Interiority Complex Mark Pimlott interviewed by Arjen Oosterman and Brendan Cormier Photo Mark Pimlott The first thing you notice in Mark Pimlott s apartment are his photographs large-scale black-and-white prints of public spaces; Mark splits his professional identity between architect and artist, and these belong to the latter. But his interest in public space and architecture is linked by a common idea: the interior. Interested in a new curriculum he is preparing at TU Delft, Arjen and Brendan are invited to his Den Haag pad for a visit. Seated at a black dining room table, books piled to one side, and armed with a bottle of Perrier, they discuss among other things his book Without and Within, future practice for interior architects, and the interior of the city. 39 V33_FINAL.indd 39 19/09/12 11:26
Arjen Oosterman Looking at interior archi tecture schools and programs, what strikes us is that most of these programs are a part of an art school your program is one of the few that takes place at a technical university. Can you speak to that? Mark Pimlott The Chair of Architectural Design/ Interiors at TU Delft, run by Tony Fretton and known as Interiors, Buildings and Cities, has been around for a long time, about fifteen years, and we ve traditionally concerned ourselves with the interior of the city as opposed to simply the interior of buildings. Now we re working on a pilot in fact for a proper course on interior architecture. The idea is that graduates would be architects and have a special focus on architectural interiors, in particular the architecture of large complex buildings. Indeed there are very few Masters of Science courses in interior architecture. So I think we re in a unique position to consider the subject both at a technical university level and a proper academic level. And the fact that Delft didn t have a course addressing interior architecture per se was to us always a little surprising. AO Wasn t it also partially arrogance, that architecture be the king of the realm? MP What s been realized is that there are a series of specializations within interior architectural practice which architects quite often have a hard time with, first, at the interior decoration level. Architects are just not trained for it and it takes a certain kind of person to do it. Then there s the interior designer who s more engaged with architectural issues, but again that tends to be quite a limited brief. And then there are those in the muddy area between architecture and interior design, which I regard as the interior architecture debate, which is involved with a reconciling of all the players and complex issues that come to bear in making such places. So these are experienced designers: they are also people who are aware of technology, consultants, clients basically they are at the hub of quite a detailed wheel. AO Do you see any difference between architects and interior architects in relation to aims or attitudes? MP I think that the interior has the capacity to be quite free, in a way that buildings in the city cannot be, with few notable exceptions. And that difference, the interiority of the interior, gives it license to be anything really. Of course when you re looking at complex interiors, you re usually looking at complex problems, which are in fact linked to all sorts of other parts of the city, sort of continuous with the city, I use that term in the broadest possible way. So in a sense it s not complete fantasy, but there s certainly zones which are subject to almost different attitudes, different rules. AO And in terms of political agendas? MP Well the interior is the place where these get played out; where people are told essentially how to be. One of the aspects of the book Without and Within that I try to deal with is the fact that in the development of the North American continent, everything becomes an interior. And the interior is a place which is controlled, your behavior is essentially manufactured, by a series of tropes, signs, and patterns which are repeated everywhere subtly, exactly the same way everywhere, rendering our entire environment a kind of giant interior, not a literal interior but an interior of behavior let s say. AO A system? MP An ideological system and a system system. There s the mechanics of how it works, and then there s the mechanics of what it does. One of my great anxieties of course is that this rather totalizing idea, the American interior, is being embraced and brought to Europe and worldwide, almost unquestioned, as if it s seen as the obvious thing and right thing to do. And of course the voices that say it s the obvious and right thing to do are people who want to make lots and lots of money. AO But then can there be any pride in being an interior architect? MP Being an architect in the city, you re working within the city, and you re working within its prevailing set of ideas and you re also working in it critically. And I think there s certainly a capacity for the interior architect to work the same way. We can tell other stories for example. We can give priority to other ways of people relating to each other, other than well not relating to each other. The extreme condition right now is of people relating to a series of messages that are played to them. So the idea of the interior actually engaging people, making them aware of themselves as a public, making a sense of consciousness. That s one of the capacities that the practice has. AO You relate critically which is a key notion in architecture, but correct me if I m wrong that requires a body of knowledge, of critical knowl edge, and we haven t come across that so far. MP Well of critical practices within the interior? AO Or critical writing even. MP It s difficult. There has been some critical writing that has come from our Chair, by Christoph Grafe, Irene Cieraad, myself. There s a growing area, slowly growing. And I often wonder why that s the case. When I look the westernized American landscape and city was the consequence of an idea and an ideology; and its methods, which purported to be transparent were in fact loaded. at the writing that considers the interior now, it s still often framed and referenced to the individual experience, it s an intimate thing, where the private interior is the ultimate interior. I think that this is problematic because it never sees the interior as being relational. It never talks about the interior of the city for example. And if it doesn t provide itself with a context it can t develop a critical theory. So there has to be a way about talking about cities; I think we re talking about it in our Chair to place the interior in the context of urban life, what role it plays, how it can be a refuge for people, how it pulls people together, allows them to be with each other in ways that, normally, they are not. In fact if you look at writing about public space, you ll probably have a sense of what the capacities of writing about the interior are. AO In the Netherlands you have these different professional licensing systems for architects, urban designers, and interior architects. That suggests a level playing field for these different professions, but you could also argue that they are one dis cipline with a few specializations. MP Yes, I understand that there s a desire to protect the boundaries of each of the professions, which means 40 V33_FINAL.indd 40 19/09/12 11:26
41 you have to be quite close about defining what the boundaries are. I do think that we re living in a time where the profession of architecture is undergoing profound changes and its movement into the interior is inevitable; and this is going to cause some stress on the interior architecture discipline which will have to look quite closely at defining and redefining itself and how it allows things to happen. The registration of interior architects, for example: Right now you can be an architect and apply yourself to the interior without having to be registered as an interior architect. In reality of course, these boundaries are not going to matter so much, and you ll find architects doing interiors like mad. Brendan Cormier One of the things that I found remarkable about your book Without and Within was how much it brings to light the crossover between urban design and interiors. Right now urban designers don t study interiors, but is there an ambition from the interiors side to really study the city. MP In fact this is more or less what we re doing at the Chair. We have been studying the city and trying to get people to consider the interior as part of the city, so there was the interior of the city and there was the interior of the building, together. It s my belief that everything is related to each other: and that to really know a subject fully you have to contextualize and contextualize. It s impossible to talk about urbanism without talking about politics, or economics. And for me it was very important in the book to say that the westernized American landscape and city was the consequence of an idea and an ideology; and its methods, which pur ported to be transparent were in fact loaded. And in a soci ety such as ours which operates at the level of bureauc racy, it s the purely economic decisions, functional decisions, and engineering decisions that have always given it a sense of transparency and honesty, but in fact the way things are done are done at the service of certain ideas. Protecting yourself from the sea, is not so much an idea but a reality, but covering the country in motorways so you can distribute the population and retail centers evenly, is not a functional idea. BC That s the American reference you re making. MP Yes, that s the American reference, but I say it eyebrows raised to suggest that s what s happening in the Netherlands now, and it keeps things going. How this impacts on the interior is that the interior particularly the large-scale interior which is inevitably dedicated to certain functions, infrastructure, and so on, is also intended to be a transparent, functional interior, value-free. But of course it does have values that pertain to it as well. Actually, it s the place where those values come into focus. The interior becomes a space for publicity, for propaganda: a space of retail; everything becomes retail-ized. We make public buildings like retail spaces in order for them to be legible. It reinforces the prevailing ideology. So to act critically means to step back from that and to find other ways of making people conscious of themselves. AO There seems to be a tendency among interior architecture schools, and I m speaking specifically to the art schools, to expand their territory into the public domain. But also there s something parallel to it, where they seem to focus mainly on an attitude and not so much on a body of knowledge. The body of knowledge is sort of taken for granted; you re expected to bring that yourself as an individual stu dent. I think that s based on the idea that the con tribution of these graduates is one of intervention. MP Well that s very much the art school tradition, producing people who operate like artists. They inter vene indeed, intervene critically, and I think it s very valuable, because it does offer new paradigms quite frequently and certainly, art practice has been really transformed over the last forty-five years by this notion of critical intervention. What is also required though, is competent and responsible practice. I m not suggesting that doesn t already exist. I just think it needs to be beefed up considering the tasks and situations that face it. AO Then the totally opposite position. Do we need interior architects or architects at all? The statistic about how 95 percent of buildings are created without architects seriously questions their position. MP My answer is yes, these are the only people who can think in a synthetic way. AO But what are you supposed to do? MP You have to muscle your way in. What I m always amazed by, particularly among the current crop of graduates is how their ambition makes them do things that are very surprising. They will be engaged no matter how difficult it is. I think the notion of easing into conven ti onal practice is gone; it s just too difficult. The difficulties which present themselves to practices now: marginali za tion in the construction process, for example. Archi tects are going to have to work hard to be relevant. If archi tects make themselves necessary, they will be neces sary. For example, a good start is to say actually, Mr. Contractor, we know how to build this. And then over time prove it; that you can get through all those liability issues that confine architectural practice now. I think it really is a responsibility, and if responsibility becomes the watchword perhaps we ll improve and become relevant again. AO But looking at the current crisis and maybe the crisis before, you see that architects have a cer tain flexibility in claiming new terrains and creat ing new practices and that s exactly what I see as happening now. There s an immense diversification amongst architectural practices. Do you see the same thing happening in interior practices? For instance today there doesn t seem to be a need for that much design, but there does seem a need for architectural intelligence. And the application of that intelligence can be more social or processoriented instead of producing these drawings or this fine piece of art as an end result. MP Yes I agree. In the sense that the interior is a space that consumes vast amounts of energy, for example; I think there will be a lot of work in that area to alleviate that situation. I think the environmental issue is an enormous one. And it s an issue that s being attended to by environmental engineers but it s certainly going to be within the consideration of interior architects as well. This notion of the interior environment as being complet ely cut off from reality, is going to end. It s ending already. And that will have a radical impact on what the interior feels like; how it presents itself. Is it a realm of fantasy or is it part of the world? AO But take office space. It was a collection of cubicles. And then the concept of Bürolandschaft was introduced (open plan offices), and then Hertzberger came with the Centraal Beheer, and then the flex office was introduced, etc. First of V33_FINAL.indd 41 19/09/12 11:26
all it s about the reproduction of money: making the most efficient surroundings for production. But secondly and for the designer it came first a social issue. Ok money has to be made, but can we produce surroundings that have a quality as well, have a proper notion of individual and personal freedom? Is that part of the discussion now? MP In my book I talk about the architectural practice Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates. That s a practice that strikes me as being in the commercial world, with obligations to that commercial world, but it also felt it had obligations to individuals, to people who didn t use their buildings in the city. Their considerations of inti mate needs of the client, of workers outside the client, and of citizens, yielded a very interesting architecture to me; because it made no claims at being avant-garde, but certainly the thinking about it was really radical: radical in the very expanded sense of responsibility. That s why I m so intrigued by those practices that apparently are more ordinary and yet have something to say socially. BC We also interviewed Rietveld Landscape for this issue, and what s funny about the project they did, is that it took a couple of landscape architects to reveal a huge interiors issue in Holland, that being the sheer number of vacant unused buildings in the country. You just said that interior architects need to muscle their way into the industry, to seek out possibilities for work and agency, but in the two years since their project Vacant NL debuted at the Venice Biennale, I haven t seen any ambition from the interiors world to take that particular task on. MP First of all, the change of the economic landscape was so violent and so sudden that we simply haven t had a lot of time to respond. I do think the marginalization of the profession, which has been going on for quite some time, has not helped. If that hadn t happened, architects would have been working in that territory already, and for a very long time. So it s a sort of self-made problem, in a way. AO But there could be a relationship there with the fact that architects today aren t responsible for programming. That s a historic discussion of course, how that came about, but we could relate that to their inability to confront this interior issue, because it seems to be an issue about program ming first of all. Another element might be the tem porariness. That s what Ronald Rietveld is addressing with his course at the Sandberg Institute. And that temporariness seems to be a rather new realm for architecture at large. MP It s an interesting one and a difficult one to come to terms with, although people in the commercial world don t seem to have too much difficulty with it. They can create anything knowing that it s going to last so long, etc. It doesn t mean they don t invest in it, but there s a kind of ability to accept what the reality of it is. Interiors have a typical life of only a few years, buildings rather longer. You know architects don t usually accept that their buildings are going to be demolished! AO You just said that the commercial world is ready to invest in temporariness, but the answer they have now for vacancy is to persuade the gov ern ment to provide them money to demolish the ex cess square meters that we currently have in Holland. MP Yes, it only makes money to sell new things. London, for example, is filled with millions and millions of empty square meters of office space and they insist on building new skyscrapers. It s quite extraordinary. I think you ll have people continue to make stupid arguments to maintain their own existence, and that will go on and they will survive, somehow. It s not just architects or developers who have to start thinking about how things need to be different; everybody needs to start thinking this way. We re at the end of a particular political-economic trajectory and we have to reinvent ourselves. And the thing is it s very hard to reinvent yourself when you ve been raised so fully in the post-war condition. BC Getting back to your book, you paint a trajectory of the increasing physical interiorization of architecture throughout history, culminating in projects like Place Ville-Marie in Montreal, a giant interior complex in Montreal linking office buildings and infrastructure in the business district of the city. Now most of the profession of urban designers see that as a mistake and are moving away from large-scale interiors and trying to get people out on the street. MP But they re actually still inside. It s just another version of the inside, but with outdoor features: an interior with exterior effects. The objective of Place Ville-Marie was to create a multi-level city; to make it as congested as possible but not to have the congestion mean total gridlock. So the idea was to reinforce the center by making it do more. And I do think that there s been a step back from that. BC I think I m still struggling with your con ception of interiors not being just physical, but that exterior spaces, a whole city can be viewed as an interior. Can you elaborate? MP I think what I was trying to describe in the book, and it s what I stick with, is the construction of a state of mind. This was the objective of the Jefferson plan as well, that every place would be the same. There would be natural features and so on, but, I m still in America. There is repetition: the township has the same form; the land has the same form; the individual piece of property has the same form; the building materials have the same form. It s a kind of a giant kit for an entire physical world, but ultimately it develops a kind of mental world. And you can see that this system is being adapted by dom i nant forces to suit its own ends. Increasing ideological interiorization is met with increasing physical interiori zation. So you end up with an ideologically charged, economically oriented environment. Interior becomes an environment. I was always interested in the fact that in the US the department in charge of the whole country, the equivalent of Britain s Home Office, was called the Depart ment of the Interior. It s a nice idea. But it s true. You can see something similar in Holland: an environment is made that you can depend upon, which is supposedly a reflection of you, and which is depended upon by all those people who depend upon it: retailers, construction companies it s a system, a dependable one, and it creates an understandable and repeatable image, and this is interiority let s not call it literally the interior but it is interiority. In that transformation in the US, you were dealing with a conceptual tabula rasa it wasn t really but it was perceived that way. And in Holland, it s quite extreme: the particularity and specificity of towns and landscape is being washed away by a system of repeatable bits, which make the country work. It s like bureaucracy, where you have rules that are dependable and predictable and repeatable. And they erase the specific and unique things. 42 V33_FINAL.indd 42 19/09/12 11:26
43 BC In our research for the issue, the word lifestyle seems unavoidable inextricably linked to the subject of interiors. Why do you think that is? MP America and Canada are the places I know very well, so I ll use that as my reference. After the war there was this huge capacity for production in America, and the only solution to capitalizing on that was to make more America, through the construction of roads and infrastructure and housing, etc. In a way, it caused an enormous social conundrum; all these people are going to be in new places; how are they going to live there? So getting people to move to these places and providing the financing so people could get there and have things there, was a big problem, and a wholesale solution was provided for it. This whole notion of creating an image of what norms are and what a lifestyle is was really important for the urbanization or suburbanization of America. It meant there had to be an image of what a family was: a father, a mother, two kids and a dog; that they had What I m always amazed by, particularly among the current crop of graduates is how their ambition makes them do things that are very surprising. to have a home that looked liked this, and this is what happened inside imagery and film and advertising all reinforced that same image; that you all had to equip yourself, because it gave meaning and a destination to the stuff that was being produced by the factories that no longer produced tanks and jeeps and planes. At first that image was very uniform, but then authorities and advertising agencies realized that there were different types of people within that system, with different ambitions, that these images needed to become more varied, more sophisticated. My belief is that this imagery was always profoundly connected to work and mobility, and that you ended up with an image of a complete environment, of a complete situation for a man and his family, which consisted of his home, his place of work, and his place of mobility: the car. The elaboration of that diagram ultimately created what we call the lifestyle image, in all of its complexity. It s interesting to look at popular magazines through time in the US, Life magazine for example, and see how advertising changes. It becomes much more lifestyle-specific as the sixties wear on and the seventies kick in, which is reflected in what you drink, surround yourself with and do. And inevitably these images are connected with the domestic interior; but as I said before, I think lifestyle connects to all of the kinds of interiors of that life. And this is where that interiority thing comes in again because I start to think that it gets connected to sunsets over certain landscapes, images that collectively constitute a whole lifestyle. But the fact that it s pre-described, that it has a complex of images through advertising, makes it an interior for me. BC Another word that comes up a lot nowadays in interiors is staging, which has an interesting relationship to the theater. MP Well back in the eighties I worked on a loft space that was originally a factory and in the seventies had been loftified. Oddly enough, those loft spaces were spaces where people felt very free liberated from the conventions of the home. You could live as tidily or as sloppily as you wanted. To me the loft became a very staged kind of experience; objects were visible as though they were art objects and you lived amongst them. And so you had this slightly peripatetic feeling to the space, like you weren t really there, were not really the occupant. And the elements surrounding you were props in a sense. I think that kind of alternative living that the loft set into motion, presented this notion of the furniture and so on being a visual effect, a prop. And I really think that the whole loft mentality has really percolated throughout the whole system to a point where the interiors are so small you can t get far enough away from the furniture to look at them as sculpture, yet they are meant to be thought of as lofts, as free spaces. So the loft thing had an enormous effect, but it s not new: it really stretches back to the early seventies in New York. AO There s this series in the NRC Handelsblad which focuses on people s home interiors, especially of people who collect things, and they all strike me as quite similar. MP Well the acceptance of being on the move, it s reflected in interiors where people can t seem to stay, where they become boxes for displaying things. We re much more internationally mobile now, we re not held to a particular place or by a technology either, so in a sense we re nomadic. That image from Superstudio, the Journey from A to B, is very prescient in this, and Andrea Branzi s construction of a continuous environ ment is also spot on, in its reading a kind of nomadic condition we have set up for ourselves punctuated by moments of consumption. AO That s still your prediction then, because that s what you end your book with? MP Well, the book was written before the economic crash, of course. It s going to be interesting to see how resilient our desire to be nomadic is. What you re seeing in design now is an extremely minimized kind of nomadism. I m always struck by these Japanese houses, which are about as big as a cupboard. They re completely empty, pale wood, there s a Mac sitting on a desk, and the desk is tiny, and they have to climb across x number of stories. Or seeing apartments with no cupboard; there s a kitchen of some kind but no cupboard. Maybe the first stage is thinking that yes, we can continue to be everywhere; a complete acceptance of the nomadic condition. And thus we make interiors that do less and less: shells. The last Biennale, curated by Kazuyo Sejima, was a bit like that: we can walk around in white space and we re free. It s a beautiful image. But maybe things are so severe that we have to establish ourselves quite firmly in places again. AO In our discussion with Ronald Rietveld, he discussed the phenomenon in Amsterdam of a young creative class coming here, and they were all open and flexible to staying in a former factory for a few months, and then move to the next one: com pletely independent. And we were speculating what would happen when they had a stable relationship and kids, whether things would change. MP Well some people adapt and some people don t. I can see it continuing in some way. I ve always been fascinated by the images of Superstudio, which always portrayed families on the move, so there was always a notion of a social group: we re never completely alone, we re always with somebody, holding hands. We ll get through this together, as long as we have our iphone. V33_FINAL.indd 43 19/09/12 11:26