Seaming the Dialect of Space

Abstract

Each discipline in the built environment has a unique dialect for thinking, designing, crafting, and inhabiting space. Words such as tectonics, materiality, and vernacular all hold a specific interpretation in architecture. Even common words have understated complexity, but only when offered under an architectural lens, words such as gesture, negotiate, and scale. Interiors also have their own language, words such as adjacency, identity, surface, and atmosphere. Language from interior design shares most origins with architecture, but arguably, as a discipline, interiors exist at a point of intersection between disciplines. To be classified as an interior, a space needs a boundary, a container, or an expression of an outside; however, the language of interiors does not need to be so contained. 

Interior design foundationally is interdisciplinary and exists as a point of entry into other disciplines. While interiors and architecture share a dialogue, for architecture to understand interiors means also to use interiors to connect with other disciplines, such as fashion. Interiors offer a means for architecture to speak to fashion and, even more so, to converse with the body. However, existing interior language based primarily on architecture does not acknowledge close ties to other disciplines. Instead of using interiors to translate, imagine what opportunities could unfold if design disciplines were bilingual, understanding their own language but also that of interiors. 

The paper proposes a method to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue when discussing Design, perhaps even changing how architecture and fashion see each other through a renewed interior dialect. Borrowing words from fashion, like seaming, fit, tailoring, and mending, interior space becomes more fluid, boundaries blur, and ideas are more curious. Making and understanding space starts with remaking the language of interiors.