on a number of projects for 2010, including a writing project on feminism for the Next Wave program.
Her PhD by project titled “white noise PANORAMA: Process-based Architectural Design” was a reconsideration of the potential and scope of process-based architectural design practice. Her projects and extensive writings on architecture have been featured in local and international publications. Vivian currently holds the role of Research Leader for the Customising Space program in RMIT’s Design Research Institute.
GUESTS MICHAEL TRUDGEON PRINCIPAL DESIGNER, CROWD PRODUCTIONS
Dr. Michael Trudgeon is the design director and a co founder of Crowd Productions, founded in 1983 as a trans-disciplinary design practice, to research and explore the potential of new technologies and design approaches. Crowd Productions has small teams in both Melbourne and London with a structure based on the film-production house model. Crowd’s projects are delivered through collaboration with a network of designers, researchers, makers, custom fabricators and specialists. Crowd has focused on creating digitally enhanced environments for the cinema, health and entertainment industries and financial services sector. Recent projects include the design of flagship cinema complexes for Hoyts at Melbourne Central and at Blacktown in Sydney, digital cinema capsules for ACMI in Melbourne, a conversation-and-customer-focused retail banking design for NAB, a new streamlined retail environment for the RTA at Blacktown, modular health clinics for diabetes treatment and the re-imagining the Australia Post post office. Other projects have included communication and exhibition projects for the International Institute for Industrial and Environmental Economics at Lund University, Sweden, for the 2000 World Expo in Frankfurt and exhibition installations for the Museum of Sydney at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, including their 2000 Sydney Olympics exhibition.
Michael Trudgeon has taught from 1982 at RMIT University, Monash University. Swinburne and Melbourne University variously in architecture, interior design, industrial and communication design. He has a PhD from RMIT University [School of Architecture and Design], Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in architecture from RMIT University and a Diploma of Fine Art from Philip Institute.
PARTICIPATING UI MEMBERS SUZIE ATTIWILL PROGRAM DIRECTOR, INTERIOR DESIGN
Associate Professor Suzie Attiwill is the Program Director of Interior Design, RMIT School of Architecture and Design. She also has an independent practice which involves the design of exhibitions, curatorial work, writing and working on a range of interdisciplinary projects in Australia and overseas. Suzie is completing a PhD in the discipline of interior design by research project at RMIT. Titled ‘an interior history’, the research questions dominant phenomenological models of interior and interiority to re-pose concepts of interior in relation to exteriors and as a practice/ process/technique of interiorization. These concerns are motivated by a desire to shift from the centrality of an autonomous subject/individual to explore the potential of collectives/groups as sites of social and cultural transformation. The research is conducted through curatorial practice where the exhibition environment becomes a site of experimentation and engagement. She approaches exhibitions as designs in and of themselves – rather than an exhibition of design. Her research has been published nationally and internationally as book chapters, journal articles and conference presentations. Suzie is a founding member of the Urban Interior research group part of the Customising Space stream in the RMIT Design Research Institute, www. urbaninterior.net. From 1996 to 1999, she was the inaugural Artistic Director of
Craft Victoria. She is the current chair of IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association – www.idea-edu. com) and a Director of West Space Inc. (one of Australia’s most prolific artist run spaces – www.westspace.org.au).
KATE CHURCH ASSOCIATE LECTURER, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
MICHAEL FOWLER RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, SIAL SOUND STUDIOS
Current PhD research is titled ‘Confronting Mobius: Landscape as Continuum’ and investigates through discourses surrounding complexity and chaos theory, landscape as a temporal continuum and spatial infinity. This research explores design methods that investigate the potential of design to ‘curate’ and continually (re)organise time and space.
As a classically trained musician, Fowler brings to UI a body of experience and knowledge concerning the relationship between systems of notation and representation,the aesthetics and impact of the avant-garde in music, performance practices in electro-acoustic music, as well as recent investigations into acoustic ecology. His expertise centres on studies into `open-form’ and indeterminacy in music, Japanese aesthetics, methodologies for visualising data, and the impact of the Japanese garden as a projective model for urban sound design.
What can a different set of criteria, another way of differentiating offer to the experience of the landscape? Through a series of built and speculative projects the research seeks to consider alternative understandings of the role of both the designer and the occupier in the continual reorganisation space and time.
PARTICIPATING UI MEMBERS MICK DOUGLAS SENIOR LECTURER, INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Mick Douglas explores art practice in the public realm and sustainable mobility by investigating inter-relationships between aesthetic experiences of mobility, cultural change practices and sustainable transport in global cities, a field he describes as ‘Cultural Transports’. This work employs cross-cultural, collaborative and inter-disciplinary methods of creation, juxtaposition, comparison and analysis between different global contexts. The research seeks to develop new artistic forms and experiences that critically engage with an increasingly global cultural industry’s use of arts projects to initiate tourism and regional development. Mick has led a number of international art/transport research projects including ‘W-11 Tram’, first commissioned by the cultural festival of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games. A book documenting his ten-year collaborative project ‘tramjatra: imagining Melbourne and Kolkata by tramways’ was recently published (Yoda Press, South Asia and RMIT Press). In 2006 he collaborated with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (New York) to develop a ‘Pedal Powered Vehicles Workshop’, a pilot research project investigating the contemporary potential of pedal-powered vehicle services in urban settings.
He is the founder of arts groups Tramtactic and Cultural Transport Collective, a member of the City of Melbourne’s public art advisory committee and undertakes practice-based art research and transport related consultancy work.
ROCHUS URBAN HINKEL SENIOR LECTURER, ARCHITECTURE
MALTE WAGENFELD PROGRAM DIRECTOR, INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Rochus Urban Hinkel is a practising architect, academic and curator. He joined RMIT School of Architecture and Design in 2004 as a visiting scholar in the program of Architecture, and was subsequently employed by the program of Interior Design as a continuing staff member. He also taught in the program of Architecture and Design at the Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart, at the University of Stuttgart. In 2009 he has been a Visiting Scholar at the Architecture Design Innovation Program (ADIP) Technical University (TU) Berlin. He has lectured and held workshops in Europe, Northern America and Australia. Rochus studied interior design, architecture and urban design and his practice ranges from furniture and interior design to architecture and urban design schemes. He has won a number of European-wide awards, and reviews about his practice have been published and included in exhibitions in Europe, Asia and Australia.
Malte Wagenfeld is leading the research project ‘Aesthetics of Air’; The physical sensation and aesthetics of air movement within interior spaces and the objects or devices used to generate this. This project is an investigation into the sensual and thermal possibilities of air movement within interior spaces with the aim of creating improved environmental conditions for living and working and the significant reduction of energy usage and associate greenhouse gas emissions.
His research and curatorial interests investigates the relationship of public and private spaces and the social and political condition of public space. These explorations commence with a number of small design projects and small scale installations. In UI he investigates relationships between interior and urban environments.
Notes towards a writing – as an arrangement of ideas – to do with urban interior SUZIE ATTIWILL
This research trajectory eddies around the concept of urban interior enticed by the potential for thinking and practising differently – particularly in relation to interior design. At this moment, two intensities are significant in this research: the expansion of interior design as a discipline and practice effected by the concept of urban interior; and the contribution of interior design to the contemporary situation of increasing urban density. This focus picks up an historical thread which while not found in conventional histories of interior design is one which seems vital to situating current emerging interior design discourse and practice. This thread plies practices, techniques and ideas of privacy, self, urbanisation, inhabitation, cities with constructions of interior – architectural and subjectivity. The writings of Walter Benjamin in the late 19th century detail the interior as the place of the private individual, in retreat from the industrialised city where the exterior is interiorised as ‘phantasmagorias of the interior … In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long ago. His living room is a box in the theatre of the world’. Scott McQuire pursues these threads through the 20th century into the 21st, relations between private and public manifested/ produced through changing conditions of the house – from the medieval house to the bourgeois home, the modernist glass house to mediated environments. With reference to Jürgen Habermas, McQuire notes ‘the quest for increased privacy manifested in
the restructuring of the interior space of the home was matched by the emergence of ‘interior subjectivity’’. In a footnote, he cites Francis Barker’s words ‘the newly interiorated subject’. Charles Rice’s articulation of ‘interior urbanisation’ and the emergence of ‘the interior’ in modernity as a doubled condition continue this thread and situate the concept of interior in a dynamic relation with exterior, urban environments. The vitality of this thread becomes apparent when coupled with Gilles Deleuze’s observation that ‘we are in a generalised crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure … The family is an ‘interior’, in crisis like all other interiors ….’ A relational condition as distinct from an idea of The Interior as an independent, autonomous and stable identity engages practices and techniques which constantly question and invent conditions of interior. What might be the contribution of interior design in new modes of urban inhabitation? This question together with the brief of interior-making outside the architectural container has been posed in projects to students, colleagues and situations. Interior Design studios and electives have become sites for testing and projecting possibilities. Urban Rooms (a 2nd /3rd year interior design studio) posed the question of interior-making along the civic spine of Melbourne; Occupation /Berlin/Brighton/ Melbourne (a 3rd/4th year interior design
specialisation) – the concept of temporal occupation, of time, of folding forces to interiorize in different cities. Exhibitions as spatial and temporal compositions have also performed as laboratories where encounters, occupations, relations, programs, groups happen; arrangements and settings which effect/affect public behaviours. Here the interiorist gathers / collects / considers concepts/ideas of urban interior, customising space, urban room, individuals, collectives, exhibition as research / publication / dissemination, text, relations of in / to, processes of making publi(city), of collecting to produce collectivity and communities of practice in the consideration of new kinds of infrastructure and governance which enable creative engagements and encounters. WRITINGS CITED Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H, Eiland & K, McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) Scott McQuire, The Media City. Media, Architecture and Urban Space (London: SAGE Publications, 2008) Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: essays on subjection (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior. Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (UK: Routledge, 2007) Charles Rice, ‘The Inside of Space: Some Issues Concerning Heterogeneity, the Interior and the Weather’, in Hensel, M et al (eds) Space Reader. Heterogeneous Space in Architecture (UK: Wiley, 2009) Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ in Leach, N (ed), Rethinking Architecture (London: Routledge. 1997)
THE SHIFTING URBAN INTERIOR KATE CHURCH
Our experience, conceptualisation and occupation of the city is calibrated through broader constructions of time and space. While the city may be understood ‘synchronously’ (Hillier, B. 1996), and thus organised via grids, strategic proximities and existing systems of spatial control, our lived experience of urban space is primarily asynchronous: immediate, visceral and subjective - and therefore draws on an alternative set of spatiotemporal information. From the coexistence and interplay of these two forces, ‘urban interior’ is formed and its spaces are materialised. Simultaneously operating at multiple scales, the urban interior is both a container for transformation (Lynch, K. 1972) and an endless process of change. This ongoing transformation occurs across both the collective and individual scale drawing from, shifting and reorganising manifold times, places and perceptions. While there are many things that inform our conceptualisation of the landscape, our experience of the city’s ‘interior’ is constructed and understood at the scale of the individual who, in negotiating and engaging with Cartesian logic, reaffirms and alters its fabric concurrently. The ‘urban interior’ therefore is not a fixed or static notion, nor is it a purely physical location but rather is constantly challenged and reconstituted through the immediacy of our experience.
The corporeal experience of the body in space unfolds in a perpetual present, projecting into an uncertain future and drawing from past occurrences. Occupying and moving through these spaces is an experience of encounter and negotiation; simultaneously constructing and transforming them, and therefore embedding a particular agency in the individual through their occupation of space. What is it to occupy these spaces? Through Heidegger’s notion of Dasein (1924) (literally ‘being there/here’) this chapter explores the asynchronous urban experience through the agency of occupation and encounter, and its relationship to the design of spatiotemporal conditions.
situated social assemblage and the urban interior: moments of cultural transport MICK DOUGLAS
In our era of increasing urbanisation, mobility of populations and the proliferating wash of global capitalism, I am particularly interested in creative practice as a means for the production of ephemeral social assemblages where lived encounters are situated both within and irrespective to prevailing contemporary flows of social, cultural, economic and environmental forces. With globalism availing increasing presentations of seemingly endless aspirations and options for urban life experience, whether as fantasy, consumption choice or realisable action, we as individuals and collectives might wonder what situates us, giving us ground and connection in our lives. Attraction to religious fundamentalism and cultural ‘tribes’ is one response; ever firmly institutionalising the nuclear family is another, as is investing in iconic civic architecture projects seeking to foster urban identity and shared inhabitation. Engaging with the dynamics of everyday urban inhabitation is my preferred mode of practice. My creative research practice explores the making of situating platforms that can produce ephemeral social assemblages constituting singular difference to prevailing modes of social gathering. Two projects serve as examples. ‘Ride-on-dinner’ explores the interrelation between the human body, a temporarily collected social body and the body of a city through facilitating a collective food and transport
experience. ‘LiveHouse’ explores the capacity of an ‘other space’ (after Foucault) to open potential for new participatory social dynamics to emerge in the setting of an inner city State Government Housing Estate with diverse community undergoing publicprivate partnership development. These projects trace forms for qualities of entwined aesthetics and ethics that question assumed contemporary urban living conditions to render glimpses of alternatives. Rather than feed the dissociated decision making of rationalism or the high abstractions of spiritualism, I seek to explore contingent situations of participatory experiential mobility open to movement, play and change. The projects induce moments of cultural transport, experienced individually and collectively, that may contribute to the urban interior: a realm I think of as the dynamic lived social assemblage of interweaving cultural, economic and environmental space-time instances that situate the production of urban subjects, living urban practices and reveries.
THE URBAN INTERIOR AS ACOUSTIC SPACE MICHAEL FOWLER
Composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer (1977) defines soundscape as the sum of auditory phenomena occurring in any given sounding environment at any given moment. The listener is central and immediate in such a system and the spatial auditory experiences that are constructed, whether from the built environment or a composed musical system, present to us a duality in the means to which auditory qualities are measured. Barry Truax (1999) sees this duality as essentially a divide between treating sound as an object of structure or treating sound as a phenomenology of meaning. As a structure, sound can be measured using standardised acoustic metrics that act to identify a source signal’s properties. When sound is overlaid with meaning, it becomes a function of culture, identity, religion and politics. In this respect the contemporary urban soundscape is thus both a globalised and a localised acoustic ecology that tracks our relationship to technology and the landscape. Contemporary urban soundscapes have continued to increase in auditory scale and content in what Thompson (2006) sees as an inheritance from 19th Century notions of the noisy but triumphant mechanical sounds of human progress. The contemporary proliferation of embedded networks, pervasive computing devices and media screens in Asian cities such as Incheon and Tokyo, serve as a reminder to the immediacy and hegemony of visual qualities in urban design. Indeed,
traditional Japanese gardens serve as a model for the manipulation of ocular and auditory conditions so as to enable multi-modal encounters. Within the spatial typology of the Japanese stroll garden lay a number of embedded acoustic spaces. Such interior acoustic ecologies sit in relation to the context of other acoustic arenas in the garden, as well as the embedded nature of the garden as interior to the house, town or city. Such spatial qualities of materiality and topography that produce interior acoustic spaces within the Japanese garden are often focused on the sound of water features, birds, insects and human visitors. As such, acoustic arenas become zones in which sound sources articulate space, producing ephemeral acoustic interiors to the ever-changing acoustic horizon. Similarly, in the urban realm the concept of the urban interior as acoustic space has been explored through infrastructure projects such as urban soundscape systems (embedded multi-channel loudspeaker arrays). This paper seeks to examine the potential that composed auditory zones and corridors may have on shaping urban design and the ways in which the urban condition is constructed through multi-sensory encounters within the landscape.
Relational Design for Public Life: The Social and Political Dimension of Urban Interior
ROCHUS URBAN HINKEL
The setting is widening; after the isolated object, it now can embrace the whole scene: the form of Gordon Matta-Clark or Dan Graham’s work can not be reduced to the “things” those two artist “produce”; it is not the simple secondary effects of a composition, as the formalistic aesthetic would like to advance, but the principle acting as a trajectory evolving through signs, objects, forms, gestures... Nicolas Bourriaud, in ‘Relational Aesthetics’ (1998) Public space is defined by being accessible to everyone at anytime, it is the space of community and social interaction, the space in which public life unfolds. Public space does not pre-exist, it only emerges once it becomes activated through inhabitation and occupation (Arendt, H. 1958; Boomkens, R. 2009 ). Within Urban agglomerations, which can be understood as social bodies, the individual becomes part of the collective, even if only provisionally, and the collective shares public space within a framework developed for the possibility of co-existence. It is within this context that I investigate the potential design can have for opening up new sites for the social and political formation of public space. Site in this context not only means the physical site, it also extends its meaning into the cultural, social and political aspects of a public. The question arises as to what role design can play in the creation of public life. What are the strategies that the designer can develop
to contribute to the spatial conditions that would allow people to use, activate and occupy public space? The role of the designer might be described as a facilitator or catalyst, while the role of the public that forms in relation to a site is to activate, extend and adapt the design intervention. Through the engagement of individuals and collectives with the design interventions in public space, a process will evolve that allows for new relationships to occur, between people and people, between people and places, and people and things. In this setting we need to understand existing relationships in order then to allow for the development of complex sets of new relationships to occur that are enabled through design interventions. In my discussion of design for public space I focus on the empirical investigation of site and context. With this method the designer can gain knowledge through first hand experience based on engagement with the likely inhabitants or occupants of a public site. In the design studio environment I have tested two strategies as active ways of engaging with public life. These strategies offer an additional or alternative toolbox to more conventional and traditional approaches. The first strategy is called Actions and the second, Urban Occupations. Actions and urban occupations are strategies more familiar to art practice,
inside and outside the gallery. They can be provocations, irritations, and disturbances, and open up new ways to learn, test, and expand the understanding of the social, political space that is being designed. These actions and urban occupations might lead to some sort of reaction, i.e. a conversation, and create an interaction, an encounter between the designer and the public. Actions in public space could range from performance-based interventions to events. Actions are performative and actively engage with people in the public sphere. Urban Occupations are activities undertaken within spaces of potential. They create situations in public spaces through active engagements with places. One could describe both strategies as a relational approach to public space and public life. This is based, in part, on Nicholas Bourriaud’s book, Relational Aesthetics (1998), in which he forwards an understanding of art practice that attempts to leave behind or challenge the autonomy of the art object, as well to critique the commodity fixation of art production. Through the projects presented here I explore a relational approach to ‘design’ for the urban condition in order to establish new, formerly hidden, or forgotten relations between people and people, and places, and things.
THE AESTHETICS OF AIR URBAN INTERIOR ATMOSPHERE; THROUGH THE WINDOW MALTE WAGENFELD
A design investigation into the complex and rich dialogue between interior and exterior atmospheric phenomena and how these, within the urban context, contribute to the experience of ‘urbanity’. The seeping in, from the outside, of breezes, odours and sounds form a critical experience of the interior, and the seeping out, of cooking smells, voices, music and children playing, create a vital discourse between the interior and exterior. The urban environment generates its own microclimate and temporal shifts ensure that the experience of this is always changing – but also, importantly, there are a-periodic and semi periodic patterns that emerge and these contribute to the urban rhythm. The argument is that by closing off this dialogue, through either an architecture which hinders such an exchange, and or by hermetically sealing interiors off from the exterior atmosphere for reasons of climate control, impedes and denies an important part of the urban interior experience. This project forms an alternate strategy that explores and engages with these rich atmospheric experiences and phenomena that the urban interior produces and suggests how this territory, the urban interior atmosphere, can become a design typology of its own.