Interior Provocations

History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors

Anca I. Lasc, Deborah Schneiderman, Keena Suh, Karin Tehve, Alexa Griffith Winton, Karyn Zieve, Anca I. Lasc, Deborah Schneiderman, Keena Suh, Karin Tehve, Alexa Griffith Winton, Karyn Zieve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000206791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Interior Provocations: History, Theory, and Practice of Autonomous Interiors addresses the broad cultural, historical, and theoretical implications of interiors beyond their conventionally defined architectural boundaries. With provocative contributions from leading and emerging historians, theorists, and design practitioners, the book is rooted in new scholarship that expands traditional relationships between architecture and interiors and that reflects the latest theoretical developments in the fields of interior design history and practice.

This collection contains diverse case studies from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century including Alexander Pope's Memorial Garden, Design Indaba, and Robin Evans. It is an essential read for researchers, practitioners, and students of interior design at all levels.

Section II

The Representational Interior

3
“A Better World Through Creativity”

Interiors without Walls and Design Indaba, South Africa

Harriet McKay

The possibility of creating an interior without walls first came to my attention while researching material on informal settlement. It took the form of a new museum initiative, the, subsequently, highly acclaimed Design Museum Dharavi, a mobile museum for a “slum” area of Mumbai (Figure 3.1).¹ That such a space might be an example of a new—and legitimate—typology was confirmed by becoming aware of New York’s + POOL which, to quote its website is “a plus-shaped, water-filtering, floating swimming pool … making it possible for New Yorkers and its visitors to swim in clean river water” (Figure 3.2).² Both the Mumbai and the New York spaces create an “interior” in the exterior, or in open air. As someone thinking and writing about design on the African continent, and in South Africa in particular, however, there was another compelling connection between what appeared to be different initiatives: both had been highlighted for commentary by the Cape Town–based digital platform, Design Indaba (DI).³ While the following discussion demonstrates the complexity of architectural design issues in the equally complex country that is South Africa, it examines the significance of various sites in which “the wall” is either made permeable or dispensed with altogether, why this should be a valuable trope for a generation-old democracy, and DI’s significance in this context. The discussion relies on the premise that it is possible to adopt the neologism “roomness” to describe spaces that are not traditionally walled interiors. The designs chosen to exemplify roomness are based upon how well they convey a sense of being contained within and enclosed by a space.

FIGURE 3.1 The mobile Design Museum Dharavi. Source: Image courtesy of Amanda Pinathi and Jorge Maños Rubio, Design Museum Dharavi.

FIGURE 3.2 Rendering of + POOL. Designed by PlayLab and Family New York. Image coutesy of Friends of +POOL.

The founding of DI and its subsequent activities are both reflective of and responsible for a reappraisal and revivifying of South Africa’s art and design landscape. Furthermore, in championing South African art, architecture, and design, alongside its positioning of South Africa at the forefront of pan-African creative energy, DI has contributed much to fostering a new national creative psychology in which—in contrast with the political, economic, and social past—barriers, both physical and metaphorical, might be removed.

In an effort not to repeat the problematic descriptions of South Africa according to the outsider’s gaze (first colonial, now more global, but still colored by the local and recent past), much of the information pertaining to the case studies presented here has come, at least in the first instance, from DI’s own pages, from conversations with the DI team in their Cape Town office, and from those involved in instigating or designing the initiatives highlighted.⁴ In their chapter in Designing Worlds, University of Pretoria, Visual Arts Department academics, Jacques Lange and Jeanne van Eeden remark:

There is to date very little published research and writing about South African design history.[⁵] One of the main obstacles has been dealing with the legacy of forty years of apartheid censorship (1950 to 1990) that banned and destroyed a vast array of visual culture in the interests of propaganda and national security … This paucity of material is aggravated by the general lack of archival and documentary evidence, not just of the struggle against apartheid, but also of the wider domain of design in South Africa.⁶

Indeed, precious little academic work has been produced around South African creative practice, an idea also forcefully addressed in Deirdre Pretorius’ questioning “Does South African Design History Exist?”⁷ Seeds of conversations that offer to redress this situation have been sown. Lange and van Eeden, for example, note that conscious attempts to redress this hiatus in scholarly enquiry are becoming more noticeable as academics seek to revise historiographies and start to articulate previously silenced narratives. Nonetheless, this sea-change will take a long time before it is adequately widespread outside the academy.⁸

All too frequently, the words “Africa” and “Design,” never usually considered in the same sentence, still appear to be read as being oxymoronic despite best efforts to reverse this assumption both on the African continent and abroad. One of these best efforts has been made for nearly two decades by the Cape Town–based organization Design Indaba (DI) via its journalism, collaboration, awareness-raising, business support, and education initiatives. Founded by CEO Ravi Naidoo in 1995, the organization’s origins were rooted in the desire to “brand” South Africa and foster new creativity just at the moment when the country was actively reinventing itself as it emerged from the apartheid era. In 2019, DI continues to operate as a multifaceted platform with an annual conference. Through designindaba.com, an online design publication featuring “the best of the world’s creativity,” the organization attracts over half a million visitors each year to its website.⁹ In seeking to discuss interiors without walls, the exploration undertaken here focuses on DI’s importance in terms of broadcasting news about an area of interior design and architecture that deserves greater acknowledgment for its potential for inventive design, that is the “outside” interior.

Spaces without solid, tangible borders but with a strong sense of interiority exist as much in sites constructed external to the main framework that buildings provide as within them,¹⁰ a point also made in Penny Sparke’s Flow and Schneiderman and Campos’ Interiors Beyond Architecture.¹¹ The underlying claim here posits the potential for freedom, empowerment, creativity, and exploration within the wall-less “interior” space that eliminates the constraints of formal architecture and design. A sloughing-off of traditional structures allows for new ideas to flow. Or is it that new ideas of interior design need to flow more freely than the delimited walled building allows?

Through providing a launching pad for conversation, DI highlights the unconventional and, according to its self-identified remit (and strapline) to help foster “A Better World Through Creativity,” it does so significantly. Many of the projects DI focuses upon are South African, from the wider continent, or in so-called developing-world communities but all are demonstrative of architectural and design-innovation for social good. In the South African context, design without boundaries could also be considered to be a metaphor, as already suggested, for post-apartheid, new, and untrammeled creativity of the kind that was subject to censure and control, its practitioners literally walled in through imprisonment, or even murdered, should they be seen to be associated with activism prior to democracy.¹² The unwalled interior, then, becomes an important trope through which to describe the power of innovation in a relatively new state which, in 2019, is only a generation into living out its new, post-apartheid constitutional agreement that all citizens should have equal freedom of political, social, and creative expression.

Rather than address the historiography of design in South Africa, however, this introduction to DI and to new initiatives associated with the organization will explore the contemporary and the possibilities for the future through two recent examples of “unwalled” interiors: Arch for Arch (Snøhetta, Local Studio, and Design Indaba, 2018) and the Masekela Pavilion Memorial (Adjaye Associates, 2019). The chapter closes with an exploration of the work of one of DI’s former Emerging Creatives, Max Melville, and his partnership with Ashleigh Killa through their architecture studio theMAAK.¹³ In doing so, it will argue three key points: first, that it is valid to examine the outdoor or external space as capable of possessing a strong sense of interiority¹⁴; second, that DI is a vital forum for the creation and expression of contemporary South African design; and, finally, that rising from the ashes of apartheid, South African art and design is able to free itself of conceptual and practical design constraints that might exist elsewhere, a freedom that is being championed by DI. Each of the examples mentioned has been promoted, considered, and discussed by DI. The building of Arch for Arch, for example, was organized by DI; similarly, an impetus for the creation of the Masekela Pavilion came from DI, Hugh Masekela having been a friend of both Ravi Naidoo’s and of the wider the organization, even speaking at several DI conferences.¹⁵ Finally, “discovered” by DI, Max Melville and Ashleigh Killa of theMAAK remain in conversation with DI and are developing work that promises to make a significant impact on Indaba’s future reach and accessibility.

Without historical context the significance and reach of DI and its role in the construction of imaginaries of the new South African creative landscape cannot be fully appreciated. Coming to power as the result of a small general election win in May 1948, the right-wing Afrikaner National Party formalized and institutionalized a political, social, and economic structure of racially divisive rule—apartheid—which was to continue in this essentially one-party state until 1994. Derived from the Afrikaans word for “separateness,” a key Nationalist policy was the doctrine of racial segregation, disenfranchisement, and disc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• SECTION I The Compressed Interior
• SECTION II The Representational Interior
• SECTION III The Un-Sited Interior
• SECTION IV The Technological Interior
• Index