Interior Design

A Global Profession

Roderick Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429649271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

As the globe shrinks and the concept of distance diminishes, this text challenges the current status quo by identifying the cohesions and specialisations of design communities across the continents. It sets out an international spatial design landscape, identifying and contouring global design practice and design hotspots from a range of case studies, interviews and design practice perspectives. Using a range of interior environments, the chapters link the origins, trends and perceptions of the interior to create new insight into trans-global design. The book expands, but also coheres the interior design discipline to ensure the subject continues to grow, develop and influence the inhabitations of the world.

The book features a wealth of pedagogical elements including:

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• Beautifully designed with over 100 full colour illustrations, photographs and examples of design work

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• Maps and diagrams which highlight hotspots of design across the globe, providing strong graphic information

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• Interview panels featuring professional insights from designers across the globe

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• 'Employability' boxes, providing a good tips guide for students gaining employment across the globe

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• 'International Dimension' boxes which strengthen the scholarship of studying interior design in a globalised way

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• 'Design Oddities' box which brings into focus any new or contextual facts that help contextualise the global interior.

1.0
Visions of the interior

Global visions of interior design alternate between powerful and luxurious aesthetics, pragmatic functionality and thematic whimsy. These visions spread across the globe through digital media and the sharing, insights and actions of professional design practice. Most corners of the planet recognise the significance of the interior to human life and the impact on the experiences of residential and commercial environments across the globe. Interior spaces complement and contrast hugely across the world. But this diversity helps define global regionality and nuance international culture, trend and taste. Not all interior designs are successful or liked and many are not deliberately designed at all but appear through human activity. However, a purposely designed interior improves the domestic living experience of humans and often enhance the commercial viability of architecture. Interior design uses a range of tactics to empower and temper architecture and improve the spatial experience. The designed interior has traditionally evolved as a response to human activity, spatial manipulation and architectural dressing. However, its complexity and cultural position have often been hidden by its temporal relationship within the spatial realm. However, its status is elevated by the conditions of the global interior through the applications of human society, culture and materiality. This deepens further when it begins to be both metaphorically and physically detached as a discipline from the built environment. While physically connected with architecture, interior design is an energetic, flexible and critical design practice that supports and enriches the cultures of design and architectural form. It configures an altruistic link between the protective nature of the building and the human activity within; a considered ‘layer’ to the architectural condition that faces the building and responds to the inhabitants, and which reflects their needs and values. Its global role is expanding as a mediator or negotiator of space, often punctuating the architectural envelope, spanning the hinterland between the inside and the outside, developing new spatial dynamics of enclosure. The interior is assuming a new role and vision exploring new disciplinary frontiers, harvesting and blending cultural provenances and human necessity as part of its international practice.

The practices of the interior began through an extension to architecture, dressing spaces to make them more comfortable and secure. The vision of the interior became clear as the purposes and functions between external architecture and internal styling became more than just aesthetic activity. The interior complemented the exterior and was used in many cases to demonstrate wealth, culture or belief (Figure 1.1). This continued into the nineteenth century and moved from being primarily associated with wealthy landowners to the wider population through advancements in industrial manufacturing and cooperative worker housing that placed commercial and domestic interiors at the heart of human advancement.

1.1 The Great Exhibition interior, Joseph Paxton (1851), Crystal Palace, London

The Industrial Revolution powered regions of the global economy and helped the development and spread of the architecture and the interior. The establishment of the interior continued through the latter part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, helping to recognise and elevate the status of internal spaces to improve user experience and quality of life. Latterly, this development geographically followed the determination of the Brandt line¹ (Figure 1.2) between the Global North and Global South around the globe. This line cut the globe in two around the Tropic of Cancer and formed a northern and southern region around the planet. The northern region included the United States, Canada and Europe, Russia, Japan, and extended tail down to cover Australia and New Zealand. The southern region consisted largely of South America, Africa, India and most of South Asia. The northern and southern regions also highlighted where the traditionally more prosperous regions are located. Interior design as a discipline originated and developed across the northern region, migrating and flourishing within the southern regions in the latter part of the twentieth century. Some of the new regions across the world have seen the power, prosperity and regional developments that can be prompted by a developing built and spatial environment. Design is endorsed by several key ‘mega-hub’ creative cities (Figure 1.2) that help drive the creative design (interior) industries as well as define the profession and the migrations of global design (further described in ‘Cultural regions of design’ below).

1.2 Design city megahub map (includes the Brandt line)

The discipline has found an emergent global voice² as part of a new canon through reconstituted collaborations and partitions from architecture. There is no particular pattern or process to this, and it varies hugely in extent across the regions of the world, but is slowly harnessing new independence and identity across the world, providing new perspectives for practitioners, designers, academics and an ever-expanding and expectant global population. This vision for the discipline is embraced by the traditional and new global markets stretching its range and scope, encompassing a broadening of its traditional areas of domestic and commercial applications, presenting new and innovative levels of design in a consistently competitive world (Figure 1.3).

1.3 Kia Beat 360 Experience, Seoul, South Korea (2017)

Most interior designs can be grouped into three broad typologies. The first is the designed interior, where the shape and form of the interior is pre-planned from a predetermined client brief, and where the designer has based the design of the interior around predetermined activities (commercial and domestic). The second is an emergent interior, where the interior began as one space and has gradually changed into something else through changing activity and re-habitation. This should be seen as a positive change, but it can also lead to periods of inactivity or dereliction. The final space is the agile interior, where a new interior is flexible and is adaptable to its surroundings. It is located into an existing architectural shell and is often semi-permanent with a specific lifespan. All three typologies are associated with the development of interior design culture and a softening of a designed society empowering the interior to mediate with the built environment in every global setting (Figure 1.4) (see further discussion in sections 5.1 and 5.5).

1.4 Interior typologies

Employability

Understanding the current global view of the discipline is a key employability skill. This might be shown through the presentations of your work (past, present, future concepts) as you demonstrate your knowledge to an employer. Your portfolio must be structured so that you can show both the ‘visions’ and the practical solutions to design problems (all three above, designed, emergent and agile interior space) but also be bold in the presentations of your creativity. Understanding how your professional work relates to aspects of global interior design will be a distinct asset to your employee recognition and reputation.

The practices of interior design are permanently evolving new trends and tastes, t but are often a potent indicator of commercial development and enterprise. Interior design uses its practices of weaving human traits, behaviours and cultural references into the completed designs as a way to highlight its differences in other disciplines, but also to portray its regional and global identities. The temporal nature of the interior does not commit a client to a long-term expense but can be used to roll out global branded interiors, but it is often used to highlight regional design trends that generate conditions for unique designs to operate. This enables the interior to capture and integrate a global stylistic oeuvre while presenting the discipline as agile, and helps drive change and improve the quality of human habitation and existence. Significantly, this flexibility also highlights the need for the innovative use of renewable materials and the monitoring of the impact that a well-designed interior can have on the ecology of the planet and the places where humans live (this is further expanded upon in Chapter 5). The following section frames some of the key issues associated with the discipline and its wider impact on the conditions of culture and society around the globe.

Design oddity

One of the features you will become aware of is that the discipline has two main forms of title. Both are common together in different parts of the globe: Interior Designer/Interior Architect. Both titles are used for training (University Programmes) and in professional practice and are often used interchangeably, but there are subtle differences to what each of these interior titles covers, levels of detail, materiality and its perceived relationship to architecture. There are also subtle differences to regional preferences and interpretation across the world. For the sake of clarity, this book uses the words interior designer as the main moniker for the profession as it is more commonly used in a global context, but will reference all other subdivisions of the discipline as required.

1.1
Interior design issues

CONTEXT: THE WORD OF DESIGN

The word ‘design’ is continually being reinterpreted, but a common belief is that design is an active, creative process with a planned meaningful purpose or outcome. Broadly, design can be related to simple objects or large, complex systems and processes. We speak of the design of a piece of pottery, the design of the clothes we wear, and even the design of a large city. In nature, we can see the design of small plants, animals or fish and, on a grand scale, we appreciate the complexity of the design of the earth, planets and the universe. Design influences every aspect of human endeavour, from the visual arts, science, industry, communications and transportation. The interior holds a central position as a complex and integrated discipline, where the interior designer coordinates the ‘assembly’ of many design disciplines, often only revealing full harmony of the design at the final solution. Captured within the interior are related disciplines, including graphic, product, fashion, and digital media design that all enhance the experience for the user.

When developing nations across the world attempt to establish their global credentials, design helps reflect their creative ambition, lifestyle quality, improvements in manufacturing and their Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Design is viewed as an important global currency and creative language associated with quality and luxury. ‘Design’ and ‘Designer’ are viewed as a mark of quality when associated with goods and services. Using design is perceived as an indicator of a nation’s achievement and, as the world adapts and changes and the power of nations changes, design is used as a symbol of success and promotion in terms of international ranking and global progression. Architecture and interior design statements are seen as symbols of success, modernity and global acceptability. Designers and architects endeavour to create unique solutions for their clients, in the hope that this will lead to a uniquely individual approach to the way the region is understood and received (Figure 1.5).

1.5 Daxing Airport, Beijing, China. Zaha Hadid Architects (2019)

GLOBAL INTERIOR ISSUES

Interior people

As the global issues of health, poverty, environment and technology converge, designers must absorb, rethink and reinvent how people experience and intersect the lives, places and spaces they occupy. The best spatial experiences anticipate their needs, tap into their emotions and engage the senses. More than ever before, there is an oppo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Visions of the interior
• 2 Global translation
• 3 Five cities: global perspectives of interior design
• 4 Cultural identity
• 5 Spatial futures
• 6 Global design practice
• 7 Conclusion
• Professional practice glossary
• Bibliography
• Image and photo credits
• Index