The Autonomous Interior
I fell in love too easily with The Story of the Interior. Having largely made up my mind what a unified and an autonomous interior were, I didn’t expect to have to raise my hand so soon after starting reading the chapter titled The Unified and the Autonomous Interior.
“Two underlying principles of the story of all inside spaces [are] the unified and the autonomous interior. These principles refer to the enduring interplay between the assimilation of the interior into the envelope that defines it, and conversely, the autonomy of the interior from that within which it is contained. Put simply, an interior is either conceived and built in chronological unity with the building that contains it, or it is not.” (p.20) This second statement is a binary truth but my problem is that it doesn’t follow from the one before. The author digs deeper. “An interior made by redesigning an existing building can be described as autonomous in that it is conceived and constructed at an entirely different time from the building in which it is situated. A unified interior is developed and made chronologically, and often aesthetically, in accord with its enclosure.” (p.20)
This chronological division is binary and encompasses all interiors except perhaps those with an overabundance of objects completely obscuring the containing envelope. Moreover, this division includes every interior designed by architects and every interior later inserted into a space. I just can’t see why this distinction matters. The Total Work of Art is no more or less valid than any other type of interior. These next three examples are unified interiors solely because they appear to have been conceived and put together in sync with the space that contains them. But how would we know this if it weren’t for certain stylistic similarities?
These next four interiors are most likely autonomous interiors conceived at an entirely different time from that within which they are contained but how can we know if we can’t even see the container? In addition to visually unified and visually not unified, we have to add “not applicable” as a third.
What about these next two interiors? It’s easier when there are fewer objects, but in the left image is Marco Marenco’s 1970 Marenco sofa in Tadao Ando’s 1984 Koshino House and the image to its right shows some Cassina furniture contained within something very much older. Both are fictions in that the Koshino House interior and the Cassina interior are unlikely to be used as we see them but, according to the author, the interior on the left is a unified interior because it was conceived along with the container and possibly also because it has the unifying aesthetic that we’ve come to call minimalism and associate with Japan. In contrast, the interior to the right is clearly inserted well after the design and construction of the architecture and not contemporaneous with the space that encloses it. There’s still the unifying association of Italy’s magnificent history of design and craft – an association well exploited in Italian luxury furniture brand advertising. The third image is Ricardo Bofill’s living room inside a converted cement factory. As much as I hate to see a good decommissioned cement factory go to waste, I can’t help thinking that people who call this grand salon a successful example of adaptive re-use are missing the point somehow.
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So far, I’ve been using that somewhat pretentious architectural term “space” to describe that thing within which objects are contained but the book’s subtitle of How We Have Shaped Rooms and How They Shape Us implies that the container AND the objects contained constitute this thing called a room, and that this is interchangeable with the word interior and, worryingly, that this is how we’re going to proceed. In other words, whether “unified” or “autonomous” in time, an interior is expected to be some kind of composite that’s neither space nor object. I used to think this was the case but now I’m not so sure.
Rooms Without Interiors
We all know the floor of a traditional Japanese-style room is covered with tatami, the ceiling is a mixture of beams and panels, about half to three quarters of the wall area are fusuma doors that can lead to either another room or an oshiire storage closet. The remainder of the wall area is shoji and external doors. Any remaining wall area will covered in a fine, colored stucco. Objects such as bedding and tables can be moved in or out of these generic rooms as required. Rooms such as a tea ceremony room will often have a hearth and a tokonoma for the display of a seasonal ikebana floral arrangement and scroll, and there will also be the implements used for the tea ceremony and hopefully some cushions. The guests are also part of the interior as the guest will be seated across from the host and in the position farthest from the entrance. All this is codified and part of Japanese culture. When the materials (and thus colours and textures) are all determined and a room (in the architectural sense) appears complete with nothing in it, then we can’t really call it an interior. At best, it’s just a room with some things in it so people can do some specific task within that space.
This next house is Riken Yamamoto’s 1977 Yamakawa Villa. Its six spaces are Living/Dining/Kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, wc, and two storage cupboards. The space for sleeping becomes a bedroom as soon as a futon is spread out. The space for daytime activity becomes a living area as soon as there’s a table for people to sit down and do whatever. Apart from things required to prepare food, this house can be lived in with a mat/futon/pillows for the sleeping area, a low table and four cushions for the living area (shown in the lower, first two images). This sitting area of the living room is two steps higher than the kitchen, suggesting that people are expected to sit on cushions on the floor, possibly involving a rug as there are no tatami. Something could be hung on the far wall that also has a long shelf for maybe a small vase and flower arrangement but, apart from that, it’s just the inside of a building. There’s nothing compelling an occupant to contrive an interior.
We may as well now forget the author’s limited definition of “unified” because we’re probably not going to be seeing much of it in the future, apart from newly designed interiors for shops and restaurants inside newly-constructed retail developments but, strictly speaking, even these would be “autonomous” interiors as their conception came after the container – as is nearly always the case. It might be possible to conceive of a container for which an interior has been designed, but I can’t think of any offhand.
Objects in Space
Last week I mentioned Joe Colombo’s 1971 Total Furniture Unit as having an existence independent of the space containing it. Even though no container is implied, this total furniture unit would be an autonomous interior because it would have invariably happened afterwards. (It wasn’t intended as a picnic setting.) The images below show it in a neutral gray space as if it were an exhibit – and it probably was the ITALY: THE NEW DOMESTIC LANDSCAPE exhibition at THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (MoMA New York) 26 May to 11 September 19721. It’s at the back in the third photo. Seen like this as part of a collective in an enclosing but unimposing space, this exhibition is NoStop Suburb minus the people.
But Joe Colombo was more realistic than that as he produced alternative arrangements in what he thought was a minimum area. Although freestanding in principle, those six PATTERNS OF USE could be tucked into one corner as two sides of Total Furnishing Unit were blank. The six arrangements are called Night, Breakfast [in bed], Living, Breakfast-Work-Living [? – I guess these days we’d write Breakfast/Work/Living], Dinner-Work-Living, and Party [!]. The POSSIBLE COMBINATIONS show four ways of dividing the remaining space but, by doing this, the unit-components are arranged within a space to create compositions a.k.a. interiors – whether unified or not. In passing and in reality, the possible combinations would have been limited by the number and position of plumbing connections for the bathroom and kitchen. Flexible pipes with hardly any fall aren’t going to be a solution. Nakagin.
Habitation Equipment in a Space
Colombo incorporated into his Total Furniture Unit “equipment” that enabled occupants to do something in a space. A bed was equal in importance to a cooker or a television or a washbasin. Only his Multichair was exempt. But the idea of condensing and concentrating all the things that one enable a space to be lived in, into one unit in one corner of a space was a good one. Akio Yachida2 did much the same but with less plastic and less flexibility, although there was some flexibility in how certain fixed elements could be used. Much like the RIken Yamamoto mountain villa, you still need to provide your own chairs, bedding, television and kitchen stuff, but you can live in this space untroubled by whether your room is unified or not.
Below is how something like this is lived in. This is one unit in Yachida’s 2006 ISPE 新丸子 [ISPE New Maruko]. The occupants have brought their own sofa, tables, chairs and lamps. Presumably their bedding is laid out upstairs. There’s a bicycle and assorted stuff beneath the bathroom. In short, it’s a space containing occupants and their stuff. The space is basic yet strong and doesn’t ask anything of its occupants who might have more important things to do than worry about “doing something with the space”.
This position I’m setting out here isn’t so much anti-interior in the sense of opposite, but in the sense of rejecting the very notion of the interior as a necessary consequence of inhabitation or, in other words, as something we’re incapable of living without.
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“Formative Houses”
“The Hexagon [a eulogy]”
“Bad Form”
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- https://side-gallery.com/exhibition/italy-the-new-domestic-landscape-1972/ ↩︎
- https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2025/08/24/role-model/ ↩︎
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