The Tyranny of the Interior

I’ve been interested in this topic on and off for decades and the other week’s post on Gio Ponti and The Art of Too Much started me thinking about it again. One thing Gio Ponti’s designs for interiors have in common is that there was no scope for rearrangement, substitution or flexibility of the items within them. I’m not talking about the folding dividing screens in his own apartment in Milan but the furniture, the positioning of furniture, the wall surfaces, and the choice of what goes on the walls themselves. Some of the early villas have spaces and shelves for artworks but even in his Reading Room at the University of Padua (1940) the items on the walls are both regulated and or curated.

Of course, this isn’t a space that invites diversion and, being an old university, isn’t one that sees change or its potential as an asset. Without seeing the plates, glassware or cutlery, we can’t say if it’s intended to be a Gesamtkunstwerk, and Ponti never went as far as designing the clothes one had to wear in one of its spaces but nevertheless, what we see is something 100% designed by the one person who designed it as a complete design that would stay that way forever. If one overlooks the two hat & coat stands and those two plum-coloured signs there through necessity rather than design, the only jarring things I can see are the positioning of that image off the top right corner of the door surround and those two uplighters either end of the sofa. Not only are they in front of the things on the wall, they also look like they’re from after 1940. (Was uplighting an interior even a thing in 1940?) Also, if we revisit Ponti’s Villa Planchard (1955), we can see that, once again, there’s no scope for selecting or changing anything apart from which potted plant to display on the two shelves. It looks like an orchid on that feature shelf below the feature lamp on the feature wall … Everything has been designed and the occupant has to accept that.

I’m only using Villa Planchard as an example, but Ponti was the architect as well as interior designer and stylist. With other projects such as the University of Padua, he was only redesigning the interiors within an architectural space that was essentially decided. Aldo Rossi may have allowed for this in the case of institutional or public buildings but he was totally against interior design in the case of private dwellings. He was of the opinion that people who sought out the services of an interior designer were lacking in some essential individuality. He saw the commissioning of an interior designer as a sign of conformity, and he also hinted at there perhaps being an underlying insecurity. You’ll have to take my word on this.¹ Of course, if we accept Rossi’s position regarding the designed interior and mental health, then we’ll have to reject the tyrannical interior of Farnsworth House.

Wealthy people have a tendency to commission interior designers but, despite what Rossi said, the choice of interior designer is still a personal choice in some sense. We have to accept that not everyone has the time or inclination to be their own interior designer. There’s no need to talk about Philip Johnson’s Glass House but not because it’s a reception room and not a real house, but because he was designing for himself and so what he designed must, on some level, be what he wanted.

This all begs the question of why should a space have this thing called an “interior” at all, as opposed to just having an inside? What does an interior design bring to a building? Is it meant to complete it or enhance it? What happens if it works against it? I once saw a cuckoo clock on the wall of a Tadao Ando house. The house is probably demolished now anyway, but it was the one with the big glass block screen on the outside. Should “the space” be strong enough to overcome it, or is it nothing more than a container anyway? To what degree do we design spaces to accept an interior design? We expect to see a few chairs in a living room and a bed in a bedroom but we easily accept this mild tyranny. Living rooms used to be designed with a wall along which a sofa could be placed and the opposite wall or opposite corner would be designed as the obvious place for a television. It was common for kitchens to be designed with the cooker/stove/oven opposite the door. The degree to which we find something unconventional lets us know when these conventions aren’t followed. A room that has been designed to accept an interior will look very empty if it doesn’t have one. How could we design a space to have a presence of its own, independent of the things inside it and how they are arranged? Perhaps some of the houses of Kazuo Shinohara came close to answering this question but the problem there is that that presence is often diluted if not destroyed by seemingly arbitrary things that occupants introduce. On some occasions the disjunction works to enhance both container and contained – a stance I’ve always taken.

However, and as Gio Ponti both knew and took advantage of, there are instances when the occupant of a space feels no obligation to personalize it. This is of course the case for the hotels and cruise liners where Ponti indulged his passion for covering all surfaces with some design that might become overbearing over time but was more than endurable for a week or two, especially when the travel involved was already a sign of excess.

Small spaces are another instance where a kind of complete design might be acceptable. The Hong Kong family of four living in a 3m x 3m x 3m space aren’t going to be too worried about the freedom to choose their possessions and arrange them how they wish. They’ve already done it. Theirs is a problem of space, not aesthetics or a manifesto underlying them. I’ve only just noticed the poster on the Nakagin capsule wall. Whether it’s Lou Reed or Edith Piaf, it’s the blackest, most contrasting thing in the space apart from the table lamp that’s the only other thing that can be relocated according to the wish or whim of an occupant. Built-in furniture used to be seen as “modern” – as it does here – but it’s not as if it takes up any less space. All that’s happened is that personal choice has been removed.

This could be a Japanese thing. Fifteenth century Sen no Rikyu was the Japanese tea ceremony master who laid down some rules to greatly simplify it (to make itself more pure) from what he saw as grotesque excess. Below are his most important seven but he also made other suggestions such as the size and degree of overlap of the pieces of paper covering the shoji. One thing he didn’t specify was where and how to locate the lantern and I’ve always thought this a curious oversight. This background, by the way, is Rikyu Gray (a.k.a. Rikyu Rat Gray HEX: #888E7E; RGB: R:136 G:142 B:126; CMYK: C:54 M:41 Y:51).  It’s basically gray with a hint of green, using colour to draw attention to the absence of colour. As you do.) Many a Japanese-style room will have walls this colour but it’s not paint. Traditionally, the colour is mixed into the plaster applied to the lath. The colour of the walls isn’t something one would change, or would even think of changing. Like the concrete in an early Ando house, it’s just the material from which the wall is made. To want to paint walls some colour because of personal whim is seen as Western affectation, and possibly a bit unhinged. Or both. This was the inference when in the early 1980s, I was told that the lady of Shinohara’s House on a Curved Road had had the master bedroom painted a midnight blue. I think I know who might have told me that, but I’ll let it rest.

My last example of a tyrannical interior are the house interiors of John Pawson even if, for the same reason as Philip Johnson’s Glass House was excluded, we have to exclude the interiors of his many houses for himself. We’re back in the world of Shinohara with curated furniture but with a vase of flowers.

In light of everything I’ve written, I find this last image fascinating because I can’t decide if it’s completely naïve or completely styled. The objects themselves aren’t special and they have that in common with the equally unremarkable space. There are none of the usual accompaniments such as curtains or some piece of artwork above the sofa. The entire effect is minimalist but without the expense or aesthetic pretence. Yet, it’s also anti-consumerist by showing us that things retain their utility even though they might not be in fashion any more. This image also has the disjunction between container and contained and it’s amazing that not having rugs, ornaments, remote controls and curtains is all you need to do that. Try this at home. It’s actually “Minimalism” on the cheap (i.e. “Minimalism” for everybody) and, if that serves to diminish the attraction of Minimalism, I’m fine with that

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1) I probably read this in either a Casabella, Domus or Arbitare between 1980-1983. The article was most likely about some recently completed villa of Rossi’s.

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